Batman: The Animated Series - "Harley's Holiday"

“I tried to play by the rules, but no! They wouldn’t let me go straight. Society is to blame. Back off, rich boy – I’m armed!”

In a staggering development, Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin) is released from Arkham Asylum, declared competent and crime-free. What’s a girl to do with her newfound freedom? Go shopping, naturally, with her pet hyenas in tow. A little snafu with a security tag, however, turns a simple shopping trip into a night of larceny, kidnapping, and explosions as Harley digs herself deeper and deeper, pursued by what seems to be a relentless Batman.

In the final hours of the show, it’s only appropriate that Paul Dini gets the last word on Harley Quinn (though it won’t be his last word, since he writes or co-writes all but the last episode from here on out). Harley, his finest creation, has been without fail the shining light of this show, an impeccable manic pixie partner for The Joker, matching his madness and mood swings with her own daffy brand of demi-sanity. Brought to fine life by the practically irreplaceable Arleen Sorkin, Harley might be the only character on this show not to appear in a bad episode. And her swan song, “Harley’s Holiday,” is a note-perfect capstone on her wacky run; I’ve spoken about this as the ostensible third part in a trilogy comprised of “Harley and Ivy” and “Harlequinade,” and the good news is that this isn’t a trilogy of diminishing returns.

One is immediately struck by the madcap logic that governs this episode, a crystalline reflection of Harley’s own demented way of looking at the world. Right around the moment when the tank rumbles down a Gotham bridge, driven by a spittle-flecked army general, I stopped and said, “Wait, all this over a security tag?!” And yet, as Emily Dickinson once noted, “much madness is divinest sense / to a discerning eye,” and Dini’s eye is nothing if not discerning. The escalating consequences stemming from a basic misunderstanding and the sheer amount of stuff packed into this episode might seem out of place and out of hand, but so too should a psychiatrist falling in love with her homicidal patient; this whirlwind is how a Harley Quinn story should work. As a result, the episode’s intended pathos works extremely well. We feel immensely sorry that Harley has found herself in the middle of this great big mess, and we want to see her resolve what should be a fairly straightforward mix-up. Even if we don’t buy into the idea that any governing body would declare her sane (although if any institution would, it’s Arkham, where – recall – the doors are literally not locked), we accept her earnest desire to reform. Her heart’s in the right place, even if the marbles aren’t all in the bag.

I can’t oversell what a delight Sorkin is. Her unique voice aside, a veritable godsend for an all-audio cast, Sorkin has always walked the line between effortless comedy and repressed tragedy, a four-color Judy Holliday with a nasty temper. Like Anthony Hopkins, in the space of a breath, Sorkin can slip between great rage and pleading despair, between a romantic swoon and a proud one-liner. She’s helped, of course, by Dini’s clever-as-ever dialogue (“Talk about grasping at straws! Oh well, at least I’m going out on a joke”), but it takes a special kind of performer to sell the sorrow behind “jiggety-jig.” Clearly Sorkin was a kind of muse to Dini, and neither is quite as good alone as when they’re together. (See also the Arkham Asylum videogame, which gave us “Nurse Harley.”)

And as ever, Dini finds ways to make his Gotham seem larger than life, paying tribute to the subtle continuity being drawn into this series. The episode begins with Scarecrow’s latest arrest, while Veronica Vreeland, late of “Birds of a Feather,” makes her least contemptible appearance here as a victim of circumstance and a bewildered straight man caught in Harley’s vortex. Boxy Bennett, meanwhile, returns from “Harlequinade” and remains the quintessential midlevel Gotham gangster, snarling his way through dropped vowels and elided consonants. We even get a good dose of Harvey Bullock thrown in for good measure (“You ain’t got nothing on me!” “I’m sure I can find something. Move it!”).

Like the past few episodes, “Harley’s Holiday” is one more story about a rogue’s inability to reform, and consistent with the others Harley proves to be her own worst enemy, her temper and rash judgments coloring the world as perpetually against her. Like her puddin’ himself in “Joker’s Wild,” Harley proves unable to recognize Batman out of costume, but where Joker had no interest in Bruce Wayne, Harley is consequently unable to recognize her greatest supporter. Joker wants only to joust with the Batman, but Bruce Wayne genuinely wants to help Harley, wants her to find peace. “I had a bad day too, once,” he tells her, with that heartbreak that only Kevin Conroy can leaven into the subtext. But because it’s one of Dini’s clown episodes, he makes sure to leave us with a laugh, a reminder that Harley isn’t all bad, even if she is a little nutty.

Original Air Date: October 15, 1994

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Kevin Altieri

Villain: Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)

Next episode: “Lock-Up,” in which Arkham finally hires a new chief of security.

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

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

It’s always a strange place to be, writing a review after learning that the movie hasn’t resonated with audiences in a big way. Solo: A Star Wars Story proves that you can in fact recast an iconic figure like Harrison Ford with a high degree of success, but it would seem also to prove that audiences aren’t terribly interested in that. I do wonder in what universe an $80-some million opener isn’t a smash (sounds like a lot of dough to me!), but I do feel a twinge of sorrow at the notion that the narrative of Solo might end up being not one of a scrappy against-all-odds winner but one of a misfired also-ran.

Alden Ehrenreich stars as Han Solo, desperate to escape the harsh streets of Corellia with his partner (in every sense of the word) Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). This being a prequel to Star Wars, you know at some point he’s bound to encounter the mammoth Wookiee Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) and the roguish gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), though getting there is half the fun – the other half being Han’s introduction to smuggling, courtesy of heist man Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and gangster Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).

Prequels can be tricky territory – heaven knows George Lucas learned that one the hard way – but Solo manages to navigate that terrain as deftly as its titular flyboy might, finding an appealing balance between fan service and genuine surprise. In the case of the former, there is a certain thrill to be had when we sense that Chewbacca is just around the corner or that Han’s about to see the Millennium Falcon for the first time; on the other hand, Solo manages to hold a few tricks up its sleeve, narrative about-faces that feel about as surprising as Vader’s “I am your father” must have seemed in 1980. Despite Beckett’s insistence that “people are predictable,” there are at least two or three genuine shocks in Solo that ought to excite anyone with a modicum of investment in the storytelling of the Star Wars universe, which bodes well for a prequel that may as well spin-off its own spin-offs.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of all is that Solo actually hangs together as a film. We’ve all heard the troubled production history of the film, with director Ron Howard replacing original filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller at as close to the eleventh hour as humanly possible. And having just seen a case of how aft agley these things can gang with last year’s Justice League, where the seams on the reshoots were as transparent as Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, Solo feels like a singular film with a singular vision, a consistent way of looking at the seedy underbelly of Star Wars. Whether we get another Solo movie is almost less important to me than whether Ron Howard gets another shot at the sandbox, with all the Western pioneer grit that gives Star Wars that lived-in feeling. Put another way, it’s a short putt from here to Tatooine in a way that never feels as reiterative as Jakku did, instead feeling much more of a piece with the danger and the dust that made Luke Skywalker so wistful for anything but.

As far as the cast goes, I’ll wager that anything I say here, you’ve probably already heard elsewhere – for one, Ehrenreich acquits himself quite well once you get past the fact that he’s not Harrison Ford. He’snot, true, but neither was Roger Moore entirely Sean Connery as James Bond, though no one raised such a fuss on general principle. We’ve seen recasting before, and Ehrenreich does find the core of Han Solo – clever, hapless, and a sucker for a good cause – to the point where even the most stubborn among us should find him an acceptable substitute for the otherwise unavailable late-70s Ford. Clarke is a welcome new kind of protagonist in a galaxy populated by princesses and queens, while Glover does a masterful riff on Billy Dee Williams as the smoothest operator in the galaxy. Harrelson and Bettany, meanwhile, are just fantastic, with the latter especially giving a performance that just exudes casual menace with every gleeful bite of the scenery. 

If the original Star Wars was The Hidden Fortress by way of Alphaville, I think there’s a conversation to be had about which visual languages Solo reappropriates. I don’t want to say too much by way of spoilers, so I’ll just note that the film begins as a Star Wars-ian riff on the outdoor sections of Blade Runner (with what appears to be a Blade Runner take on a Star Wars crawl) before moving into a heist film courtesy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, detouring through the light tunnel sequences from 2001: A Space Odyssey (as scored not by Strauss but by the greatest hits of John Williams), before ultimately cycling back around to the interiors of Blade Runner. Spoiler-phobes can rest easy while the rest of us try to draw points of connection, which I raise not to accuse Howard of any sort of plagiarism – indeed, this may just be my own filmic apophenia – but to note with some curiosity how he may have taken a trick from George Lucas’s own playbook and made a Star Wars film out of a cinematic bricolage.

Ultimately, I think Solo will end up being something of a litmus test for Star Wars fans, telling us more about the moviegoer than the movie itself. For the xenophobes boycotting the film until producer Kathleen Kennedy is fired for the crime of daring to include just a whiff of diversity (both cultural and narrative in The Last Jedi), Solo is a staging ground for protest. For those of us living on planet earth, however, Solo is either a lackluster cash-grab or a fine diversion through a side street in Star Wars. It’s not a game-changer for the saga (though it may contain one, in the very last place you may be expecting it), but I’m of the opinion that these Anthology films – subtitled A Star Wars Story, as Rogue One was – need only be engaging standalones that just so happen to take place in that galaxy far, far away. While we wait for Episode IX to reveal the final fate (for now, at least) of the Skywalker bloodline, Solo is the kind of side-trip that reminds us why we fell in love with Star Wars in the first place.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.” Directed by Ron Howard. Written by Jonathan Kasdan and Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo, and Paul Bettany.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Second Chance"

“Good old Bruce. He’s never given up on me. Always been my best friend.”

An experimental procedure promises to restore Harvey Dent (Richard Moll) and rid him of his Two-Face persona for good. But as the former district attorney goes under anesthesia, he’s abducted by a gang of ne’er-do-wells, who threaten that their boss wants to “teach him some respect.” Bruce Wayne was funding the procedure, but it falls to Batman and Robin to catch the crooks – with Rupert Thorne and the Penguin as top suspects in the abduction.

On the occasion of Two-Face’s final appearance in Batman: The Animated Series (and with only five more episodes in the entire run), it’s an appropriate time to begin to think about the overall arcs of the show, and so these reviews may start to feel a bit final as the showrunners close up their bibles and move toward The New Batman Adventures. With last week’s episode, “Second Chance” is one of three episodes in a row that deals with a villain’s efforts to go straight, and BtAS remains in its final hours deeply pessimistic but equally empathetic about the impossibility of a rogue’s reform. If you haven’t seen the episode or figured it out yet, spoiler warning – the episode’s third act turns on the revelation that it was Two-Face himself who kidnapped Harvey Dent, a painful psychological break that was as much madness as it was self-defense.

In this way, “Second Chance” is a worthy sequel to the masterful two-parter “Two-Face” from the earliest days of the show, and this is something that BtAS has always done well; in the absence of long-running arcs, the writers often revisited standout episodes with remarkable follow-ups that built on the themes and characters. (See also “His Silicon Soul,” “I Am the Night,” and “Day of the Samurai,” to name a few.) In “Second Chance,” the writers pick up the tragedy of Harvey Dent and further explore this idea that Harvey’s worst demons have always been himself. From a clever use of flashbacks to the reappearance of Harvey’s psychiatrist, “Second Chance” picks up the baton from “Two-Face” in giving us a painful exploration of a man whose scars run so much deeper than the cosmetic fix his doctors pursue.

Usually on episodes like this one, with three distinct writers and a director, I’ll wonder why so many cooks got involved with the broth, but in this case the three writers work together pretty seamlessly. There must have been some division of labor between the Two-Face bits and the search for Harvey, but I think it’s evident that the Paul Dini bits are the ones that make this episode feel like one day in a vast tapestry of Gotham nights. Continuity with “Two-Face” aside, it’s quintessential Batman to discover that our Dark Knight has a readymade list of suspects even before the abduction. Moreover, the scene with Penguin (featuring Paul Williams at his Burgess Meredith best) introduces a lengthy backstory and rivalry between Penguin and Two-Face. In the hands of a less capable craftsman, that sort of brute-force exposition might feel hamfisted, but the writers here have a way of working those words into conversation, helped perhaps by the fact that Penguin’s syntax is more circuitous than the long way through a thesaurus.

The only sour note struck in this episode is at the very end, when the episode plays through its denouement and one last somber reminder of the sad state of Harvey’s psyche. It’s the kind of melancholy beat this show usually grasped in its best episodes. Here, though, the writers pivot toward a schmaltzy retread of the final shot in Casablanca, in which Dick and Bruce remind each other that, goshdarnit, life is grand because they’re such good pals to each other. I actually had to rewind the episode to make sure that’s where it ended because it’s a tonal catastrophe with the rest of the episode’s serious interrogation of split-personality. It’s also a reminder that the show was attempting to move into a more visibly kid-friendly mode (note the increased appearances of Robin as the show went on), which was never why it gained prominence in the first place. We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.

Original Air Date: September 17, 1994

Writers: Paul Dini, Michael Reaves, and Gerry Conway

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villains: Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), and Rupert Thorne (John Vernon)

Next episode: “Harley’s Holiday,” in which the going gets kooky, and so the kooky go shopping.

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

Deadpool 2 (2018)

From its opening salvo on Logan to postcredits potshots at movies I guarantee you’ve probably forgotten, Deadpool 2 wastes not a moment in reminding us that it’s the “bad boy” of the superhero genre, the riotous class clown not afraid to point out the absurdities and shortcomings that our favorite genre often exhibits. And yet Deadpool 2 manages to find a heart amid all its chaos – even if, as Deadpool’s love chides him, it looks like it’s in the wrong place.

Ryan Reynolds returns to the red spandex as Deadpool, hitman for hire, whose domestic bliss with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is interrupted by his own murder sprees and the appearance of a time-traveling badass named Cable (Josh Brolin). Between an ersatz internship as an X-Man (with Stefan Kapičić and Brianna Hildebrand returning as Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, respectively) and forming his own X-Force team, Deadpool starts to learn that “family” isn’t just an F-word.

My immediate reaction to Deadpool 2 is that I like it better than the first, though I contend part of that difference is the absolute glut of trailers for the first film compared to a relative (and to a large degree self-imposed) drought for the second. There are lots of surprises in Deadpool 2, from metatextual references to surprise appearances from the source material. Ray Donovan fans might even be surprised to see Eddie Marsan crop up as one of the film’s antagonists. The real surprise, though, is that Deadpool 2 doesn’t just retread and overplay the successes of the first Deadpool film. Instead, it finds a way to expand the Deadpool world by bringing in a few new characters and ideas without losing sight of that irreverent brand of self-reflexive humor. If the next film is, as we’ve been led to expect, an X-Force outing, fans will be thrilled to see more of newcomers Cable and Domino (Zazie Beetz), who fit into their characters comfortably and with great cinematic flair.

What’s particularly interesting about Deadpool 2 is its pervading air of the unexpected and the postmodern fun Deadpool has with that novelty. In a scene that feels like an extended metaphor, Deadpool careens around the X-Mansion, playing with familiar props and wrecking the scenery, as if to bring life to the notion that he’s the franchise wild child, and Reynolds is delightful as this unrestrained super-id. He’s clearly having a ball with the part, which translates to uproarious laughs from the audience. But one senses also that Reynolds is frankly stunned at how successful the first film was, a sentiment that carries over into moments like the one early on, in which a stunned Deadpool notes that he’s the star of a film that’s literally spoken about in the same sentence as Jesus Christ (Deadpool famously jousted with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ for R-rated box office records). It’s a great gag but also a bemused “how’d this happen” moment that no one could have predicted.

Speaking of unpredictable, I was astonished to see the sheer number of characters packed into the film, particularly the ones of whom I’ve never even heard. I’m pretty deep into this stuff, but there are quite a few figures from the X-Universe unfamiliar to anyone who’s not a diehard X-Fan of the 1980s and early ’90s. (For good measure, Deadpool tosses in a joke about the art style of the last generation’s X-comics.) The film cleverly manages not to overpack itself, recognizing which characters to develop and which to throw away on a well-timed gag. And boy, are those gags expertly deployed, introduced in an offhanded way that doesn’t foreshadow their reoccurrence but which do manage to get funnier each time they’re echoed. On top of the jokes that are developed over the course of this movie, there are a staggering number of jokes built on moments from the first film – par for the course for a densely referential character like Deadpool, yes, but a true testament to the way that the filmmakers trust the audience to keep up. One could imagine a lazier version of this film that telegraphs each callback by having Deadpool remark on it, but instead Deadpool 2 plops them in, assuming you’ll remember the gags but recontextualizing them well enough for those who don’t pore over these movies like sacred religious texts. (Which, y’know, I do.)

There’s really only one joke in the film that runs on too long, but it’s near the end (no spoilers) and the joke ends up becoming about how long the joke is going on. It’s a gag that wallops another superhero movie in the best National Lampoon tradition of parody, and it’s one of the only times in recent memory that I can recall being successfully pummeled into submission by a single punchline. I recognized immediately that it was also simultaneously a callback to one of the first jokes in the film, and so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see the film go there, but what did end up surprising me was the fact that the film manages to land a truly heartfelt emotional beat on the heels of a tired-til-it’s-funny gag-o-rama. In a film that’s never afraid to deploy lazy writing and then hang a lantern on it, in a film that never fails to pratfall over a punchline, it was a real thrill to see Deadpool 2 stick the emotional landing in a way that manages to humanize a character who’s all too easy to reduce to a manic pixie one-liner. Deadpool 2 is one of that rare breed of sequels that manages to surprise – and perhaps even outdo its predecessor – by keeping sight of the old yet accessing something new about a character with a striking number of narrative layers.

Deadpool 2 is rated for “strong violence and language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug material.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds. Based on the Marvel Comics by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, and Brianna Hildebrand.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Riddler's Reform"

“Now, now, I know what you’re thinking. But those silly riddle crimes are a thing of the past. Ancient history that’s gone now. I’m a new man. But you probably won’t figure that out until it’s too late.”

On their nightly patrol, Batman and Robin bust up what they think is the latest heist by The Riddler (John Glover), only to discover that Edward Nygma’s gone legitimate, licensing his image to a toy company. But has he? Batman’s unconvinced and believes Nygma is still dropping clues. Whether The Riddler has truly gone straight may prove to be the toughest riddle yet...

As fine an episode as Riddler’s debut remains, “Riddler’s Reform” always has a soft spot for me because it feels like a truer Riddler episode. Don’t mistake me – “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” is a bang-up episode and transparently one of the best in the whole run of Batman: The Animated Series. But its reliance on the computer game angle always felt, even in the 1990s, a little dated, like someone felt that The Riddler needed to be “hipped up” for a modern crowd. It’s a minor quibble, to be sure, but “Riddler’s Reform” doesn’t come with any of that baggage. It’s a straightforward story, with no technological frills on its riddles; here, The Riddler is just an intelligent guy trying to prove once more that he’s smarter than everyone else. 

The Riddler is at his level-best when he’s walking around with a haughty air of self-assured confidence that he’s the smartest man in the room; indeed, it’s probably his defining characteristic. This episode really gives John Glover a lot of material for his smirking arrogant Riddler, beginning with the poised opener in which Riddler knows he’s legally untouchable. I’ve praised the character animation on The Riddler before, but there’s something just effortlessly polished about the Riddler in his dapper suit, perched on a shipping crate and waiting for Batman to discover his mistake. Glover continues to be one of the best-cast villains in the already overqualified pool of applicants from this series, with one of those voices I can’t help but hear in my head when I read the comics. 

It’s just a shame that the Riddler didn’t make more appearances on this show, because this episode reminds us what a great villain he makes for Batman. The rhythm of this episode is classic Riddler – a riddle inviting challenge, Batman’s efforts to solve the riddle, pursuit and combat, lather, rinse, repeat – but “Riddler’s Reform” takes the formula into new territory by sowing doubt in Batman’s mind. Is Riddler really leaving clues, or is Batman just paranoid in his skepticism that Nygma might be going straight? (I almost wish the writers hadn’t resolved this subplot so quickly; a dark knight in doubt is a very intriguing premise, but then again they do only have twenty minutes.) Riddler’s frustration at being outwitted, then, is matched by Batman’s frustration with his own sense of being outsmarted (perhaps by himself).

I have said that “Ra’s [al Ghul] is the Professor Moriarty to Batman’s Sherlock Holmes,” and in the sense of a criminal mastermind with a vast network of ne’er-do-wells, I stand by that claim. But there is something admirable about the purely cerebral level on which Riddler challenges Batman that makes him a kind of Moriarty to Batman’s master detective. There’s no chance of a physical confrontation with The Riddler, nor should there be, because for him the game is all. Killing Batman only represents the final outfoxing, and in a moment of dark maddening irony the ending of this episode presents the perfect defeat of the Riddler (far better, at least, than the brain-mushing of “What Is Reality?”). If only we’d gotten more episodes as clever as this one; I’d trade a dozen “Terrible Trio”s for just one more Riddler episode.

Original Air Date: September 24, 1994

Writers: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, and Randy Rogel

Director: Dan Riba 

Villain: The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “Second Chance,” in which Two-Face gets a shot at singularity.

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

Monday at the Movies - May 14, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a trilogy concludes.

The Trip to Spain (2017)– After trips through Northern England and Italy, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are at it again in Michael Winterbottom’s third in the Trip trilogy, ostensibly reviewing restaurants but actually drinking in local culture and antagonizing each other in games of impressions and good-natured joshing. Three films in, The Trip to Spain shows some signs of wear, like a sauce that’s been on the pot a bit too long and is simmering a little thin. Where The Trip to Italy had a good laugh at the idea of just redoing the first film on the Italian peninsula, Spain feels more compulsory, intruded upon as it is by more constructed narratives (a subplot about Steve’s son) and a real head-scratcher of a conclusion that veers into weird satirical endlessness. The trip, though, has always been more the point of these movies than their destinations, and Spain does introduce a number of great bits, including a pit-stop amid a poor man’s Jurassic Park and an exceptionally apt James Bond reference apropos of Brydon’s preposterous choice of hat. The real stars of the film end up being, to the surprise of few, the impressions, chief among them Marlon Brando as the Spanish Inquisition by way of Python, a clapping Mick Jagger (who attempts his own Michael Caine impression), and Roger Moore, who on various occasions serves shellfish and narrates the history of the Spanish Moors as though they were his own family. A sort of “oh, this again” appearance by Yolanda the photographer does visualize the genius metaphor of Coogan as Don Quixote, with Brydon as his Sancho Panza, a gag that could have carried the film like Italy’s reference to The Godfather, Part II, but Spain doesn’t go there. Instead, it ends up somewhat less than the sum of its parts. I don’t anticipate (but would welcome) a fourth film to extend some of the matter of this film, but I do think that Coogan and Brydon are some of the most consistently funny comedians on film, even if this Trip seems less hysterical than the preceding two.

Sidebar: is this film the only time that the word “apotheosis” has been used as an insult? (Steve jeers that Rob’s “small man in a box” represents “the apotheosis of your career.”) A remarkable achievement in and of itself.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

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.🦇

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Lion and the Unicorn"

“And people wonder why no one takes Britain seriously anymore.”

Stalwart butler Alfred (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) receives a call from his “cousin” Freddie (Roy Dotrice), who’s found himself in a spot of bother across the pond. In his manservant’s absence, Batman realizes that Freddie is actually Frederick, an old British Secret Service chum from Alfred’s days with the spy agency. By the time Batman and Robin reach London (“There is only one,” Alfred cautions them drolly), they learn that the two retired secret agents have been kidnapped by familiar foe Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew), who hopes to use them to gain access to Britain’s nuclear arsenal.

Things were going so well. Having just come off a marginally better “Baby-Doll” than I remembered, I was willing to set aside my boredom with Red Claw and give her another chance. Yet she and Baby-Doll, unlikely virtually every other character created for Batman: The Animated Series, never migrated over to the comics because, simply put, they’re dull. The last time we saw Red Claw (and the first, for that matter), she was menacing Catwoman in a real headscratcher of a two-parter, where her motive was as muddy as the unnecessarily long two-parter she headlined. Here, she’s still the same nebulously defined terrorist with goals that seem horribly generic (extort money from London). I’ve said before that Batman works in just about every story imaginable; such continues to be the case here, but Red Claw doesn’t seem a likely match for Batman on any count. (Wonder Woman, though, maybe…)

This episode is all the more bizarre when we consider that it’s ostensibly the series finale (though not the last in production value), the last episode aired by Fox before the show rebranded as The New Batman Adventures, with an updated art style and paired with Superman as The New Batman/Superman Adventures. As such, all we can ask is, why? Why end the show with an episode that’s barely about Batman? Why end the show outside of Gotham City, with one of the only episodes not set there? Why for the love of all that’s holy do you end the show with Red Claw? (To this last point, there may actually be a good answer – the first episode to air was, you guessed it, “The Cat and the Claw.” Fearful symmetry, indeed.) Perhaps most importantly, how did this episode require the strengths of three writers?

“The Lion and the Unicorn” should have been a slam-dunk in the sense that it’s an episode focused entirely on Alfred, one of the richest and underused characters in the Bat-mythos. It’s incredibly easy to take Alfred for granted – the unfaltering support system, ever at the ready to aid his Master Bruce in his undying quest for justice. He’s the voice of reason, the conscience, the emotional weight of the whole story. He’s the father Bruce Wayne never had, or rather tends to forget he always already had. And he’s an unmitigated badass, equally at home on the stage, in a surgical room, or behind enemy lines. Instead of distilling all the best parts about Alfred into twenty minutes, though, “The Lion and the Unicorn” relegates him to the role of hostage, who crumbles under torture despite convincing his captors (somewhat cleverly, I grant you) that he hasn’t. He breaks a vase over a goon’s head, yes, and gets a great one-liner in the process (“A Louis Quinze: what a pity”), but that should have been the whole episode. 

And for being an episode set in London, the writers don’t take anywhere near full advantage of the new setting. We have a pair of goons who sound like their dialogue coach was Dick Van Dyke as Bert the chimney sweep, and we have a room full of British spymasters devoid of any personality at all. Red Claw isn’t a good fit for London (is she supposed to be Russian? – to wit, “Red”), but Batman’s been to London before. The 1966 television show introduced loose analogue Londinium, which could have appeared here with its rogues Marmaduke Ffogg and Penelope Peasoup (okay, maybe not). The comics even have a British Batman & Robin (from 1950, dubbed Knight & Squire, because of course they are), who could have made Alfred feel right at home and who might have lent a superheroic air to this whole thing.

Instead, we get an episode that is very basic, very conventional, and very safe. It’s not unwatchable, but there’s nothing in it to invite a second look. Contrary to “Baby-Doll,” which had a few surprises in it that I had forgotten, “The Lion and the Unicorn” was exactly the episode I remembered, and I didn’t like it then, either.

Original Air Date: September 15, 1995

Writers: Diane Duane, Peter Morwood, and Steve Perry

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: Red Claw (Kate Mulgrew)

Next episode: “Showdown,” in which a certain scarred cowboy tangoes with an immortal terrorist.

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