My Patron-Funded Look at the Entirety of Batman Beyond Comes to An End by Anticipating Chappie and Contemplating Terry's Lonely Existential Plight
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.
We have reached another ending here at the Happy Place. I have now watched and written about every episode of Batman Beyond for a very generous, very appreciated patron. That’s three seasons and fifty two episodes worth of futuristic super heroism.
I went into this project a complete neophyte. Now I possess the kind of wisdom and experience that can only come with truly immersing yourself in a weird Batman cartoon from the turn of the millennium.
It feels good, man!
This is going to change everything. I’ve been struggling in every facet of my life but once people know that I’ve seen EVERY episode of Batman Beyond it’ll change the way they think about me for the better.
Batman Beyond impressed the hell out of me up until the very end. It’s full of glorious surprises, including a penultimate episode with pretty much the exact same premise as my all-time favorite motion picture, Chappie.
Only instead of focussing on a fictionalized version of South African sex criminals and dirt ball degenerates Die Antwoord, “Countdown” features Henry Rollins engaging in delightful self-parody as crazed anarchist and bomb enthusiast Mad Stan.
Mad Stan is a cartoonish caricature of Rollins’ last angry man persona. He’s a rebellious doofus engaged in a one-man war with “The Man”, the government, corporations and pretty much the sum of humanity.
Rollins’ glorious contribution to the D.C animated universe is generally a supporting character but he’s front and center in “Countdown.” The episode opens with a fancy pants science symposium that Mad Stan crashes with his trademark mindless destructiveness.
Mad Stan is an agent of chaos and disorder pin balling wildly in every direction. Terry squares off against the outsized activist with way too many causes but the muscleman makes off with Zeta, the child-like robot introduced in a previous episode.
We learn a lot more about our old pal Mad Stan here. We learn, for example, that he’s an animal lover with a dog that is clearly his only real family. The dynamic between rock and roll maniac Mad Stan and innocent man-child android Zeta can’t help but recall that of Die Antwoord and Chappie in Chappie.
Zeta sees the goodness and innocence in Mad Stan where others see only a colossal annoyance. Zeta would live on in a spin-off of his own, The Zeta Project, which ran for two seasons in 2001 and 2002.
Zeta is an agreeable enough character but he lacks the depth and moral complexity of Bruce Wayne and his teen protege Terry. Batman Beyond definitely had more life in it when the plug was definitively pulled. It’s hard not to mourn what was never to be.
Why couldn’t we have three more seasons of Batman Beyond? And two or three Chappie sequels? Is that really too much to ask, God? Haven’t we suffered enough? Can you throw us a bone every now and then?
The final episode is a strange one, in part because much of it unfolds in flashback. In it, Terry shows up late for a fundraiser and is chastised by Max for letting his secret job as a superhero interfere with his life as a high school student.
She suggests that it might not be a bad idea for Terry to let a few other people in his life in on his secret identity, most notably his girlfriend Dana. Terry then shares a story from early in his life as Batman 2.0 to illustrate why that would be a bad idea.
Terry’s flashback centers on a weird little boy named Miguel who is obsessed with an action figure known as Soldier Sam. He’s so fixated on the plastic exemplar of rugged American masculinity that he’s oblivious to the world around him.
The sculpture Miguel is on is struck by a missile from the villainous, reptile-themed evil gang Kobra. The child is in danger of plummeting to his death until Batman reaches him.
In his Bat-Suit, Terry looks like both Soldier Sam’s antagonist AND a demon so, in a moment of questionable judgment, Terry temporarily takes off his mask and reveals his face to Miguel.
This succeeds in reassuring Miguel but it leads Kobra to think that the boy knows what Batman looks like under his mask. That is information that they are very much interested in procuring.
Terry revealing his true identity to a scared little boy on the verge of death is a plot point, of course, but it has a larger philosophical dimension as well. Max is encouraging Terry to be less of a brooding, intense, secretive and paranoid loner like Bruce Wayne and let other people into his life a little.
In another context that might be healthy but on an existential as well as practical level Terry really can’t let people know that he’s secretly Gotham’s crime-fighting Dark Knight because that would instantly make them a target for the many people who want him dead.
“Unmasked” illustrates yet again that Terry is a Nowhere Man who must hide his true self from the world for the sake of the people he loves as well as himself.
The episode, and by extension, the series, ends with a satisfying twist. Miguel tells Kobra that Terry looks just like Soldier Sam’s enemy. That is no help to anyone and while Terry thinks that Miguel wouldn’t and doesn’t recognize him because he only saw his face for a brief moment, and then under chaotic, confusing circumstances, but when he sees him on the street he shoots him a look that suggests otherwise.
Now that I have watched every episode of Batman Beyond I can now confidently state that it is a great fucking show, one of the deepest, most beautiful and emotionally resonant superhero cartoons of all time.
I’m grateful that I was professionally obligated to experience in its entirety, because I desperately need the money, of course, but also because I otherwise would not have experienced this fascinating anomaly.
Next up I will tackle Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker and then the complete filmography of cult fright master Stuart Gordon. Yay! This is gonna be fun.
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