The Shores of Avalon: The Master Plan

This e-mail was received from Greg Weisman upon asking him what his 'master plan' for Gargoyles was. The following is his response:

The Master Plan is a big amorphous thing in my head. Way too long to type up here. It was also a flexible thing. One of the things we learned on Gargoyles was to pay attention and take advantage of the discoveries we made along the way. We had things planned out way in advance, but they were influenced and altered by each new episode we wrote and produced. That process would have continued.

Keep in mind that the ABC episodes (with he exception of "The Journey") are not part of the Master Plan, though they may reflect Eric Lewald's takes on some notions and thoughts that I gave to him when I passed the baton.

At any rate, there's no particular reason to keep the Master Plan a secret, but it's not a single line narrative. It's a tapestry that widens out from the 66 episodes that I worked on. We had some grandiose notion of creating a small universe of shows and pitched a number of spin-off possibilities, all of which Disney ultimately rejected.

1) "Timedancer"- A spin-off starring Brooklyn where he finds the Phoenix Gate which has been lost in time since Goliath chucked it in "Future Tense". He can't control tha Gate and winds up bopping around the timestream. The idea was that he'd pick up the Gate, vanish, and reappear five minutes later from Broadway and Angela's point of view. But he'd be forty years older (twenty in gargoyle years). And he'd arrive with a gargoyle mate, two gargoyle kids, and a gargoyle beast as a pet. The spin-off series would follow his adventures. We'd learn more secrets of the past and future, have guest appearances from Finella, Mary, Young Xanatos, Demona, the Ishimura clan, Goliath's grandson and others.

2) "Future Tense" (Recently renamed "Gargoyles: 2158," so as not to be confused with the episode "Future Tense")- Set in the distant future and starring Goliath's grandson, Samson. It would feature Nokkar, Demona, Owen, Alexander, a time-traveling Brooklyn, etc.

3) "The Dark Ages"- A prequel, set in Scotland in the days that Hudson led the gargoyles and Goliath, Demona, Coldstone, Coldsteel, and Coldfire were young warriors, while Brooklyn, Lexington, and Broadway were little kids. Prince Malcolm ruled Wyvern and the Archmage was his primary advisor.

4) "The New Olympians" - The New Olympians arrive in very splashy style in front of the United Nations Building. This would have featured Taurus and Talos from that episode, in addition to two new characters.

5) "Pendragon"- King Arthur and Griff search for Merlin and battle the Illuminati Society, which was led by someone who was once Arthur's friend. We definately would have done a Stone of Destiny story to reflect the fact that in real life, the Stone was returned to Scotland last month.

6) "Bad Guys"- This is the one that we came closest to making. Even completeed a five minutes leica reel. This would have been a Dirty Dozen type show featuring Dingo, Matrix, Fang, Yama, and Robyn Canmore the Hunter.

7) "Gargoyles"- Would have explored the Quarryman problem, Xanatos' conversion, Broadway and Angela's relationship, Goliath and Elisa's relationship, the four tricksters and Alexander, the Illuminati, the Ultra-Pack, Coldsteel and Coyote, the clones, etc. Many of the things that Eric has wound up doing this season, but in a very different fashion.

Anyway, that outlines the basics. Material from any series that didn't get made would have been fed into the ones that were. Since the only show that was ordered was more episodes from #7, we would have would up adding a lot of stuff from 1-6. In retrospect, I regret not having at least supervised the writing of the entire third saeson. It's all hindsight. I made the best decision I could have at the time, given the information at my disposal, but I've learned that you don't give up doing something you love when there's a chance to tell more stories.

creatures have viewed the Master Plan since 6-1-98.