Batman: The Animated Series - "The Cat and the Claw"

“Red Claw... a woman?”
“Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all - I’m an equal opportunity crime-fighter!”

After Batman traces a rash of cat burglaries to Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau), he learns that the notorious terrorist Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew) has moved operations to Gotham City. But while the city is menaced by a gruesome plague, Bruce Wayne finds himself falling in love with Selina Kyle, who’s purchased him in a charity auction.

I have never liked these episodes as much as I want to like them, because I can’t help feeling that the debut of Catwoman deserves much bigger fanfare and much tighter plotting; though these were the first episodes of Batman: The Animated Series aired (15th and 16th in production order), watching them just after “Heart of Ice” does no favors to “The Cat and the Claw.” For one, neither of the villains is particularly well-developed. In the case of Catwoman, that’s slightly forgivable because her only motivation is to liberate shiny objects from their owners, but the show’s curious decision to instill in her a heavy-handed conservationist mentality always comes off as preachy and not a proclivity rooted in her feline alter ego. Put another way, it ends up distracting from what really works about the character – her playful yet sexualized cat-and-mouse game with Batman. (It’s no coincidence that her best appearances, “Almost Got ’Im” and “Batgirl Returns” are the ones where this never comes up.)

On the other hand, while Batman: The Animated Series did create its share of significant Batman characters – most of them, now that I’m thinking of it, women – Red Claw is ultimately a disappointment. This has much to do with the ambiguity (read: poor writing) surrounding her ultimate plot. She wants to build/bankroll a resort to acquire the arms underneath it, to steal a plague and never use it, to blackmail the city to do... terrorism? Or does she actually want to exterminate the big cats along the way? Of course, the word “terrorism” has a different valence now than it did in 1992, but it seems that Red Claw is a thinly-drawn villain with a shoehorned link to Catwoman solely by virtue of their animalistic nomenclature. (Though puzzlingly, when she returns in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Catwoman is nowhere to be seen.) This is all, of course, to ignore the fact that this episode repeats the gag where Batman (and Commissioner Gordon, too) is surprised to learn that his adversary is a woman, a retrograde attitude that shouldn't surprise someone who has already gone up against Poison Ivy.

As is often the case with so-deemed “bad” episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, there are so many good things in “The Cat and the Claw” that don’t add up. I’ve mentioned the playful banter between Batman and Catwoman, which Conroy and Barbeau play like a 1940s screwball comedy. The circumstances of their meeting at a charity auction, and their first date involving a car chase across Gotham, are spot-on plays with the dichotomy between Bruce and Selina and their masked alter egos. And there’s something undeniably cool about the image of Batman driving a gasoline truck while chucking a grenade out the window, to say nothing of the episode’s homage to The Maltese Falcon at the end.

Indeed, if this episode had been more Maltese Falcon than Die Hard, it’d be an A-plus winner of a show. As it is, “The Cat and the Claw” is neither a great episode nor as bad as “The Forgotten.” It’s a middle-of-the-road “I’d rather not” of an episode, padded out with good ideas but perhaps too lean to justify a two-parter – especially when the last two-parter was as good as “Two-Face” was.

Original Air Date: September 5-12, 1992

Writer: Sean Catherine Derek, Laren Bright, Jules Dennis, & Richard Mueller

Director: Kevin Altieri & Dick Sebast

Villains: Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) and Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew)

Next episode: “See No Evil,” in which Batman fights a little girl’s invisible friend.

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