Not All Cops: “The New Olympians”

“It’s not fair to hold all humans responsible for something that happened centuries ago. Give me a chance!” — Elisa Maza

Written by: Adam Gilad

Original Air Date: February 14, 1996

Introduces: New Olympus, Taurus, Helios, Kiron, Boreas, Ekidna, Talos, Proteus

Timeline placement: May 22 – May 23, 1996

Location: New Olympus

TMNT episode I could make a comparison to: A Wing and a Prayer

The Deets:

• The world tourists are sailing through the middle of nowhere when they arrive at an island with a city made up of elaborate and high-tech structures unlike any on Earth.
• The tourists hear someone approaching, so the gargoyles go hide while Elisa greets the newcomers. Unfortunately, this proves to be exactly the wrong thing to do, as those newcomers, a squadron of peacekeepers for the city, New Olympus, arrest Elisa for being human.
• Elisa is tried for her crimes–being a human inside New Olympus–and Boreas, the judge, rules that Elisa may not leave the island, lest she tell others of the existence of New Olympus. She is, however, allowed to remain free within the island. The gargoyles are allowed to leave. 
• Elisa and the gargoyles are walking through the city when she quickly becomes the subject of harassment by various New Olympians, including multiple peacekeepers. This quickly escalates to violence, leading Taurus, New Olympus’ head of security, to arrest Elisa once more and jail her, despite her being completely blameless.
• As Elisa is transported to her cell, she and Taurus pass by a cell inhabited by Proteus, a shape-shifter who entertains himself by using his powers to attempt to get under people’s skins. Currently, he is trolling Taurus by pretending to be his father, who had been New Olympus’ previous head of security until he was killed by Proteus.
• A lynch mob, which once again includes at least one peacekeeper, Helios, forms outside of the prison. 
• After seeing that they will get nowhere by official means, Goliath decides to break Elisa out. Breaking into the prison, he is greeted by Proteus in Elisa’s form, who convinces the gargoyle to break “her” out (Elisa, asleep, does not hear this). The shape-shifter then locks Goliath in his old cell, and proceeds to impersonate him to break the real Elisa out.
• The peacekeepers learn of the prison break and begin pursuing “Goliath” and Elisa. As they make their escape, the sun rises. Proteus, not being a gargoyle, does not turn to stone, which he excuses by claiming that the energy field hiding the island affects the sun enough to prevent it from having its usual effect. 
• “Goliath” suggests that he and Elisa split up: while Elisa goes to the boat, he’ll head to the island’s power generator, overload it, and cause it to explode, creating a diversion that will conceivably allow them to escape. Elisa agrees. 
• While “Goliath” proceeds to the island’s Columnadium and primes New Olympus’ power generator to explode, Elisa approaches Helios and attempts to explain about Proteus. Helios ignores this and attacks Elisa, but Elisa defeats him and steals his vehicle.
• Elisa catches Taurus’ attention and leads him on a chase to the Columnadium. Once there, she confronts Proteus, who is once again disguised as Goliath.
• Taurus catches up to Elisa and captures her, but Elisa argues that the gargoyle before them cannot be Goliath, or else he’d be stone. Proteus decides not to attempt a bluff, and instead gives the game away to attack Taurus. 
• Taurus defeats Proteus and prevents the power generator from overloading. He then frees Elisa, and the two cops make peace. 
• After night falls, the world tourists return to the ocean. As Taurus and Boreas watch them leave, they ponder what the future may hold for New Olympus and its relationship with the larger world.   

Mythology and Continuity Notes:

• The New Olympians are by and large based on creatures of myth–minotaurs, centaurs, nagae, and the like.

—-

I mentioned in the post for “Heritage” how wrong it felt for Elisa to insist that there was just one way for Nick to interact with his culture, given her own existence as a Native woman. It felt like erasure—like the writers simply ignored Elisa’s identity and its implications (such as the fact that she is not herself very tradition-driven) in order to allow her to play the role they wanted. Something similar happens here, in an episode where Elisa is shocked to find her existence criminalized, simply for being human. While many people would be surprised to find themselves arrested for simply walking around, or being the target of a lynch mob, I feel Elisa should not be one of them. 

So far, Gargoyles has been rather uniformly pro-police: between having several of its good guy characters be cops, having the gargoyles’ second home be above a police station, and having “to protect and serve” be the backbone of gargoyles’ current ethos, it’s clear where the series stands. What’s more, it’s perfectly understandable for the series to be this way. Even if “All Cops Are Bastards” were as widely understood as it is now, this is still a kids’ show about super-heroes. As sophisticated as it could be, it was never going to advocate for a radical change to the status quo.  This makes Gargoyles a rather odd watch in 2021, particularly as it pertains to Elisa’s character: it makes the various elements of her identity rather hard to reconcile, and raises many crucial questions the series never answers. Is she aware of the racism within the system? Does it affect the way she feels about her work?  Does she believe it can be justified, think of it as a necessary evil, or does she work to change the culture from within? Does she simply not care? There are really no clear answers, and probably no answers that make Elisa look good—even “good” cops within the system do harm. The closest we get to illumination on this matter is this episode, which shows us that Elisa finds being treated like a Black woman shocking.

While the things that Elisa is subjected to at the start of the episode are outrageous—they should cause outrage—they should not at all be surprising. Walking while Black is a thing. The systematic oppression of Native peoples is a thing. Black people get killed by cops simply for living, with a regularity that cannot accurately be called shocking. The New Olympians may have adopted their beliefs as a reaction to real oppression that they endured, but aside from that, what they’re doing is not new, or different, or unfamiliar—nor was it in 1996, for the people that were living it. And while Elisa herself may not have been direct experience of this sort of dehumanization—and we’ve seen that she has—it is exceedingly unlikely, nearly impossible, that she would be unaware of it. And yet none of this comes up in this episode, suggesting that that near impossibility is actually the case.  

There are two possibilities at play here. Either the world of Gargoyles features no systematic racial oppression (towards non-fictional species, anyway) which would make it entirely unlike our own, or Elisa is unaware of it and/or indifferent.  In the worst-case scenario she is a voter for the leopards eating faces party, someone who is fine with other people being fucked over as long as it’s not her.  At the very least, she is someone who can apparently go through her experience this episode and resist the implications: when she attempts to appeal to Taurus by bringing up what they have in common—there’s quite a bit!—she mentions being a cop, but not their shared background of cultural oppression. Being a cop, we can assume, is more important to her sense of identity.  

(Is Elisa out of character this episode? I’m not sure. You can make a case for both arguments, I think.) 

This episode, then, handily illustrates the limits of storytelling via allegory. The tale “The New Olympians” is trying to tell is worth telling, and its portrayal of the criminalization of certain people for existing rings true. Its problems all arise from the unwillingness to explicitly engage with the real-world implications, and its failure to treat Elisa’s Black identity as relevant when the episode features a literal lynch mob.  Had the episode done otherwise—had it had Elisa at any point grapple with the idea that this story should be all too familiar for her—it would have been worthwhile, maybe even groundbreaking. Instead, “The New Olympians” is a story about how prejudice can be overcome by being One of the Good Ones, and how some cops are good, actually, even within a racist system (*1). 

On the other hand…

My impression of this episode is that it is not too fondly thought of, featuring too many characters viewers have no reason to care for, most of which don’t get developed enough to be likable. The episode is also aesthetically blah, having neither the designs nor the animation to make up for the story, which like many World Tour stories manages to be both overstuffed and too slight. And yet, watching the episode for possibly only the second time, I have to say, I don’t actually mind it. It’ll never be a favorite, and it’s a huge missed opportunity, but it’s not actively unpleasant in the way episodes like “Heritage” or “Mark of the Panther” are, and I suspect that a large reason for that is because it doesn’t actually try to tie its themes to the real world.

One of the very ironic things about a work like Xena: Warrior Princess, and its iconically gay central dynamic is that the series might have ended up being a lot less enjoyable, in the end, if it had been textually explicit. Naming the dynamic would have meant having to deal with it in a different matter, which given TV at the time might have easily derailed the fun train. Not naming it, on the other hand, means they were allowed to handle the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle more casually, without having to carry the weight of being a mainstreaming show with a queer couple at its center in the nineties. Additionally, it means the show didn’t have to do the usual romance arc tropes, which are often not handled great (*2). While the best case scenario was the show that we got but with lots of extra kissing and displays of affection, there’s no guarantee that that’s what we would have gotten. The show we actually got may not have been the best iteration of its concept, but it was perhaps the best we could expect.

This sort of thing, then, helps explain the appeal of allegory, and why so many works with appealing subtext end up faltering when it comes to actual text. The stakes are simply lower, which means it’s much easier to hit deeper, and to say profound things. With Gargoyles, this helps explain why the show could be fairly insightful when it came to, say, the challenges inherent in incorporating one’s heritage into one’s identity, but only when it came to gargoyles. Once the time came to explore the issue as it related to actual real-world peoples, it resulted in the show’s worst episode. Something similar, I feel, is at play here: I’m not sure an episode that dealt more directly with race would have worked better (the show has not done well with this, in the past!) and its most interesting element—its depiction of how people are criminalized—might not have been nearly as dead-on. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have preferred a different episode—again, this one is simply alright at best—but I’m not sure the series could have done better.

Random Thoughts:

• If I were a new Olympian, I simply would not make it possible to blow up the island by accessing a single terminal–but that’s just me.
• It may be because I’ve recently begun going through the Three-body Trilogy by Cixin Liu, but I find the recurring detail about how humans will apparently eventually develop technology that will overcome the New Olympians’ to be super-interesting. It’s not at all clear if the Olympians’ level of technology is one they’ve reached over time, or if it’s the one they started with. Have they always been stagnant, or have they just hit the limit of what they can do? If the latter, why? Why wouldn’t they remain ahead of humanity, given their head start?
• I really like the peacekeepers’ rocket bolas.

Footnotes!

(*1) Are Taurus and Boreas good people, or even just people who in good faith do bad things for what they perceive to be a greater good? Arguably, yes, in a world where New Olympians are themselves escaping oppression and are one unfortunate coincidence away from being genocided. That said, I wish it we had a more detailed account of their circumstances, given that it’s not at all clear how they happened to become the victims of systematic oppression. By all apparent metrics, Olympians had way more power than humans did, both physically and technologically, and no exploitable weaknesses the way gargoyles did. Additionally, it’s not at all clear how the various Olympians fit into society, or how they hoped to do so. What exactly made humans a threat, then? Numbers? It’s also worth noting that the New Olympians we see appear to be several generations removed from the ones who first occupied the island, which means that for many, oppression by humans is not something they experienced or had reason to believe they would experience. Their violent animosity, then, is less a practical response to trauma and more something they were made to feel second hand because…it’s not clear.

Additionally, while Taurus and Boreas may be among the less terrible New Olympians, that doesn’t mean they don’t do terrible things.  I mean, Taurus apparently has no problem having subordinates lead lynch mobs, which is the most cop thing possible, and there’s no indication the events of the episode have changed his thinking on that score. Then again, that tracks: being the better person doesn’t actually change the minds of people determined to hate you. 

(*2) At least I think it didn’t. This is where I admit my knowledge of Xena is extremely incomplete.