Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #207 Batman Beyond "Babel" and "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot"

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 the late Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

In a weird bit of synchronicity, I took my son Harris to speech therapy just before watching the Batman Beyond episode “Babel.” Harris is an incredibly sweet, curious, intelligent and loving little guy but he’ll be three in a couple of months and he does not talk very much.

His vocabulary is extremely limited so for the most part he cannot convey his desires through language. That’s incredibly frustrating for him because, like all of us, he desperately wants to be heard and listened to and understood and that can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, when you don’t have the necessary language and tools.

It’s equally frustrating for us as his parents because we also want very much to understand what’s going on in that beautiful little head of his, and how we can help him be as happy and successful as possible and it’s difficult without language and words. 

As its title suggests, “Babel” is very much about the horror and existential dread that ensues when you lose the ability to be understood, when language fails you and you’re reduced to using other means in an attempt to communicate. 

It reminded me of “Wordplay”, a standout, Wes Craven-directed episode of the 1980s The Twilight Zone about a man who wakes up one morning to discover that he no longer understands what everyone around him is saying, a trauma that very quickly pushes him to the point of madness. 

Something similar happens in “Babel” after sound-based super-villain Shriek uses a building that looks unnervingly like the World Trade Center as a giant tuning fork that sends out vibrations that play havoc with the people and animals of Neo-Gotham.

First Shriek and his burnout teen assistant Ollie send vibrations that cause the animals of Gotham to lose their goddamn minds and become aggressive and belligerent, including Bruce Wayne’s asshole dog Ace. 

That’s just a warm-up for Shriek’s real plan, which is to unleash a vibration that transforms Gotham City into a futuristic Tower of Babel where people open their mouths intending to speak English and nonsense instead comes out. 

Society cannot function in a world where people cannot communicate clearly or understand one another. Shriek promises further attacks on the fragile psyches of the people of Neo-Gotham unless Batman is delivered to him. 

Bruce Wayne is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of humanity but Shriek wants Terry. This leads to Bruce treating his protege with unexpected and uncharacteristic tenderness and compassion. 

The former Batman might be a hard-ass and the world’s toughest boss but in “Babel” we come to realize just how much he values Terry as a crime-fighting colleague but also as a human being. 

Bruce may value Terry but society as a whole does not. After Shriek’s demands hit the news we see man on the street interviews with typical city-goers who are far more empathetic towards Shriek and his goals than is right or fair.  

In these exchanges it becomes achingly apparent that Terry is literally putting his life on the line every night for the sake of a city full of assholes who don’t appreciate or understand him, yet seem perversely sympathetic to his enemies. 

That’s one of the main differences between Superman and Batman. Superman saves humanity because he is an overgrown Boy Scout who legitimately loves the Earth and its inhabitants whereas Batman is canonically a misanthropic loner intent on saving a world full of people he actively hates. 

“Babel” climaxes with the World Trade Center-like building Shriek has been using as a massive tuning fork to drive the city mad crumbling to the ground in a heap of rubble. It’s damn near impossible to watch the devastation and not think of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center but “Babel” doesn’t need the long, tragic shadow of 9/11 to be mesmerizingly dark and despairing, about the nature of heroism and everything else as well. 

Batman Beyond is many things. It’s dark. It’s uncompromising. It’s gorgeously animated. It’s smartly cast and deftly written. It’s a bold new take on a classic American anti-hero. It is not, however, wacky.

That consequently makes “Terry’s Friend Dates a Robot” a real anomaly. The episode’s title pretty much says it all. In this incongruously zany outlier, Terry’s associate Howard “Howie” Groote, Hamilton Hill High School’s biggest nerd, lucks upon a sleazy operation that makes android girlfriends to fit the specific needs and desires of customers. 

Louie, the weaselly degenerate behind Howie’s new, robotic gal-pal is essentially making fuck-bots for sad, wealthy incels who want the pleasure and sexual bliss of having sex with a beautiful women without having to treat women like human beings. 

Howie has Louie create the girl of his dreams: a gorgeous redhead with icy, otherworldly green eyes who, more than anything, will be devoted to him and only him. 

Howie’s foxy new girlfriend does wonders for his social standing. Being seen on the arm of a stone-cold fox earns Howie the respect of boys and the interest of popular girls who never would have given him the time of day before. But the gregarious, superficial nerd’s newfound popularity comes at a steep price. 

Cynthia, you see, cannot stand the idea of competing for Howie’s affections. She’s programmed to see the chubby nerd as hers and hers alone and lashes out against women she sees as a threat to her relationship with Howie with great ferocity. 

Howie finds himself in the unusual and unexpected position of having to break up with a girl who would be wildly out of his league if he hadn’t paid for her creation and when he tells her that he just wants to be friends she literally explodes with rage, destroying Howie’s family home in the process. 

“Terry’s Friend Dates a Robot” is surprisingly sly and observant in its take on gender politics and the politics of high school life but what else would you expect from a show that does just about everything right, down to the casting of all-time voiceover legend Dan Castellaneta, Homer Simpson himself, in the bit role of Howard’s apoplectic papa. 

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are five so far, including Shasta McNasty and the second season of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace