The Mirror
"The Mirror" is the eighteenth televised episode of the series Gargoyles, and the fifth episode of Season 2.
- Story: Lydia C. Marano
- Story Editor: Brynne Chandler Reaves
Summary
"The Mirror" opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Demona steals Titania's Mirror and uses it to summon and capture Puck, in part, At the World Trade Center, Puck transformed all of Manhattan into Gargoyles, and the Manhattan Clan into humans. By the end of this episode, Demona was given the "gift" of turning into a human by day, and reverting to her gargoyle form by night, and all of Manhattan, and the Clan were reverted to their natural forms.
Tidbits
This is the first time that the Third Race, also known as Oberon's Children, is mentioned in Gargoyles. Greg Weisman is not entirely happy with the name Oberon's Children, as it has been taken too literally by many members of the audience, who interpreted it as meaning that the Third Race are the biological offspring of Oberon. (They are "Oberon's Children" in the sense that the subjects of a ruler might be seen as his children.) He considered many other names for them, all of which were rejected, including Oberati (which was discarded on the grounds that it sounded too much like the name of an Italian car).
Brooklyn and Elisa both allude to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the play by Shakespeare that was the source for Puck (and also Oberon and Titania, who are mentioned in the dialogue but do not appear on-stage until Ill Met By Moonlight - unless you count Titania's alias as Anastasia Renard in Walkabout).
We get our first hint about Puck's alter ego as Owen (a notion that occurred to Greg Weisman and a few other members of the production team independently and simultaneously) when Demona says to him, "You serve the human; you can serve me." The "human" in question, of course, is Xanatos, though Puck immediately says "Serving humans is fun", shifting the word to plural so as to prevent the audience from becoming suspicious too early.
The production team briefly considered calling Puck by his Shakespearean alias of "Robin Goodfellow" instead, out of fears that the name "Puck" might be misheard as a certain four-letter-word that rhymed with it. In the end, however, they decided to simply be very careful about how they pronounced it.
Puck's line to Demona, "What does this [Titania's Mirror] look like to you, Aladdin's lamp?" was an in-joke reference to the then-running Disney animated series Aladdin, based on the movie.
The gargoyles' human forms were modelled partly on their voice actors, with appropriate changes for their most distinguishing characteristics that would cross over during the transformation (such as Hudson's beard).
Links
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