Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #216 Batman Beyond: "The Last Resort" and "Armory"
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 four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. 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. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
The articles about Batman Beyond that I have written for this column have been short on criticism and long on rapturous praise. To say that I am impressed with the cult classic would be an understatement: I’ve been blown away by its world-building, darkness and psychological depth and complexity.
The dystopian continuation of Batman: The Animated Series has been firing on all cylinders pretty much from the start but it hits a bit of a rut with “The Last Resort” and “Armory.” They’re not bad, necessarily but they are what Metallica would refer to in the documentary Some Kind of Monster as a bit “stock.”
They’re two of the series’ weaker and more forgettable episodes. This being Batman Beyond, there’s good stuff in each of them but they don’t cohere into something much greater than the sum of their individual parts the way the show usually does.
In “The Last Resort” the villain is Dr. David Wheeler, a sadistic child psychologist voiced by John Ritter who promises to cure the rebellious progeny of concerned Gotham parents for a steep price at a secretive clinic that employs the kind of brainwashing techniques favored by cults.
Watching the demented doctor psychologically abuse his charges into submission I couldn’t help but think of NXIVM and how Keith Raniere was something of a real-life super-villain, a demented sociopath who used brainwashing, manipulation and volleyball to turn vulnerable young women into sex slaves.
Raniere even had a super-villain name in Vanguard AND for good measure, a sinister sidekick played by a genuine superhero television actress in Smallville’s own Allison Mack.
The world is full of real-life villains. Jeffrey Epstein! Donald Trump! Bill Cosby! These are all men whose evil became so cartoonish and extreme that it veered into the world of comic book melodrama.
Dr. Wheeler’s methods aren’t terribly dissimilar from those employed by Raniere, or Scientologists, or proponents of EST, or Erhard Seminars Training: destroy the fragile spirits and psyches of vulnerable people in desperate need of help so that you can build them back up again in the image of the perfect follower, docile and easily led.
Here, that means Sean Miller, a classmate of teen trainee Batman Terry McGiniss who is an archetypal juvenile delinquent, a bad seed, a real piece of shit. There’s a wonderful specificity to Sean, a gloriously lived-in quality: I feel like I know Sean, that I went to school with him and had to avert his creepy gaze in the classroom or the hallways or risk getting bullied.
It makes sense for hard cases like Sean to be sent to be sent away for some harsh discipline and tough love minus the love but when Terry’s colleagues start getting sent there for seemingly minor infractions he grows suspicious and decides to investigate.
Terry ends up in the belly of the beast alongside Sean, where they must learn to work together to defeat the evil shrink and his minions. This being a superhero cartoon I naturally assumed that Dr. Wheeler’s evil scheme would involve using his brainwashed army of troubled teens to steal diamonds or some such super-villain type shit but nope, his endgame just seems to be destroying teenagers psychologically.
“The Last Resort” feels like it’s missing something essential, something that would make it complete. I’m not entirely sure what that is necessarily, except perhaps inspiration.
That applies to “Armory” as well. The episode opens with an obscenely lavish party for Terry’s classmate Jared, the spoiled son of Jim, a wealthy weapons designer who lives to spoil his family and his materialistic wife.
Then one day the wealthy businessman with the physique of a tank is laid off and finds it impossible to secure honest work elsewhere. In desperation, Jim becomes an easy target for a disreputable rogue who wants the out of work family man to design weapons for a country that has fallen out of favor with the global community.
Jim decides to become the super-villain Armory, a hooded figure in all black with an impressive arsenal. I’ve got to say that I was less than impressed with Armory. Armory is definitely one of the weakest bad guys Terry and Bruce have squared off against, although as a fundamentally good man who does bad things for both good and bad reasons there’s a certain refreshing element of moral ambiguity at play.
On one level Armory is decent man pushed too far by the heartless dictates of capitalism and the prohibitive cost of supporting a family used to the finer things in life. On another, he’s really just a dude with a bunch of weapons cursed to have “kill Batman” on his to-do list at the very beginning of his super-villain career.
Armory was ultimately not destined to join Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, The Penguin and Cat-Woman in the great pantheon of Batman villains, just as “The Last Resort” and “Armory” were not going to make anyone’s lists of essential episodes.
That’s not because they’re bad, necessarily, but rather because they fall short of the show’s usual brilliance.
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