Control Nathan Rabin Rabin 4.0 #107 Batman Beyond: "Inque" and "Golem"

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 or early aughts animated television program. 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. 

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen along with an exploration of the cult animated series Batman  Beyond. 

The last time we ventured deep into the future of Gotham City it was for Batman Beyond’s premiere and second episode. Those seminal adventures grimly and compellingly examined how an exhausted and defeated Bruce Wayne, fighting aging and mortality along with Joker, The Riddler, Bane and the like, retired as Batman in 2019. 

Twenty years later the mantle of Batman is picked up by Terrence “Terry” McGinnis, a rage-filled teenager who stumbles upon the Bat-Cave and with it all of the old, broken down man’s secrets. 

In “Inque”, the third episode, a shape-shifting super-villain who is like a sexy sentient ink blot engages in a little industrial espionage and sabotage against FoxTeca at the behest of Derek Powers/Blight, Bruce Wayne’s unwanted partner in Wayne-Powers and business nemesis. 

Inque sounds like a high-end perfume or a heavily tattooed stripper. Inque may be an amorphous blackness that can take the form and shape of anything she encounters but she’s also got curves in all the right places. She’s an intensely gendered, seriously sexy ink spill come to life. 

There’s a great moment when Inque tells Derek Powers that she encountered a man in a red and black costume and the older man responds with, “Batman?” to which Inque retorts The Batman? 

Derek replies that it does not matter. In a way that’s true, as, technically speaking, the costume clad caped crusader they’re dealing with is not, in fact, the Batman but rather a teen trainee who is still very new on the job. 

The relationship between the ancient, cane-wielding, perpetually sour Bruce Wayne and his agile young protege reminded me a lot of the central dynamic in the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta Jones vehicle Entrapment. In that wonderfully ridiculous motion picture, Sean Connery’s master thief would sit in a comfy chair, eating a sandwich or reading the newspaper while the much younger woman handled all of the exhausting and exacting physical stuff. 

Inque may essentially be an ink blot with attitude but she proves a surprisingly fierce foe for Young Batman and his decrepit mentor. After hitching a ride on the Batmobile into the Bat-Cave, Inque embarks on an orgy of destruction. 

The shape-shifting femme fatale makes quick work of all of the wonderful souvenirs Bruce keeps in the cave despite the furtive nature of his second life: the giant penny, the dinosaur, the Ventriloquist’s dummy Scarface, the whole gaudy lot. 

The souvenirs in the Bat-Cave are a wonderful gift to future Batmanologists, of course but they seem deeply counter-productive in light of the furtive nature of Bruce Wayne’s whole enterprise. Why even bother to keep your alter ego a secret if you’re going to simultaneously curate a huge, elaborate museum chronicling your super-heroic exploits?

Over the course of a conversation with Inque, Derek Powers starts to transform into his super villain alter-ego Blight. Inque is understandably a little freaked out, but he brushes it aside with, “I have a condition. I trust you to be discreet.” 

That seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Here Blight has an opportunity to talk to someone who has also acquired super-powers they have chosen to use for evil following some manner of freak accident and he completely blows it. 

Acquiring super-powers and committing yourself to a life of evil and defeating Batman has to be a lonely and confusing and inherently melancholy existence. Having someone to talk to about it sure couldn’t hurt. I can’t even imagine how productive a support group for super-villains would be. 

Super-villains need to help each other out. That’s why they’re always springing each other from jail. The Joker will free Bane from Arkham Asylum because he needs his help in fighting Batman. Or Donald Trump will pardon Roger Stone because he needs his rat-fuckery to help get him re-elected. There’s a rich tradition. 

Inque may be a tough nemesis but she has a fairly pedestrian weakness: she can’t handle water or cold so Terry is ultimately able to defeat Inque by shooting her with Mr. Freeze’s gun. 

The episode ends with Terry, the teen trainee Batman, delivering Inque to Commissioner Gordon (Stockard Channing). Once upon a time Commissioner Gordon was Bat-Girl but that was a long time ago. Like Bruce Wayne, she is a retired superhero but her fight against evil is far from over. 

“Inque” concludes with a passing of the guard, with the brash young renegade assuming the role of Batman, with all the nifty toys that go with it, to the relief of a city that needs a hero and an infusion of young blood more than it knows. 

While Bruce Wayne has a supporting role in “Blackout”, he’s reduced to a voice cameo in Batman Beyond’s fourth episode “Golem.”

That’s because “Golem” shifts the focus from corporate sabotage to the horrors of teen life and the nightmare of raging hormones. 

In that respect Batman Beyond feels more than a little like Spider-Man, which similarly filtered superhero mythology through the prism of high school melodrama. 

In “Golem”, 98 pound wearing Willie Watt lives a sad, small life as the victim of bullies at school like Nelson Nash and at home like his father Frank, a construction titan who reviles his son as a weak-willed coward. 

Like the current inhabitant of the White House, Frank lives by the credo that if someone pushes you, you push back ten times as hard, and even if no one pushes you, then you’re still obligated to push back with great fury and vengeance. 

Willie finds a powerful vehicle to express his bottomless rage towards his dad, the bullies at school and the world at large in the form of GoLeM (for Galvanic Lifter Machine), a two story tall, thirteen ton construction robot that suggests an evil version of the Iron Giant. 

Willie has a telepathic link with GoLeM that allows him to control it and its incredible destructive power with his brain. In the process, the picked-on Poindexter makes a dramatic transformation from zero to anti-hero, from powerlessness nerd to all-powerful super-villain. 

Like Terry, access to almost inconceivably powerful technology changes Willie profoundly but in a markedly different fashion. It empowers and liberates him in the worst possible way. Turning GoLeM against a world that has never even attempted to understand him unleashes a monster within. 

Willie takes wicked delight in his new powers. When a gobsmacked Terry comes to understand that his nerdy classmate has achieved a deadly mind-meld with a killer robot and asks, “How are you doing this?”, the newfangled super-villain grinningly, ghoulishly replies, “With SUPREME satisfaction!” 

“Golem” is fascinating as an exploration of male fragility and the seductive allure of power fantasies. Willie has to become something destructive and beastly and wrong to matter to his father.  After Willie’s GoLeM-fueled rampage Frank tells Terry of his son’s wanton destruction, “I guess that means he ain’t no wuss anymore.” 

We have not seen the last of Willie, it seems. When we see him next he will have traded in his scrawny physique for muscles but remained the same sad proto-Incel inside. 

I’m not gonna lie: it feels a little weird writing up individual episodes of a television show that I’d never watched before for this column but it’s an interesting challenge and God knows I need the money. 

I really, really need the money because it is HARD out there, friend, sometimes to the point of seeming almost impossible. Yet I have faith that television and superheroes are here to stay, and I am here for it! At least, within the context of this exceedingly weird, but also exceedingly welcome new project. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

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