Batman: The Animated Series - "Showdown"

“Right nice sentiment, ma’am. But I never cotton much to luck. I like to make my own.”

When Ra’s al Ghul’s Society of Shadows abducts an elderly man from a nursing home, Batman and Robin are baffled before discovering that Ra’s (David Warner) has left them a recording. But the truth about the missing old man stretches back to 1883, a time when the Transcontinental Railroad was forging forward, with a bounty hunter named Jonah Hex (Bill McKinney) in hot pursuit of the fiendish Arkady Duvall (Malcolm McDowell) aboard a dirigible of death.

It’s very difficult to review “Showdown” as an episode of Batman: The Animated Series because, to state it plainly, “Showdown” is not an episode of Batman: The Animated Series. It is instead a weird hybrid one-off, only tenuously connected to the rest of the series and more of a piece with the anthology-esque Justice League Unlimited, which juxtaposed a grab-bag of characters from the DC Universe with unlikely counterparts. Summary notwithstanding, Batman and Robin are barely in this episode, which plays out much more like a backdoor pilot for Jonah Hex: The Animated Series.

One senses that this episode exists purely because the writers – three of whom you don’t even need to look up to recognize (the fourth, Joe R. Lansdale, penned “Perchance to Dream”) – clearly wanted to do a Jonah Hex episode set in the Old West. While Hex has endeared himself to me a little by his appearances on Legends of Tomorrow (another series governed by bonkers mash-up plotting), I’ve never wholly shared the enthusiasm on display for the character. But gee whiz, do the writers love Hex. His dialogue is populated with smirky one-liners, and his relentless pursuit of Duvall puts us in mind of an antebellum Batman. Indeed, Hex is practically Batman by proxy, with a dash of Indiana Jones for good measure, and in that sense, “Showdown” feels at least resonant with the attitude and style of BtAS. 

Strangely, “Showdown” puts one in mind of “The Forgotten,” one of the worst episodes of the entire series. You’d be forgiven if you too had forgotten “The Forgotten,” in which an amnesiac Bruce Wayne is forced into a slave labor camp, but “Showdown” seems almost to remember the episode and apologize for it, showing what could have been done with the Western setting, all Arizona sunsets and lush golden deserts. The scenes of Ra’s al Ghul’s airship recall Alfred’s ersatz efforts at flying the Batplane toward the camp, only the animation is better and the plotting receives more careful construction. And in Arkady Duvall, we have a much more loathsome slave-driver than the bloated Boss Biggis, with as sadistic a bent as one can imply in a cartoon nominally for children’s afternoon programming; of course, it helps that McDowell is a masterful talent, and his voiceover work next to David Warner’s is like a masterclass in “Accents on Parade.”

My kneejerk reaction to “Showdown” is that it’s probably the worst episode of BtAS but only by dint of not really being an episode of BtAS. It does contribute some interesting ideas to the BtAS mythos – namely, Ra’s al Ghul’s regrets about his own past, which has come to bear on Gotham in striking ways – though the show never managed, in its final episodes, to circle back around to those concepts. With a tenuous link to the rest of the show, “Showdown” does feel like a last-ditch effort by the writers to crowbar in their favorite character. And while I can’t quite see Jonah Hex the way they do, I can recognize their passion and admire the craft that goes into this strange, unique little one-off.

Original Air Date: September 12, 1995

Writers: Kevin Altieri, Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and Joe R. Lansdale

Director: Kevin Altieri

Villains: Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner) and Arkady Duvall (Malcolm McDowell)

Next episode: “Riddler’s Reform,” in which The Riddler is puzzled.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇