Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #122 Batman Beyond: "Shriek" and "Dead Man's Hand"

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 every episode of the cult animated show Batman Beyond.

I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen. 

You. should never trust white Sinbad.

I must admit that I am a little surprised by the quantity and quality of the comments for my Batman Beyond write-ups. I like to think of my readers as cool dudes who spend their time getting laid, doing sick electric guitar solos, executing wicked skateboard tricks and slam-dunking basketballs. 

You know, total jocks. Studs. Bros. Frat boys. Athletes. Party animals. Problem drinkers. Addicts with horrible chemical and psychological dependencies to drugs and alcohol. 

I’m wrong. Apparently the readership of this weird cult website devoted to obscure pop ephemera includes a lot of comic book geeks and superhero aficionados who know a lot about obscure pop ephemera. 

And you know what? That’s great. Truth be told, I’d rather have a smart, informed, appreciative audience than readers who all behave EXACTLY like Reagan-era beer pitchman Spuds MacKenzie, with the caveat that I do hope that Mackenzie is real and enjoys the website, as he is who I specifically pitch every article to, even this one. 

Y’all know an awful lot about Batman Beyond as well as the cult animated classics that preceded it, Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures. I’m more of a neophyte, as my primary experience of Batman: The Animated Series involves writing about it for this column but I’ve enjoyed both watching and writing about Batman Beyond, as nearly every episode is what my old professor used to called “textually rich.” 

The seventh episode, “Shriek”, for example boasts several revelatory moments that deepen our understanding of the old Bruce Wayne and his ferocious demons. We’re coming off a slew of episodes dominated by complex and charismatic villains but in “Shriek” the focus is unmistakably on the complicated relationship between teen Batman-in-training Terry McGinnis and elderly Bruce Wayne and Wayne’s even darker, even more complex relationship with himself. 

There’s also a villain of the week in the form of sound-crazy evil genius Shriek, AKA Walter Shreeve, a sound engineer who develops a deadly sound suit that looks like the Vulture’s suit if designed by Steve Jobs, but the bond between Terry and Bruce forms the episode’s emotional core. 

In “Shriek”, sinister business mogul/super-villain Derek Powers/Blight is keen on bulldozing Gotham’s historical district to make space for the kind of soulless industrial complex favored by bad guys everywhere. 

An uncharacteristically idealistic Bruce lectures passionately about wanting Gotham to be a “city that remembers its history, a city where the ideals flow from the past, defining our present and shaping our future” but the truth is that his desire to preserve the historical district is of course rooted in unfathomably deep pain. 

For it was in the historical district that some bad hombres killed Thomas and Martha Wayne in front of their traumatized son after taking in an evening showing of Surf Ninjas (I’m guessing, as it’s never made explicit exactly what movie they saw), the crime that famously inspired Bruce to become Batman. 

Terry, acting as the audience surrogate, asks Bruce why on earth he would want to preserve the site where his parents were killed rather than having it blown up in a way that might prove liberating and freeing and Bruce pointedly asks his protege if he’d want to forget his own father’s murder. 

The point is clear: Bruce is CHOOSING to hold onto his anger at his parent’s death, and by extension a universe and God that would allow something like that to happen a boy who had done nothing wrong. 

He’s CHOOSING to hold onto this pain because it defines him. He’s CHOOSING to hold onto this pain because it inspires him. He’s CHOOSING to hold onto this pain because without it, there’s no Batman, only callow Gotham playboy Bruce Wayne. 

Alas, life as Bruce Wayne is so lonely and depressing that his ostensible business partner and actual arch-nemesis Derek Powers is able to get Bruce institutionalized, as he has no wife or children or family to protect him.

Part of what makes the solitary image of an old, enraged Bruce Wayne in a mental hospital all by himself so powerful is that a psychiatric institution doesn’t ultimately seem like an inappropriate place for a man who dressed up like a bat to hurt criminals as a strange manner of coping with formative trauma and now seemingly yearns with every breath for the sweet release of death.

In the mental hospital Bruce hears voices when no one else is around that turn out to be sonic-themed super-villain Shriek trying unsuccessfully to drive Bruce insane. 

There’s a great moment at the end of the episode where Terry asks Bruce how he knew that the voices he was hearing came from an external source and weren’t products of his own endlessly haunted, ghost-riddled psyche. 

Bruce replies that he knew the voices came from somewhere outside his own brain because they referred to him as “Bruce” and that’s not how he sees himself internally. 

He does not state it explicitly, but it’s apparent that in this old man’s mind, his true self is Batman. Bruce Wayne is just someone he pretends to be to fool the public. What makes Bruce’s sense of himself as Batman rather than Bruce Wayne even more complex is that within the world of Batman Beyond, Bruce ISN’T Batman. 

Terry is now trainee Batman and Bruce is his cranky mentor/boss but in the swampy darkness of his soul, Bruce will ALWAYS be Batman, regardless of who is wearing the suit. 

In previous episodes, Bruce and Terry have come off as afterthoughts compared to more fully realized villains. The opposite is true in “Shriek.” Shriek isn’t a bad villain so much as an undistinguished heavy, an inventor in the Electro/Vulture mode who is ultimately no match for the combo of Terry and Bruce. 

If “Shriek” is a heavy, emotional episode, “Dead Man’s Hand” offers the blissful escapism of Batman taking on a band of absurd bad guys with an impossibly specific modus operandi rooted in their heavy-handed shtick. 

In “Dead Man’s Hand” Bruce and Terry face off against the Royal Flush Gang, a family of arch weirdoes who dress up like the characters on playing cards to commit playing cards-themed crime. 

If that sounds utterly ridiculous, it is. “Dead Man’s Hand” serves as a semi-welcome reminder that there is more to Batman Beyond than psychological complexity, impressive and immersive world-building and gloomy fatalism. Sometimes Batman Beyond is about heroes in silly costumes defeating villains in even sillier get-ups. 

In the B-story, Terry falls for a beautiful teenaged girl with a very predictable secret: her family moves around a lot because they are the Royal Flush Gang. 

The episode ends with Terry asking Bruce if he’d ever found himself in a similar situation and he tells his successor, “Let me tell you about a woman named Selina Kyle.” 

Truth be told, I found “Dead Man’s Hand” to be a nice change of pace after a battery of episodes heavy on brooding melodrama but I’m excited to have an opportunity to dive back into the show’s seedy, fascinating depths in subsequent episodes that I’m guessing will be grim and uncompromising in that inimitable Batman Beyond kind of way. 

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