“It’s about time.”Harboring a seven-year grudge, Temple Fugate (Alan Rachins) assumes the moniker of The Clock King, hellbent on disrupting Gotham City as an elaborate revenge scheme against Mayor Hamilton Hill (Lloyd Bochner) amid his reelection campaign. Batman finds himself short on time as the clock runs out for Mayor Hill, and it’s high time to stop these time-related puns from running one second longer.
I’ve always thought that The Clock King is largely underrated – both as an episode, a Batman antagonist, and a villain for the DC Universe at large. He appears in only three episodes of the DC Animated Universe – including a particularly inspired turn as the master strategist for Task Force X (alias the Suicide Squad) – and he’s been a sporadic presence in the Arrow-verse of television shows; you might even remember him from back when I reviewed “Mayhem of the Music Meister!” in his appearance as a man with an actual clock for a face.
The thing I love about The Clock King is tied to one of the core tenets of my conception of Batman. In The Dark Knight, The Joker is portrayed as an agent of chaos, whose villainy metaphorically and literally represents the introduction of anarchy into Batman’s ordered world. Batman represents the struggle against madness, forcing the world to make sense by taking a stand against the irrational. He’s a detective; every crime can be solved, every mad act restrained. Yet The Clock King’s villainy stems from his ability to create a system of pure order while at the same time finding that one domino which can completely disrupt the rational order of Gotham; he can, at once, derail a subway train by altering its schedule by seconds, but he can also calculate the precise amount of time needed to entomb Batman in a bank vault.
The Clock King is presented, then, as a particularly clever Bat-villain, on an intellectual par with The Riddler (whom we haven’t yet met, though both debut episodes are written by David Wise) but with a more personal motivation than Riddler’s more compulsive behavior. As is generally the case with Batman: The Animated Series, the visual design of The Clock King is elegant and expressive – though, unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the animation in this episode, which comes off uneven and jerky. Matched with an arrogant nasal clip of a voice, a perfectly irritated how-dare-you quality that can’t believe Batman would interfere with his perfect plans, The Clock King’s costume is a restrained brown suit with only the clock hands on his glasses indicating his particular modus operandi. That little flair is one more reminder at how objectively successful the BtAS crew was at distilling a character’s entire essence into a singular image.
The plotting is really bang-on, too. David Wise turns in a script that manages to be impressively clever, groaningly pun-laden, and genuinely scary, as in the surprisingly alarming subway crash sequence. Like The Clock King, Wise only contributed three episodes to Batman: The Animated Series – this one, Riddler’s debut, and Hugo Strange’s only appearance – and if you don’t see him on my Top 10 list, he’s a solid contender for the “Next 10” (also known as “Top 10 Episodes NOT Written by Paul Dini”). Not a one of Wise’s three episodes is anything less than strong, solid Batman fare.
Aside from the curious decision to have Batman appear exclusively in daylight for this episode, “The Clock King” is a well-oiled machine, a tasteful timepiece of a thing that holds up for this reviewer, who always remembered it fondly, even if the rest of the Bat-fan community seems to have moved on. It earns extra brownie points by including a pointed number of streets named after famous Batman comic book creators (Breyfogle, Toth, Broome, and a nod to Jack Kirby among them).
Writer: David Wise
Director: Kevin Altieri
Villain: The Clock King (Alan Rachins)
Next episode: “Appointment in Crime Alley,” in which Batman anticipates the lesson of Batman v Superman.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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