“I do hope you’ll be seeing Ms. Selina again now that she’s
free to prowl again.”Released on probation after saving the city, Selina Kyle (Adrienne Barbeau) vows to hang up her Catwoman suit, only to discover that her beloved cat Isis has been cat-napped by Roland Daggett. When Catwoman is bitten by Isis, who’s been infected with a virulent toxin, Batman races against the clock to save her life.
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this one, but in my head I was thinking this was the episode where Catwoman is turned into a were-cat. The bad news is that it isn’t, which means that episode (“Tyger, Tyger”) is still to come; the worse news is that “Cat Scratch Fever” isn’t much better. It is, in fact, largely rubbish, which means Catwoman is oh-for-two (hilariously, her best appearance so far is the one in which she was only a hallucination, in “Perchance to Dream”). The plot wanders and missteps, the characterization approaches development but never lands, and the animation is so bad that the animators (Akom Studios) were literally fired after this.
I said in Catwoman’s debut episode, “The Cat and the Claw,” that her characterization as a conservationist is peculiar and overly moralizing, and evidently the writers wanted to extend that trait to animal testing. We learn that Roland Daggett, ostensibly the upstart challenger to Rupert Thorne’s place as Gotham’s resident crime lord, has been rounding up stray animals to infect them with a plague, for which he plans to sell the cure to the city. The scenes in his facility’s basement, lined with cages of scared and injured animals, obviously invokes the idea of testing products on animals, but it’s a leaden comparison because Daggett is literally plotting to murder most of the city to turn a buck. Moreover, the episode enlists Professor Achilles Milo, which is a colossal waste of a solid second/third-tier Bat-villain.
Ultimately, I just don’t buy any of this episode. I can’t believe Daggett is in a position to market a major pharmaceutical after his public embarrassment in “Feat of Clay,” and I don’t believe that he’s mustache-twirlingly evil enough to introduce a viral pathogen into the city. Moreover, the episode suffers from a bifurcated identity; in the first half of the episode, which isn’t entirely bad, Catwoman takes center stage, but after she’s infected the writers seem to remember that this is a show about Batman, who promptly takes over the action while Catwoman rests in a sickbed. One of their only scenes together is surprisingly electric – in perhaps the best dialogue of the episode, delirious with fever, Catwoman smiles up at Batman as he remarks, “You’re hot!” and replies, “Now you notice.” This playful relationship, hyper-aware of the divide between them posed by the law, could have been the stuff of BtAS legend, but the Batman/Catwoman dynamic almost never gets off the ground on this show because, frankly, most of Catwoman’s episodes are clunkers.
To top it all off, the animation in “Cat Scratch Fever” is lousy. It’s jerky, flat, and uninspired; the dialogue doesn’t sync up with the video, and it features what might be the strangest-looking cat I’ve ever seen. (But on the plus side, it’s Frank Welker voicing the cat, in one of his patented “Wait, that wasn’t an actual animal?” roles.) The rest of the characters look astonishingly generic, particularly Milo’s two henchmen, and it’s no wonder that Akom were dismissed after “Cat Scratch Fever.” It’s not a good episode anyway, but it could have at least looked good.
Boy, after the winning streak we had, it’s almost karmic that we’ve got two in a row for the thumbs-down column.
Writers: Sean Catherine Derek & Buzz Dixon
Director: Boyd Kirkland
Villains: Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau), Dr. Milo (Treat Williams), and Roland Daggett (Ed Asner)
Next episode: “The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne,” in which Batman’s secret identity can be purchased on VHS.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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