style92 (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} style92) wrote,@ 2008-01-07 23:16:00 |
|
The Batman Season 4 review (SPOILERS)
Yep, Spoilers.
Ah, the Batman season 4. Missed it as it was airing, but through the magic of DVD, I've seen it now. I love how that works. This Season is the season wherein either A). Batfans starting watching because they claim it finally got good, or B). the bellyacheing grew old and the Batfan hold outs finally decided to settle. I think it was B, because the season, while excellent, was not a marked improvement over the previous two.
And on to the episodes!
A Matter of Family: Robin finally makes his overdue entrance into The Batman and the series finally becomes complete. As an episode, it has it's moments, it really does, of being something akin to artful. Still, while writers are slaving away at new and innovative ways to portray Batman's origin, Robin's comes off kind of perfunctory, like everyone's reading a script. Like "Robin's Reckoning," Bruce Wayne impulsively takes in Dick only to pawn him off on Alfred. In both cases, Batman professes to be doing it for Dick, ("I'm doing this for him!" "I don't want your childhood to be consumed by revenge. Like mine was." Ooh, like that last line, didn't think this series would go there,) but Really Bruce has adopted Dick's cause so he can project his own frustrations on his parenters murder onto Dick's Parent's Murderer. Yep. This one also had the job of getting Dick to be Robin by the end, which "RR" didn't have to deal with, (remember, that one only got Dick down into the cave, not into costume.) Here, Dick becoming Robin so fast almost works, and almost doesn't feel forced.
Nice use of BTAS cameos.
Team Penguin: Guilty or not, Tom Kenny's Penguin is a pleasure I never tire of indulging in. I know it's kind of in vogue to hate him and the Joker, but Damn, I find them both immensely pleasing. Here, the Penguin has hatched an idea that ain't that bad, all things considered, and does a nice job of bringing back in B and C rate villains. This version of Killer Moth is really really funny too, and gives the Titans version a run for his money. (Particularly the twist him Moth become a true monster, but still maintaining loyalty to Penguin who has abused and belittled him so!) On the other side of things, Batman's team gells as Robin and Batgirl meet, (so glad they didn't drop Batgirl as though she never existed, a la Yin) and rankle each other nicely. In fact, things settle into a very comfortable groove, that eerily reminds me of the TNBA days. (So much so that I often think of Robin as Tim, not Dick, then have to mentally correct myself. "No, this IS Dick.")And maybe it's odd to say so, but I'm glad Batgirl is a younger teenager this time out, so she's NOT defined as a love interest to either Bruce or Dick. As such, the Dick/Babs interaction is refreshingly innocent and spunky.
Nice action too. Especially love Robin's fight with Ragdoll as viewed from exterior.
Clayfaces: Ethan Bennet's Saga comes to an end, as his reputation is restored in a fight with a much more vicious Clayface. Now, personally, I always liked Meltdown and felt it DID make an interesting case for why Bennet would lapse into outright villainry. A few others, though, didn't like that episode and felt the change was unnatural. Seems like the guy who wrote this agreed with the latter opinion, so he fixes it by making Bennet's switch back just as sudden and arbitrary. So then, Bennet's Saga, which should be an epic about the fall of a Just Man and his fight to redeem himself, comes of just somewhat hollow. Still, the episode is pretty good.
Basil Karlo as Clayface Mark II is grating, but I grant that was the point of his character as written. It's clever that his crimewave is a huge publicity stunt, but Hagen as the actor Clayface was just better. He was Clayface as if played by Heston, (or Heston's lower-rent TV counterpart, Shatner) The material can be paper thin, but so much .....ACTING!!!... goes into it it manages to play. Basil Karlo is just played by the schlubb working at Blockbuster.
The Everywhere Man: The Everywhere Man is just as interesting as his Gimmick (duplicating himself) would indicate. No more, No less. More satisfying is Batman's reaction to all this: Utter disdain to this villain and his means and motives. Batman treats him EM as if EM is just totally beneath him. (In some ways, it's worse than how BTAS Batman treated Ra's Al Ghul. At least Batman would crack jokes and laugh openly at Ra's over the top super villainry. Everywhere Man just isn't even worth THAT kind of effort to Batman apparently.)
The Breakout: Indulge me, please. Back in the Miasma between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins, when Warner Bros. knew they still wanted to make Batman movies but had no idea how to do it, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the matter. My personal suggestion was, Why do Superhero movies need to be structured the way they are? Basically, a Superhero engaging in a grudge match with a Supervillain that goes for an extended period of time and several encounters across a movie. Can't it be structured more focusedly? How about a Batman version of Die Hard, for example? Well, the Breakout is as close to a Batman Die Hard as I've seen crop up in as many years, and it's a refreshing and engaging change of Pace for it.
But let's not beat around the Bush: the stars here are Robin and Batgirl, who are charming as kid sidekicks in ways kid sidekicks usually aint. from there initial goofing off to them having to rally to beat back Black Mask's forces with no police and no Batman to help them. It's all very honest. From Robin sinking briefly into despair to Batgirl's tender treatment of the unconscious Commissioner, (without an explicit reminder to the audience that they are father and daughter, which I thought was a nice touch,) it's easy to get caught up in it all.
Strange New World: Damn Bat-embargo. This should have been a Scarecrow piece and we all know it. If it were, it would have been a more creative use of Scarecrow Toxin than anything in BTAS or TNBA. So, Hugo Strange has created a Toxin that turns all of Gotham into Zombies, and it's down to Batman to save the whole city. Or is there more to this than meets the eye? (ROBOTS IN DISGUISE! Sorry.)
Effective Use of the "Dream as trap." Not as good as "over the edge" or Futurama's "The Sting, but possibly on par with "Perchance to Dream" and defiantly better than the animated "For the Man who Has Everything." (Seriously, having the dream of FTMWHE be a paradise is seriously missing the point. Awakening from a dream or delusion is never nor should it ever be portrayed as a tragedy. And don't try to through "Perchance to Dream" at me. that dream world was only superficially a Bruce Wayne paradise. Fundamentally, it mocked his entire being. FTMWHE coddled Superman's.)
Artifacts: So, if this is the year 3000 or so, does that mean Fry, Leela, and Bender are flying around somewhere? and wouldn't Bruce Wayne's head be at the Head Museum? Well, anyway, this episode is mostly about the writers getting able to work out there "Future Batman" jones, hence cameos by Oracle, Nightwing, and a DKR-esque Batman. And Mr. Freeze is going the same way as his TNBA counterpart, it seems. So, if seeing all those things gives you Geekgasms, more power to you. But I ask: wouldn't a Carrie Kelly esque Robin have rounded things off nicely?
Seconds: For some reason, I suspect this episode may have originally been intended as a Clock King introduction, but then they decided against it. Anyway, it's a clever use of time travel and a gimmick that gets laughs. Particularly flattering to the couch potato viewer is the idea that any problem, including an assault from Batman, is just a series of smaller patterns to navigate. What I do and don't like about this episode: I DO like how he gets his Superpower. No accidental infusion, just a man left isolated, with nothing left to do but to explore his brain's own innate potential. I didn't like how the episode claimed such pathos at the end. To that point, it was just Batman in a fight against a clever foe, as Batman struggled to figure out a way to overcome him. Then, it just all went apocalyptic in a hurry. Sure, our criminal got a happy ending, but it's still not the ending I felt was most appropriate to the piece.
Riddler's Revenge: The Riddler finally gets a second solo outing in a tale that explores his origins. As has been said before, sometimes the problem with this character is that the writers over think his escapades. This one, finally, has gone in the opposite direction. We don't get a central Riddler crime to solve, but rather open on Riddler having planted bombs on his former boss's boat that can be diffused when his boss can solve a hilariously simple Riddle. But Riddler has his boss bound and gagged, taunting him "Speak up! I can't hear you!" And what follows is his origins, peppered with a minor mystery.
This episode, more than anything else, made me realize that by now Riddler does have a definitive over arching origin story that's true of him in mostly all versions. Basically, Riddler is a talented young genius who gets screwed over by corporate America. That's true in BTAS, Batman Forever, and now The Batman (In Batman Forever, the executive who screws over Nygma was none other than Bruce Wayne! I KNEW I still liked that movie for a reason!) But I must confess, this take on Riddler does try a couple of interesting twists on this rapidly forming archetypal tale. Mostly, was Edward Nygma's persecution mostly in his mind? An important point of his origin is his feud with his father. Obviously Nygma viewed him as an overgrown brute that humiliated and belittled him, and just "didn't understand." But we ask, was Nygma's father such a bad guy after all? All he seemed to do was insist his son get out for a little physical activity and interact with other children. Both of which are currently being strongly urged of parents in our internet-driven age. Oh sure, the man may have broken some of Edward's puzzles, which probably was going over the line somewhat. Still, if Edwards father had, say, confiscated instead of destroying those puzzles, that wouldn't have been bad. As such, it seems Edward Nygma spent his life rebelling against his father and his lessons. Which makes it very easy for me to see Nygma's chief failing as an adult: He's naive about people.
Nygma's boss would be in the habit of calling him Champ just as Nygma's father would. That, all by itself, was enough to make Nygma hate him. Nygma was paired on a project with another scientist, who happened to be a pretty and young woman, who spoke to Nygma cordially. That, all by itself, was enough to make Nygma think she was to be his great love. But again, Nygma fails to see below these surfaces. Nygma's boss may have been a blowhard, but we all have obnoxious bosses and Nygma's probably wasn't so bad, all things considered. As for the woman, Nygma had already made the mistake of viewing her as an accessory to himself, (his love) and stopped seeing her as an independent moral agent. Sure, she took advantage of him, and that's reprehensible, (Batman's decision to leave her tied up until the police came is understandable,) but she does seem to have one redeeming value: she knew people. She could see that Nygma was a naive, socially and emotionally stunted person whom she did NOT want to be working with for years to come. Next to Nygma, who would never have been able to grasp such subtlety, she comes off not so bad.
On another note, it's interesting that Batman solves the mystery of who sabotaged Nygma by pointing out that Nygma's boss would not have been smart enough to sabotage the brain discs to make it look like equipment failure. Only someone who actually worked on the project could do that. It's an interesting point, because, in really for real life, that would be a great big "Well DUH!" But, in comic book would, not necessarily. In comic books, many characters that figure prominently are very smart, even some who you wouldn't think would be. I mean, this is a universe rife with Business men who are also talented scientists who could pull something like that off. To me, it's a smart narrative move that subtlety disobeys the rules. (For another example of intelligence blown out of proportion, I submit Return of the Joker. Yes, great movie, but c'mon, I found it's central conceit laughably both then and now. I can believe the Joker as a brilliant chemist, but Joker actually managed to figure out a way of implanting Brainwaves and DNA into a microchip that re sequences the physiology of it's victim into the Joker? I mean, wouldn't cloning himself have been vastly easier by comparison? Seems Dwayne McDuffie felt the same way I did and had the little retcon in Epilogue about Joker stealing Cadmus nanites to pull it off. See, I don't critiscize McDuffie all the time.)
One final note about this episode: Title may be a reference to the Rubicks Revenge, a 4x4x4 version of the Rubicks cube introduced when the public started to figure out how to solve the 3x3x3 version.
Two of a Kind: Harley Quinn gets introduced to the world of The Batman as Paul Dini is tasked to reconfigure her origins to something more befitting The Batman. Batgirl gets a nice Freudian Dick Joke at Penguin's expense. But anyway, this version of the tale reminds me how demeaning Paul can be to Harley. To Paul, even Harley's real accomplishments, such as her degree in psychology, must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. The original comic version of "Mad Love" plainly stated that Harley only got through College by screwing her professors. I was glad to see that angle dropped in the animated version. (And overall, I would say that the animated Mad love was a subtle improvement over the comics tale.) But here, those old implications come back even more pathetically. Harley has her degree through some lame 12 week online course. Now Paul's saying she wasn't even good enough to go to real College! Consider all this in contrast to the Joker, who is evil but still has the dignity by being a truly talented chemist. Not so with Harley. To Dini, Harley is nothing but a fluzy.
Still, to call attention this episodes strengths, this is truly a Harley spotlight of a kind I just don't remember seeing in BTAS. Too true, BTAS did have many Harley spotlights, (Harley and Ivy, Harlyquinnade and Harley's Holiday all very memorable.) But when Harley got a spotlight in BTAS, it was usually only in episodes she got to spend a significant amount of time away from Joker. (The above 3 examples.) When Joker and Harley would reteam, she would get back in line as his subservient. Here, she's paired with Joker the whole time and holds her own. the final scheme is hers and focused around her. Even Joker starts getting worried that she's stealing the spotlight. So in that sense, I do have to say attitudes about the character may have improved.
Her new design is undeniably cute. Harley was cuter in a handful of TNBA episodes, (Particularly beware the creeper,) but that's rarified company.
Rumors: Yep. Every so often the itch comes up to write a story about a fellow who's "more Batman than Batman" someone not just willing to beat the baddies and turn them over to the police, but someone out to off the baddies once and for all. The obvious moral dilemma is whether or not letting someone kill the killers is a bad idea, but hardly any entries in this sort of story explore that as much as it could be. from BTAS, we have Mask the Phantasm, and Lock up. TNBA contributes Judgment Day and to a lesser extent, Mystery of the Batwoman. Batman Beyond has "Payback" to it's name, and finally the Batman has Rumors. And to be honest, since no episode proposes a solution to the central moral dilemma, only the episodes where there's a clever twist as to the new vigalante's secret identity stand out. That's why Rumors gets filed away with the likes of Judgment day. Mostly Meh. But to it's credit, it does ring out some interesting moments having all the villains together reacting to this situation, and a very memorable fight with all the villains.
Joining, parts 1 and 2: Umm, okay, I guess. I mean, there are memorable bits to be sure, but the whole alien invasion story comes together quickly and perfunctorily, the aliens themselves don't seem so unique, and the whole thing seems mostly like an exercise in how many one-liners they can squeeze into this thing. (I mean, lately people seem impressed by one liners again, but I remember when they were considered cheap and lame.) I mean, sure, the watchtower being a floating version of the Hall of Justice from Superfriends does tickle my geek bone, but I had to train myself long ago to not reward or be impressed by such gratuitous references. Some shows just slide by on them.
And there you go. On par with season 2. Part of me still likes season 3 more.
Hopefully, coming soon-ish a review of Bender's Big Score with a large geeky discussion on time travel.
Yep, Spoilers.
Ah, the Batman season 4. Missed it as it was airing, but through the magic of DVD, I've seen it now. I love how that works. This Season is the season wherein either A). Batfans starting watching because they claim it finally got good, or B). the bellyacheing grew old and the Batfan hold outs finally decided to settle. I think it was B, because the season, while excellent, was not a marked improvement over the previous two.
And on to the episodes!
A Matter of Family: Robin finally makes his overdue entrance into The Batman and the series finally becomes complete. As an episode, it has it's moments, it really does, of being something akin to artful. Still, while writers are slaving away at new and innovative ways to portray Batman's origin, Robin's comes off kind of perfunctory, like everyone's reading a script. Like "Robin's Reckoning," Bruce Wayne impulsively takes in Dick only to pawn him off on Alfred. In both cases, Batman professes to be doing it for Dick, ("I'm doing this for him!" "I don't want your childhood to be consumed by revenge. Like mine was." Ooh, like that last line, didn't think this series would go there,) but Really Bruce has adopted Dick's cause so he can project his own frustrations on his parenters murder onto Dick's Parent's Murderer. Yep. This one also had the job of getting Dick to be Robin by the end, which "RR" didn't have to deal with, (remember, that one only got Dick down into the cave, not into costume.) Here, Dick becoming Robin so fast almost works, and almost doesn't feel forced.
Nice use of BTAS cameos.
Team Penguin: Guilty or not, Tom Kenny's Penguin is a pleasure I never tire of indulging in. I know it's kind of in vogue to hate him and the Joker, but Damn, I find them both immensely pleasing. Here, the Penguin has hatched an idea that ain't that bad, all things considered, and does a nice job of bringing back in B and C rate villains. This version of Killer Moth is really really funny too, and gives the Titans version a run for his money. (Particularly the twist him Moth become a true monster, but still maintaining loyalty to Penguin who has abused and belittled him so!) On the other side of things, Batman's team gells as Robin and Batgirl meet, (so glad they didn't drop Batgirl as though she never existed, a la Yin) and rankle each other nicely. In fact, things settle into a very comfortable groove, that eerily reminds me of the TNBA days. (So much so that I often think of Robin as Tim, not Dick, then have to mentally correct myself. "No, this IS Dick.")And maybe it's odd to say so, but I'm glad Batgirl is a younger teenager this time out, so she's NOT defined as a love interest to either Bruce or Dick. As such, the Dick/Babs interaction is refreshingly innocent and spunky.
Nice action too. Especially love Robin's fight with Ragdoll as viewed from exterior.
Clayfaces: Ethan Bennet's Saga comes to an end, as his reputation is restored in a fight with a much more vicious Clayface. Now, personally, I always liked Meltdown and felt it DID make an interesting case for why Bennet would lapse into outright villainry. A few others, though, didn't like that episode and felt the change was unnatural. Seems like the guy who wrote this agreed with the latter opinion, so he fixes it by making Bennet's switch back just as sudden and arbitrary. So then, Bennet's Saga, which should be an epic about the fall of a Just Man and his fight to redeem himself, comes of just somewhat hollow. Still, the episode is pretty good.
Basil Karlo as Clayface Mark II is grating, but I grant that was the point of his character as written. It's clever that his crimewave is a huge publicity stunt, but Hagen as the actor Clayface was just better. He was Clayface as if played by Heston, (or Heston's lower-rent TV counterpart, Shatner) The material can be paper thin, but so much .....ACTING!!!... goes into it it manages to play. Basil Karlo is just played by the schlubb working at Blockbuster.
The Everywhere Man: The Everywhere Man is just as interesting as his Gimmick (duplicating himself) would indicate. No more, No less. More satisfying is Batman's reaction to all this: Utter disdain to this villain and his means and motives. Batman treats him EM as if EM is just totally beneath him. (In some ways, it's worse than how BTAS Batman treated Ra's Al Ghul. At least Batman would crack jokes and laugh openly at Ra's over the top super villainry. Everywhere Man just isn't even worth THAT kind of effort to Batman apparently.)
The Breakout: Indulge me, please. Back in the Miasma between Batman and Robin and Batman Begins, when Warner Bros. knew they still wanted to make Batman movies but had no idea how to do it, everyone seemed to have an opinion on the matter. My personal suggestion was, Why do Superhero movies need to be structured the way they are? Basically, a Superhero engaging in a grudge match with a Supervillain that goes for an extended period of time and several encounters across a movie. Can't it be structured more focusedly? How about a Batman version of Die Hard, for example? Well, the Breakout is as close to a Batman Die Hard as I've seen crop up in as many years, and it's a refreshing and engaging change of Pace for it.
But let's not beat around the Bush: the stars here are Robin and Batgirl, who are charming as kid sidekicks in ways kid sidekicks usually aint. from there initial goofing off to them having to rally to beat back Black Mask's forces with no police and no Batman to help them. It's all very honest. From Robin sinking briefly into despair to Batgirl's tender treatment of the unconscious Commissioner, (without an explicit reminder to the audience that they are father and daughter, which I thought was a nice touch,) it's easy to get caught up in it all.
Strange New World: Damn Bat-embargo. This should have been a Scarecrow piece and we all know it. If it were, it would have been a more creative use of Scarecrow Toxin than anything in BTAS or TNBA. So, Hugo Strange has created a Toxin that turns all of Gotham into Zombies, and it's down to Batman to save the whole city. Or is there more to this than meets the eye? (ROBOTS IN DISGUISE! Sorry.)
Effective Use of the "Dream as trap." Not as good as "over the edge" or Futurama's "The Sting, but possibly on par with "Perchance to Dream" and defiantly better than the animated "For the Man who Has Everything." (Seriously, having the dream of FTMWHE be a paradise is seriously missing the point. Awakening from a dream or delusion is never nor should it ever be portrayed as a tragedy. And don't try to through "Perchance to Dream" at me. that dream world was only superficially a Bruce Wayne paradise. Fundamentally, it mocked his entire being. FTMWHE coddled Superman's.)
Artifacts: So, if this is the year 3000 or so, does that mean Fry, Leela, and Bender are flying around somewhere? and wouldn't Bruce Wayne's head be at the Head Museum? Well, anyway, this episode is mostly about the writers getting able to work out there "Future Batman" jones, hence cameos by Oracle, Nightwing, and a DKR-esque Batman. And Mr. Freeze is going the same way as his TNBA counterpart, it seems. So, if seeing all those things gives you Geekgasms, more power to you. But I ask: wouldn't a Carrie Kelly esque Robin have rounded things off nicely?
Seconds: For some reason, I suspect this episode may have originally been intended as a Clock King introduction, but then they decided against it. Anyway, it's a clever use of time travel and a gimmick that gets laughs. Particularly flattering to the couch potato viewer is the idea that any problem, including an assault from Batman, is just a series of smaller patterns to navigate. What I do and don't like about this episode: I DO like how he gets his Superpower. No accidental infusion, just a man left isolated, with nothing left to do but to explore his brain's own innate potential. I didn't like how the episode claimed such pathos at the end. To that point, it was just Batman in a fight against a clever foe, as Batman struggled to figure out a way to overcome him. Then, it just all went apocalyptic in a hurry. Sure, our criminal got a happy ending, but it's still not the ending I felt was most appropriate to the piece.
Riddler's Revenge: The Riddler finally gets a second solo outing in a tale that explores his origins. As has been said before, sometimes the problem with this character is that the writers over think his escapades. This one, finally, has gone in the opposite direction. We don't get a central Riddler crime to solve, but rather open on Riddler having planted bombs on his former boss's boat that can be diffused when his boss can solve a hilariously simple Riddle. But Riddler has his boss bound and gagged, taunting him "Speak up! I can't hear you!" And what follows is his origins, peppered with a minor mystery.
This episode, more than anything else, made me realize that by now Riddler does have a definitive over arching origin story that's true of him in mostly all versions. Basically, Riddler is a talented young genius who gets screwed over by corporate America. That's true in BTAS, Batman Forever, and now The Batman (In Batman Forever, the executive who screws over Nygma was none other than Bruce Wayne! I KNEW I still liked that movie for a reason!) But I must confess, this take on Riddler does try a couple of interesting twists on this rapidly forming archetypal tale. Mostly, was Edward Nygma's persecution mostly in his mind? An important point of his origin is his feud with his father. Obviously Nygma viewed him as an overgrown brute that humiliated and belittled him, and just "didn't understand." But we ask, was Nygma's father such a bad guy after all? All he seemed to do was insist his son get out for a little physical activity and interact with other children. Both of which are currently being strongly urged of parents in our internet-driven age. Oh sure, the man may have broken some of Edward's puzzles, which probably was going over the line somewhat. Still, if Edwards father had, say, confiscated instead of destroying those puzzles, that wouldn't have been bad. As such, it seems Edward Nygma spent his life rebelling against his father and his lessons. Which makes it very easy for me to see Nygma's chief failing as an adult: He's naive about people.
Nygma's boss would be in the habit of calling him Champ just as Nygma's father would. That, all by itself, was enough to make Nygma hate him. Nygma was paired on a project with another scientist, who happened to be a pretty and young woman, who spoke to Nygma cordially. That, all by itself, was enough to make Nygma think she was to be his great love. But again, Nygma fails to see below these surfaces. Nygma's boss may have been a blowhard, but we all have obnoxious bosses and Nygma's probably wasn't so bad, all things considered. As for the woman, Nygma had already made the mistake of viewing her as an accessory to himself, (his love) and stopped seeing her as an independent moral agent. Sure, she took advantage of him, and that's reprehensible, (Batman's decision to leave her tied up until the police came is understandable,) but she does seem to have one redeeming value: she knew people. She could see that Nygma was a naive, socially and emotionally stunted person whom she did NOT want to be working with for years to come. Next to Nygma, who would never have been able to grasp such subtlety, she comes off not so bad.
On another note, it's interesting that Batman solves the mystery of who sabotaged Nygma by pointing out that Nygma's boss would not have been smart enough to sabotage the brain discs to make it look like equipment failure. Only someone who actually worked on the project could do that. It's an interesting point, because, in really for real life, that would be a great big "Well DUH!" But, in comic book would, not necessarily. In comic books, many characters that figure prominently are very smart, even some who you wouldn't think would be. I mean, this is a universe rife with Business men who are also talented scientists who could pull something like that off. To me, it's a smart narrative move that subtlety disobeys the rules. (For another example of intelligence blown out of proportion, I submit Return of the Joker. Yes, great movie, but c'mon, I found it's central conceit laughably both then and now. I can believe the Joker as a brilliant chemist, but Joker actually managed to figure out a way of implanting Brainwaves and DNA into a microchip that re sequences the physiology of it's victim into the Joker? I mean, wouldn't cloning himself have been vastly easier by comparison? Seems Dwayne McDuffie felt the same way I did and had the little retcon in Epilogue about Joker stealing Cadmus nanites to pull it off. See, I don't critiscize McDuffie all the time.)
One final note about this episode: Title may be a reference to the Rubicks Revenge, a 4x4x4 version of the Rubicks cube introduced when the public started to figure out how to solve the 3x3x3 version.
Two of a Kind: Harley Quinn gets introduced to the world of The Batman as Paul Dini is tasked to reconfigure her origins to something more befitting The Batman. Batgirl gets a nice Freudian Dick Joke at Penguin's expense. But anyway, this version of the tale reminds me how demeaning Paul can be to Harley. To Paul, even Harley's real accomplishments, such as her degree in psychology, must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. The original comic version of "Mad Love" plainly stated that Harley only got through College by screwing her professors. I was glad to see that angle dropped in the animated version. (And overall, I would say that the animated Mad love was a subtle improvement over the comics tale.) But here, those old implications come back even more pathetically. Harley has her degree through some lame 12 week online course. Now Paul's saying she wasn't even good enough to go to real College! Consider all this in contrast to the Joker, who is evil but still has the dignity by being a truly talented chemist. Not so with Harley. To Dini, Harley is nothing but a fluzy.
Still, to call attention this episodes strengths, this is truly a Harley spotlight of a kind I just don't remember seeing in BTAS. Too true, BTAS did have many Harley spotlights, (Harley and Ivy, Harlyquinnade and Harley's Holiday all very memorable.) But when Harley got a spotlight in BTAS, it was usually only in episodes she got to spend a significant amount of time away from Joker. (The above 3 examples.) When Joker and Harley would reteam, she would get back in line as his subservient. Here, she's paired with Joker the whole time and holds her own. the final scheme is hers and focused around her. Even Joker starts getting worried that she's stealing the spotlight. So in that sense, I do have to say attitudes about the character may have improved.
Her new design is undeniably cute. Harley was cuter in a handful of TNBA episodes, (Particularly beware the creeper,) but that's rarified company.
Rumors: Yep. Every so often the itch comes up to write a story about a fellow who's "more Batman than Batman" someone not just willing to beat the baddies and turn them over to the police, but someone out to off the baddies once and for all. The obvious moral dilemma is whether or not letting someone kill the killers is a bad idea, but hardly any entries in this sort of story explore that as much as it could be. from BTAS, we have Mask the Phantasm, and Lock up. TNBA contributes Judgment Day and to a lesser extent, Mystery of the Batwoman. Batman Beyond has "Payback" to it's name, and finally the Batman has Rumors. And to be honest, since no episode proposes a solution to the central moral dilemma, only the episodes where there's a clever twist as to the new vigalante's secret identity stand out. That's why Rumors gets filed away with the likes of Judgment day. Mostly Meh. But to it's credit, it does ring out some interesting moments having all the villains together reacting to this situation, and a very memorable fight with all the villains.
Joining, parts 1 and 2: Umm, okay, I guess. I mean, there are memorable bits to be sure, but the whole alien invasion story comes together quickly and perfunctorily, the aliens themselves don't seem so unique, and the whole thing seems mostly like an exercise in how many one-liners they can squeeze into this thing. (I mean, lately people seem impressed by one liners again, but I remember when they were considered cheap and lame.) I mean, sure, the watchtower being a floating version of the Hall of Justice from Superfriends does tickle my geek bone, but I had to train myself long ago to not reward or be impressed by such gratuitous references. Some shows just slide by on them.
And there you go. On par with season 2. Part of me still likes season 3 more.
Hopefully, coming soon-ish a review of Bender's Big Score with a large geeky discussion on time travel.
