Control Nathan Rabin #149 Batman Beyond: "Ascension" and "Splicers"

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

In this entry I’m writing about a season finale and a season debut as we come to the end of an impressively bleak first season and begin an exceedingly promising second season with two tales of Cronenbergian body horror. For kids! 

Derek Powers/Blight (Sherman Howard), the CEO of Wayne-Powers figured very prominently in the first few episodes of Batman Beyond a sneering heavy who teaches kids the important lesson that to truly make it in today’s competitive business world you need to be both a super-villain and a literal monster. 

Powers was once merely a terrifyingly powerful corporate shark but then in one of Batman Beyond’s many, many unfortunate freak accidents he ended up with glowing, fluorescent green skin that makes him look like a Shamrock-shake green version of the Ghost Rider.

Becoming Blight gives Mr. Powers super-powers but it took much more than it gave. It transformed him from a titan of industry to an inhuman freak who has to wear fake skin to cover up his glowing green body. 

When he gets angry, Derek Powers hulks out and becomes Blight. This presents all manner of public relations problems for his company. After all we’re perfectly fine with figurative monsters and super villains running our corporations but when they become LITERAL creatures of darkness and evil the optics are less than ideal. 

So Derek decides to appoint his useless, evil, Donald Trump Jr. like son Paxton to be the non-green glowing face of his company. 

This surprises the hell out of a Wayne-Powers board that is easily astonished to a comic degree. First they’re gobsmacked to learn that the asshole son of their asshole boss will be getting a plum gig, as if that’s not literally the most common and predictable thing in the world. 

Then they’re astonished when someone representing Wayne-Powers’ south of the border operations bursts in and throws dead, radioactive fish on the boardroom table to protest Paxton’s role in polluting the environment. 

These hilariously overly-expressive bit players are finally shocked when the head of Wayne-Powers begins to turn into an evil glowing green skeleton man. These board members are now my all-time favorite characters in the D.C Universe. I want them to get a spin-off where they respond to a never-ending series of new developments very dramatically each week. 

Derek goes into hiding and Paxton agrees to lure his father into a trap under the pretense of helping save him from his violent rages and his unfortunate medical condition but really so that he can kill his father and take over his businessman. 

There’s a great moment here when Bruce Wayne tells Terry that he’s partially responsible for Derek Powers becoming a monster, that he played a role in the creation of Blight. 

Instead of expressing guilt or remorse for his part in unwittingly helping unleash Blight upon an already dystopian world Terry instead answers with a cold bordering on sociopathic, “Good.” 

He goes on to explain that Derek Powers ordered the hit on his father and consequently deserves every bad thing that could possibly happen to him. 

Terry’s emotions are understandable. Who wouldn’t be overcome with rage towards the monster that killed their father? Yet Terry expresses those emotions so icily that even Bruce Wayne, a mentally ill man who copes with formative early parental trauma by dressing up like a bat and beating up criminals, seems taken aback. Even he seems to realize there’s something more than a little wrong at the core of Terry’s being, an insatiable hunger for vengeance where his conscience should be. 

When Terry faces down Blight he introduces himself by sneering, “You killed my father” he replies with just the right note of sociopathic defiance, “Do you have the SLIGHTEST idea how little that narrows it down?” 

That isn’t writing just good writing for a kid’s show or good writing for a cartoon: that’s just plain good writing: funny, smart, pitch-perfect and bracingly dark in that inimitable Batman Beyond fashion. 

Underground comic book hero, Milk and Cheese creator and Yo Gabba! Gabba! contributor Evan Dorkin co-wrote “Splicers”, the second season premiere, with wife and writing partner Sarah Dyer.

That helps explain why the episode’s humor is overtly satirical as well as unrelentingly dark. In “Splicers” the hot new fad involves having your DNA genetically spliced with animals in order to create human/animal hybrids. This affords crazy cat ladies an opportunity to be actual Cat-Lady hybrids and not just someone with a sad life and an excessive amount of feline companions. 

These hip, hot new mutants are the brainchild of Dr. Cuvier, a mad scientist who is himself a gene-spliced combination of human and animal. “I want to assure everyone that splicing is safe, reversible, and more importantly, utterly beautiful. I was the first test subject, and as you can see, I'm perfectly fine” the mad doctor tries to assure an understandably skeptical world. 

This, however, turns out to be the one instance in which man playing God turns out poorly for everyone involved. Heroic DA Young wants to ban the practice as a crime against nature so Dr. Cuvier dispatches his genetically spliced henchmen to kill him. 

These include Ramrod, a tough goat/human hybrid who sounds just like Ice-T because he is actually voiced by Ice-T, King Cobra, a snake/human hybrid and finally Tigress (Cree Summer), a sexy combination of tiger and human. 

Bruce Wayne and Terry understandably look askance at the eccentric doctor and his homegrown stable of killer mutants although men who choose to spend much of their lives dressed up like bats might be expected to have a little more sympathy for the deliberate blurring of the lines separating animal from man. 

To that end, Dr. Cuvier has Terry’s DNA spliced with that of a bat, transforming him into a bat-like creature who looks and acts pretty much exactly like Bat-Man’s nemesis Man-Bat. 

Batman Beyond gets more and more Cronenbergian as it goes along. It climaxes with Dr. Cuvier revealing his initially majestic true form, a sleek, enormous, snake-like create that combines the best qualities of myriad different animals. 

It does not hold, however, and the terrified and overwhelmed Doctor looks on helplessly as he devolves into a monstrous blob that doesn’t look anything like an animal or a man.

It’s like they always: if you live by irresponsible and dangerous gene-splicing, then you die by it as well. 

I was VERY impressed with the first season of Batman Beyond. I was dazzled by its character design, animation, world-building, complexity, humor and the complicated dynamic between Bruce Wayne and his teen protege. 

The second season looks just as audacious and impressive. Batman Beyond gives gritty superhero revisionism a good name at a time when the Zack Snyders of the world have made it synonymous with comic book-derived entertainment at its most humorless and pretentious. 

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