“I know he lives for the chase, and I was the best he ever had.”A new thief in Gotham makes her mark after a daring zeppelin robbery and an airborne getaway. Batman recognizes Roxy Rocket (Charity James) as adrenaline junkie stuntwoman Roxanne Sutton. Recognizing that Roxy will need a fence for her ill-gotten gains – but not knowing she’s in cahoots with The Penguin (Paul Williams), Batman and Batgirl take to the streets, while Roxy hits the skies.
Roxy Rocket is a curious addition to the Bat-mythos because of her winding entry into the material. She began life in a Paul Dini/Bruce Timm issue of the tie-in comic The Batman Adventures (a series I can’t recommend enough) before wending her way onto The New Batman Adventures four years later. And though neither Dini nor Timm has a direct credited hand in this episode, “The Ultimate Thrill” has Timm written all over it. The image of Roxy enthusiastically straddling a transparently phallic rocket is a particularly Timm brand of cheesecake, leavened with a dose of Dave Stevens’s postwar pin-up style. Indeed, as Batman episodes go, this one is comparatively oversexed, right down to Roxy’s downright orgasmic reaction to the possibility of sudden death in a game of chicken with Batman.
With the above proviso, then, as the first “new” villain created “for” The New Batman Adventures, Roxy Rocket is a pretty fun addition to the catalog, and it’s a shame the comics haven’t drawn on her more. As something of a cinema buff myself, it’s no surprise that I found Roxy’s showbiz background highly engaging, and I immediately wondered what might happen if she had worked on one of Matt Hagen’s movies before the accident that made him Clayface. Moreover, the idea that she’s motivated by an addiction to adrenaline is something of a novel concept for a Bat-villain, who are generally driven by the fact that they’re plain-and-simple nuts. She’s Harley Quinn without the delusion, Poison Ivy with a sense of humor, and Baby-Doll without the burden of trauma. Best of all, she’s fun, which is sadly not a word I’ve used much in the frequently dour New Batman Adventures.
This episode also finds a niche for Penguin to fill. Despite appearing in several episodes as an ostensibly aboveboard nightclub owner, he’s always had a whiff of incorrigibility about him. Here, we see in full his continued devotion to a life of crime as a discreet fence for Roxy’s stolen goods. Paul Williams shines as Penguin, maintaining his aristocratic air even as he ogles the jewels – and their thief, dubbing her a “felonious falcon” before asking if she’s “ever been pursued by a bird of prey.” And the interrogation sequence between Penguin and Batman is solid gold, treating the Bat as an unstoppable creature of the night while Penguin braces himself against the limitations of due process. It’s the kind of scene that illustrates why Penguin works better when he’s pretending to be legitimate – so Batman has someone to throw around a room until he gets the information he needs.
This episode feels a lot like a throwback to The Animated Series because of its direct and self-contained nature, but it’s also a key moment when Batman doesn’t rely on any other members of the Bat-family. Aside from a payphone call from Batgirl, Batman’s riding solo, up to and including the moment when he instantly recognizes Roxy as Roxanne Sutton and rattles off her backstory as a matter of course; it’s either lazy writing or quintessential Batman to have all this information right at his fingertips. (No, it’s definitely the latter.) For as much as the show fumbles the relationships within the Bat-family – Nightwing and Robin are needlessly angsty, while Batgirl is uncomfortably flirtatious with her ersatz father figure – it recognizes that Batman is a polished crime-fighting machine who, despite needing a family to keep him human, works most efficiently on his own. (It’s perhaps not a coincidence that, between my two Top Ten lists, only three episodes involved Robin.) Roxy, meanwhile, represents a temptation to stray on the dark side, to join her in a romantically charged game of cat-and-mouse; unfortunately for her, this Bat’s already chasing a Cat.
Writer: Hilary J. Bader
Director: Dan Riba
Villains: Roxy Rocket (Charity James) and The Penguin (Paul Williams)
Next episode: “Over the Edge,” in which a bat falls, and life is but a dream.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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