“Heracles bested 12 labors before I received him. And so it
shall be with you, bat demon.”After a police informant is apparently struck by lightning on a cloudless night, Batman follows the trail of a stolen energy weapon to the man responsible for shipping the device. However, Maxie Zeus (Steve Susskind) has been suffering delusions of godhood, believing himself to be the Greek deity that is his namesake. Mistaking Batman for his brother Hades, Maxie runs Batman through a gauntlet while plotting to rule Gotham from his Olympian tower.
Maxie Zeus is a bit of a pickle. As a villain, he opens up a lot of interesting territory for Batman, dropping him into Greek mythology in the way that Wonder Woman might be more comfortable. He brings that set of arresting iconography with him, and there’s probably a very good episode to be written in which he teams up with The Riddler in a heist involving the riddle of the Sphinx. However, this episode never fully wrestles with the very clear fact that Maxie Zeus is demonstrably mentally ill, and so a good deal of this episode involves Batman patiently accommodating this deluded goofball and couching his vigilante efforts under the umbrella of “helping” Maxie Zeus.
Look, as fantastic as Batman’s rogues gallery is – it’s arguably the best in comics (Spider-Man and Flash are distant runners-up) – it’s always gotten a little flak, and rightly so, for its unilateral equivalence between mental illness and pure evil. That is, The Joker is evil because he’s crazy; Two-Face becomes evil once he can’t manage his personality disorder; and Harley Quinn is only bad because she’s crazy enough to love The Joker. I’m certain that there’s a very interesting and much less thorny version of Maxie Zeus who’s not mentally ill, who knows he’s not a demigod but relishes the metaphor and the trappings of Olympus. That way, we’d have a Batman who’s not afraid to act, who doesn’t have to dance around his foe for twenty minutes until the baddie’s own hubris gets the better of him. Batman is gentler with Maxie than with his other foes, it’s true, but I never got the sense from this episode that Batman’s desire to “help” Maxie Zeus was anything more than a strategy to acquire the help of his assistant Clio (because of course she’s named after the muse of history).
Having said that, though, in the setpieces designed to keep Batman and Maxie Zeus apart, the writers Reeves-Stevens do come up with some very clever bits. The aforementioned gauntlet, Maxie Zeus’s riff on Greek myths of the hydra and the Erymanthian boar, work very well for Batman. It almost recalls the Maze of the Minotaur from “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” (probably why my mind went to a Riddler/Maxie Zeus team-up), in that it’s as much a test of Batman’s brains as his physical body. There’s a genuine sense of peril there, especially when Maxie implies there are eleven more terrible beasties behind each door. And of course, there’s a delightful frisson in the moments when the episode allows us to see the world as our villain sees it, as when he likens Batman to Hades, lord of the underworld. (I’ve always been a fan, incidentally, of the reading that the Justice League re-present the Greek pantheon: sun god Apollo reborn as Superman, underworldly Batman/Hades, Wonder Woman as the warrior Artemis, the mercurial Flash/Hermes, etc.) The episode smartly flips the script when Maxie arrives at Arkham and finds that even the incarcerated are familiar to him; we’ll forgive the way he confuses Greek and Roman mythology when he likens Two-Face to the Roman god Janus, because the rest of the sequence is such fun.
As I’ve said all along, even a B-list episode of Batman: The Animated Series is better than anything out there – case in point, I’ll even go so far as to put "The Underdwellers" against anything Teen Titans Go! has offered. This is Maxie Zeus’s one and only appearance in the DC Animated Universe (he’s made only infrequent appearances in the comics themselves), and while I couldn’t help but feel the episode could have been stronger, that’s not to say it’s a particularly poor showing. As a child, I found this episode cemented Maxie Zeus for me as a major adversary of Batman’s, and while I’ve discovered in my adulthood that that’s not quite accurate, I do confess there are a few things in “Fire From Olympus” that align with everything I love about Batman – his improbable action, his lofty tethers to mythology, and his existence in a universe populated with the most madcap of madmen.
Writers: Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Director: Dan Riba
Villain: Maxie Zeus (Steve Susskind)
Next episode: “Read My Lips,” in which a glock of wood gets his gig greak.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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