Control Nathan Rabin #212: Batman Beyond "Eyewitness" and "Final Cut"

I’m “mad” about this character. A real “Stan” as it were.

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. 

There are a lot of things I absolutely adore about Batman Beyond. I love the animation. I love the world-building. I love how unrelentingly grim and despairing it is in its worldview and take on human nature. I love its psychological death and the complicated relationship between Bruce Wayne and his angry teen protege. 

But if you were to ask me what I love about Batman Beyond in two words my answer would have to be “Mad Stan.” 

As Batman Beyond fans are well aware, Mad Stan is improbably but gloriously the delicious, simultaneously affectionate and scathing cyber-punk parody of Henry Rollins’ last angry man persona who functions as a secondary villain in its dystopian universe as well as a bit of a Punisher figure. 

Just in case there is any doubt as to which seminal punk icon this superhero cartoon ostensibly aimed at children is lovingly sending up, Mad Stan looks like Henry Rollins crossed with a Sherman Tank, or how Henry Rollins wishes he looked. 

For that final element of punk verisimilitude, Mad Stan is of course voiced by Henry Rollins. who is clearly having an absolute blast. I love everything about Mad Stan but what I love most about him is how mercurial and unpredictable he is. 

You never quite see Mad Stan coming and he’s never the primary villain or focus of an episode. Instead he’s invariably a wild feature attraction or unexpected bonus, like a famous rapper who comes out during a concert by another artist to thrill fans or a professional wrestler who unexpectedly enters the fray, chair in hand, to help out an ally. 

That’s the role Mad Stan plays in “Eyewitness.” He’s anarchy incarnate, an inveterate troublemaker, a natural-born upsetter. Barbara Gordon (voiced by Stockard Channing) is giving a speech at a fundraiser for her politician husband when good old Mad Stan quite literally crashes the party, all muscled-up attitude and high-volume intensity. 

Mad Stan single-handedly transforms a respectable gathering for the cream of Gotham society into a borderline riot before Terry swoops in and handles the situation. 

The ancient but still powerful and authoritative Barbara Gordon seemingly sees Terry kill Mad Stan in what she sees as a clear violation of the complex unwritten arrangement she has with her old mentor. 

Barbara and the Gotham police willfully turn a blind eye towards Terry’s vigilante antics and Bruce’s role in aiding and abetting them as long as Bruce and Terry accept certain conditions and restrictions, chief among them Terry not intentionally killing anyone. 

Oh sure, folks might argue that killing Mad Stan is no crime, really, and that society as a whole would be much better off for his absence but killing is wrong, I guess, even if the person being killed is really annoying and really loud the way Mad Stan is.

Bruce believes Terry when he tells him that he did not kill Mad Stan but he also believes Barbara Gordon when she tells him that she saw the murder with her own eyes. So the world’s greatest detective decides to do a little detective work, appropriately enough. 

One of the many ways that Batman Beyond deviates defiantly from conventional superhero animation lies in the way it plays with structure. “Eyewitness” is unique in that it’s about mystery as much as it is about action. 

It’s unique as well in that its real bad guy doesn’t make an appearance until the episode is nearly over and Batman Beyond doesn’t tip its hand by giving us information that Terry and Bruce do not already possess. 

It turns out that Terry did not, in fact, kill Mad Stan. Instead the fiendish hypnotist known as Spellbinder used his evil powers to trick Barbara Gordon into thinking she’d seen seen Teen Trainee Batman Terry break bad. 

“Eyewitness” ends on a bleakly comic note. We close with Mad Stan, who is in fact extremely not dead, seemingly triumphant as he prepares to realize all of his dreams by blowing up city hall and laying waste to the bureaucracy and order it represents. 

It’s all a melancholy illusion, however, as Mad Stan is actually hooked up to one of the Spellbinder’s dangerously addictive and just plain dangerous virtual reality machines. It’s funny but it’s also poignant because in the nightmarish world of Batman Beyond, happiness is primarily an illusion you have to pay for in myriad ways, not something that can be attained honestly or legitimately. 

The Spellbinder is a sad, desperate, angry man who sells fantasies and illusions to other sad, desperate, angry men at a steep cost, men like Mad Stan, for whom happiness is a warm gun and properly blown up government building. 

In a weird if ultimately deeply insignificant coincidence, I wasn’t able to write a non-Big Whoop piece for five days because my kids were home from camp last week so I had precious little time to myself. 

But the first two non-Big Whoop pieces I wrote about both have “Final Cut” in their titles. I covered Urban Legends: Final Cut as part of my patron-funded Rebecca Gayheart retrospective and now I’m covering the Batman Beyond episode “Final Cut.” 

“Final Cut” marks the triumphant return of Curare, a silent and skillful assassin who somehow manages to be legitimately badass despite her look and vibe being “Sexy Mummy Ninja.”

“Sexy mummy ninja” should be a surefire recipe for disaster. It should inspire unintentional belly laughs. But this is Batman Beyond that we’re talking about. It alone could make a super villain who looks a sexy mummy ninja genuinely cool and also more than a little sad. 

“Final Cut” opens with a set-piece begging for the silver screen. In it, one of the only surviving members of the League of Assassins is celebrating his good fortune in not being murdered by Curare yet aboard his private plane. 

Then, in a not entirely unexpected development, Curare shows up out of nowhere, a dazzling blur, and murders the fuck out of the poor man, leaving only a single member of the League of Assassins alive. 

Since Terry’s trainee Batman is the only person ever to tangle with Curare and survive the only living member of the League of Assassins blackmails Terry into protecting him by threatening to detonate a powerful bomb unless he acquiesces. 

Terry’s friend and sidekick Max enters the fray even though Terry warns her, correctly, that she is putting her life in danger by messing with with two of the most skillful killers alive. She plunges ahead all the same and is nearly killed for her cockiness. 

Max shows real vulnerability in an episode that deepens and strengthens her character and her relationship with Terry. In the end it feels like a bit of a cheat that Curare does not kill Terry or Max when she has an opportunity to, being a stone-cold killer and all, but Batman Beyond would suffer if its main character was dead. 

I haven’t been to a movie theater to see a silly superhero movie in well over a year, which used to be one of the great joys in my life. I hope to change that with a trip to the multiplex to see Black Widow. 

I hear good things about the Marvel blockbuster but I would be eminently satisfied if the action in Black Widow is half as good as it is here. 

Over two decades later, superhero movies still haven’t caught up with the bold innovations of Batman Beyond, and they have made quite a few of them. 

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