Fantasy Solutions to Real-World Problems: The Green

“This precious forest can never be replaced. We must defend it at all costs.” — Goliath

Written by: Cary Bates

Original Air Date: February 16, 1996

Introduces: Zafiro, Obsidiana, Jade, Turquesa

Timeline placement: May 24 – May 26, 1996

Location: Guatemala

TMNT episode I could make a comparison to: “Sons of the Silent Age”

The Deets:

• The world tourists arrive at a tropical rain forest, where their attention is quickly drawn to gunshots in the distance. They follow the noise and find its source, a group of wood cutters shooting at gargoyles who are themselves trying to wreck the loggers’ machinery.
• As the tourists ponder what they’re watching, a new player enters the fray, Jackal and Hyena, working on behalf of the loggers. They quickly overpower the local gargoyles, only find themselves contending with the Manhattan clan, who have also joined the fray.
• The tourists are eventually able to drive back Jackal, Hyena and the loggers and free the local gargoyles. After introductions–the local gargoyles are Zafiro and Obsidiana–they head for the safety of the Guatemalan gargoyles’ home.
• Bronx, who was injured by Hyena during the battle, begins finding it hard to go on. With waiting until sunrise not an option, Obsidiana provides another solution: using several of the forest’s medicinal plants to treat the injury.
• The gargoyles eventually arrive at the Guatemala Clan’s home, an ancient Mayan pyramid. There, the tourists meet the remaining two members of the clan–Jade and Turquesa–and learn that the four local gargoyles are unique in all the world in that they do not turn to stone at sunrise.
• The Guatemalan gargoyles explain how they are able to remain awake by day: long ago, a sorcerer created a sun amulet that allowed four pendant-wearers to remain awake indefinitely. While the amulet had been stolen by the archeologists looters who killed most of the clan, and is location remains unknown, it is obviously still intact, given that its effects continue. Unfortunately, this spiel is overheard by Jackal and Hyena, and gives the former an idea.
• After morning arrives, Elisa joins Zafiro on patrol. She watches as the gargoyle scares away a small-scale wood cutter and his son, and is not entirely comfortable with this, noting that these were not at all like the corporate loggers from the previous night. Zafiro does not find this argument convincing, or the differences between both kinds of humans to be relevant.
• At the villa they are currently staying at, Jackal uses THE POWER OF THE INTERNET to find the current location of the sun amulet. He tasks his sister with destroying it. Later, he explains his plan to his employer, Preston Vogel: once the amulet is destroyed, it will be much easier to kill all the gargoyles, thus stopping their sabotage of Cyberbiotics’ logging efforts and fulfilling the terms of the two cyborg siblings’ contract. Vogel notes that the plan still allows the gargoyles time to commit further sabotage, whose cost comes out of the siblings’ paycheck.
• Elisa and Zafiro rejoin the other gargoyles, including the now-awake Goliath, Angela and Bronx, who have agreed to join their Guatemalan counterparts in their sabotage efforts for the night. Elisa expresses her discomfort, and urges Goliath to change his mind, noting that what they should exhaust legal avenues before turning to vandalism. Goliath remains undeterred, but the argument concludes there, without strife, and Elisa agrees to stay behind and guard the pyramid with Jade and Turquesa.
• Hyena arrives at the sun amulet’s location: the Museum of Natural History in New York. Her break-in does not go unnoticed, as she is followed by Broadway and Lexington, who eventually succeed in foiling her mission. Left with the sun amulet and no idea what it’s for, the two gargoyles ponder whether to destroy it.
• As the gargoyles fight off Cyberbiotics’ loggers, Jackal arrives on the scene. However, he does not attack the gargoyles directly, and instead focuses his attacks on the forest itself, clearing a path towards the pyramid. Once there, he sets the surrounding area ablaze.
• As the gargoyles and Elisa work to extinguish the fire, their single-minded focus prevents them from realizing several things, such as the approaching sunrise and the fact that Obsidiana has lost her amulet, which is found by Bronx.
• The sun rises, leaving half the gargoyles defenseless. Fortunately, the remaining gargoyles prove enough to handle the situation. They defeat Jackal and drop him back at the Villa, where Vogel concludes that perhaps it might be a good idea for Cyberbiotics to cut its losses, cancel its contract with Jackal and Hyena, and abandon its operations in the area.
• In New York, Norman and his partner arrive at the 23rd Precinct, only to find Hyena bound and unconscious atop the stairs. At the clock tower, Lexington and Broadway sleep, the sun amulet in the latter’s arms.
• As the world tourists prepare to leave, Zafiro laments that no matter what victories they obtain in their current efforts to protect the forest, it’s not really a war they can win. Elisa makes a proposal: transplanting some of the plants to Avalon. It won’t save the forest, but it will at least keep some of it alive even if the worst happens. The Guatemalan gargoyles agree, and, after picking some choice samples, Jade and Turquesa join the tourists on their return to Avalon.

Mythology and Continuity Notes:

• Jackal and Hyena were last seen in “Grief“. Although nothing is explicitly said, the various members of The Pack appear to have gone their separate ways after that adventure.
• Preston Vogel was last seen in “Golem“, where and the gargoyles largely interacted amicably.

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It’s become a trend in these Gargoyles reviews that I have the most to say whenever an episode disagrees with me, so I’m exceedingly happy to see that change here. “The Green” is one of the most solid episodes in a while, one about which I have a lot to say.

One of the chief complications about writing genre work that ostensibly takes place in “our” world, is that once you introduce your X factor—magic, aliens, advanced technology—it’s no longer really our world.  Change one of the many many strands that make the world as we know it, and the rest often looks drastically different. Unless the story is precisely about how the world is different, the trick, then, is to find the balance between exploring the implications of your X factors and still having a world that is still largely recognizable.

For decades, the super-hero genre has tried to find this balance, often unsuccessfully: in the end, it’s quite hard to explain why Bruce Wayne can heal from a broken back but Barbara Gordon—or someone who is not a super-hero—cannot. It’s even harder to explain how super-heroes could have been a thing for decades without making the world unrecognizable, and how real-world milestones like World War II or the War on Terror still occur despite the existence of super-powered beings. At the very least, you’d expect the constant attacks on New York to have driven property prices down a whole lot.

So far, Gargoyles hasn’t had to deal much with this, having kept the weirdness largely at a remove from the “real” world (even when it shouldn’t have been able to do so). This episode, though, is all weirdness—everyone’s familiar with gargoyles, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. So it makes perfect sense that its “solution” is one that can only exist in a world with Gargoyles’ X factors.   

Deforestation, is, and continues to be one of the biggest existential threats the world faces today, and possibly the best thing this episode does is acknowledge that none of the characters present here can solve it, X factors or not. It shows far better instincts than the show has displayed in most of the world tour so far, which has largely been hobbled by its episodic structure and forced to rely on solutions that often don’t really work once one thinks about them. 

What X factors can do, however, is bring about possibilities that don’t exist in the real world, such as creating a magical plant bank. And that’s fantastic—not in the sense it’s necessarily a great idea (it feels like a successful retreat more than anything else)—but because it shows solid incorporation of the world into the show’s storytelling.  What’s more, it doesn’t invalidate what the Guatemalan gargoyles had already been doing, which is vitally important. 

The previous episode raised questions about how Elisa’s worldview was shaped by her job, and this episode, if anything, only appears to confirm that Elisa is very much A Cop, as she argues that Cyberbiotics’ legal ownership of the Guatemalan forest supersedes other factors. It’s frankly incoherent nonsense, but I can understand why Elisa might think this way; I realized, watching this episode, that her views are that of a standard Democrat—i.e., the sort that gets elected to the U.S. Senate—which is very believable and consistent with what we’ve seen of her, if somewhat dismaying.  

That said, her role this episode lands way better than her reactions to cops being cops last episode, largely because the series isn’t treating the law as a solution.  Indeed, despite her condemnation of the gargoyles’ acts of vandalism, it is ultimately those acts that get Cyberbiotics to abandon its operations.  It’s a tiny victory in a larger war, but it’s a victory nonetheless, and one that is true to life. Additionally, it’s worth noting that Elisa’s final suggestion isn’t actually legal either. Cyberbiotics or whoever owns the land the plants were on may not miss them, but those plants were still theirs, and taking them is still legally theft.

In general, this episode feels farther to the left than Gargoyles’ usual. In addition to everything already mentioned, it’s interesting to see Cyberbiotics placed once again as the antagonist. While the series feels less than entirely confident about this development—having Vogel in charge of things, while logical, also feels like a hedge, since we’re predisposed to like him less than Renard—I like that it went there.  It feels substantially different from what we’ll see with Xanatos. 

Back to Elisa and the gargoyles: this episode, we get to see something that feels significant—I’m not sure if it’s happened before, or given this much weight—in that Elisa and Goliath are allowed to disagree on a course of action without debate or an attempt to force the issue. It feels stunningly mature and like a significant evolution of their relationship, given both characters, and I really, really like it.  This is possibly my favorite iteration of people in a relationship: people who are allowed to disagree, argue, and even ultimately act independently without fear of harming the unit.  It’s shocking how rare that can be, in fiction.

If there is one weakness to this episode, it is that the Guatemalan gargoyles are, individually speaking, non-entities. With Elisa carrying the conflict ball, we’re left with four brand-new characters acting in concert, with little opportunity to distinguish themselves from each other.  They have solid designs, the amulets are an interesting addition to the lore, and their portrayal doesn’t detract from the episode (I don’t think intra-clan conflict would have added much), but I’m not exactly hankering to see them again, either. 

More interesting are Jackal and Hyena, back as a duo for the first time since “Her Brother’s Keeper,” and being generally a good time. I don’t quite recall how I felt about them at this point when I first watched the series, but honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised at how well they’ve avoided wearing out their welcome. Part of it, I’m now realizing, is because it’s fun seeing them grow increasingly comfortable with transhumanism, which allows for some cool cyborg bits, compounded by the series not giving a fuck about how the robotics are integrating with the remaining biological bits. If we ever get more Gargoyles, exploring this element this could be an interesting angle for them. Have them start getting groupies. Have them argue that they’re THE FUTURE. Have fun with it. 

Overall, “The Green” is comfortably in the upper tier of World Tour episodes. Every part of it works, and that makes me happy.

Random Thoughts:

• We’re told several hours pass between the initial meeting between the tourists and the Guatemala clan and sunrise, and I really wish we knew what the groups had talked about for all that time.
• I quite like that the new gargoyle group has gender parity.
• I mentioned that none of the characters in the episode can really do much against deforestation, but that doesn’t mean characters who can do something about it don’t exist.  Billionaires like Xanatos and Renard wouldn’t be able to solve it, but there’s a lot they could do to mitigate it.
• Something that goes unmentioned this episode is how the family that according to Elisa illustrates how some woodcutting is necessary is quite probably doing so illegally. How that squares with her later “it’s the law” defense is something the episode wisely does not attempt to clarify; I’m not sure it could.
• I do quite like seeing a plot that manages to involve both the tourists and the gargoyles back in Manhattan. I don’t know if the World Tour could have used more of this—I feel it would have gotten very contrived very fast—but here and now? I’m into it. 
• Another of the elements that make this episode pop is that it’s animated by Walt Disney Animation Japan, which is always a treat.  While part of me wonders whether it might have been better if this episode had been animated by one of the show’s other studios, with the Japan studio instead used to prop up an episode with less solid writing, another is glad I don’t have to find out. 
• An element I often forget about in this series and in TMNT is how humans and other non-nocturnal species quite often seem to have perfect night vision. The New York City setting can often justify it, but in a rain forest? Elisa and the loggers should not be able to get around as easily as they do.