“Wait a minute. Cat worship? Theft? Those guys should be praying to me.”Another night, another heist, but this one runs Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) afoul of a murderous cult intent on retrieving the statue she filched. After their leader Thomas Blake (Scott Cleverdon) gives orders to kill, Catwoman throws herself into Batman’s arms, but when she discovers that the cult worships all things feline, Catwoman begins to wonder whether there’s another angle to this job.
This is how Catwoman’s animated tenure ends – with neither a whimper nor a bang, but a fizzle. Aside from episodes like “The Terrible Trio,” the most painful tragedy is that the show has seldom known quite what to do with Catwoman. At her best, she’s been a flirtatious foil for Batman, weaving uncomplicated schemes and snagging her share of shiny-shinies. However, the preponderance of Catwoman episodes have fixated on her namesake, pitting her against cats with the flu, lion-adjacent terrorists, and literal cat people. Throughout it all, I’ve been over here shouting, “Why? Why?”
As Catwoman’s swan song, “Cult of the Cat” is somewhere in the middle. It still has a weird obsession with making the story about cats, but it does a halfway decent job of presenting Catwoman as straddling the line between hero and criminal, using her powers of seduction to trick Batman into helping her. In those moments, this episode is flat-out great – the sequence of her in the Batmobile, slowly doling out information until Batman agrees to help save her life, is vintage Selina Kyle. Even Batman remarks on how frequently he falls for her dangerous ruses when he deadpans, “I might have been knocked out twice tonight, but I still have my long-term memory.”
The bulk of the episode, however, orbits around Thomas Blake and the titular cult, which is shockingly underdeveloped for an episode bearing Paul Dini’s name. (As a “story” credit, Dini’s contribution probably wasn’t enormous; I imagine he was called on to flesh out Catwoman’s role, since it veers close to his take in “Catwalk.”) We don’t really know what the cult wants, what its endgame is, or what its operations look like – only that its intent is murderous and its wild genetic experiments have yielded a monstrous cat-creature in a feeding pit. On this count – and I never thought I’d say this – the writers might have done well to resurrect Emile Dorian from “Tyger, Tyger,” whose mad science and feline fixation would have fed well into this episode’s underdeveloped cult leader. (Sidebar: the gag seems to be that Thomas Blake is the name of Catman in the comics, though this episode does that character absolutely no favors.)
“Cult of the Cat” continues the uninspiring bent of The New Batman Adventures toward action sequences. An opener that reminds one of From Russia With Love’s beginning shows some promise, but a protracted car chase and a dull gladiator pit sequence drag on and lost this viewer with some rapidity. I don’t have strong memories of watching this episode when it first aired, and indeed even on this rewatch I had trouble distinguishing it from “You Scratch My Back” less than three months ago; I kept waiting for Nightwing to show up, forgetting I’d already watched that episode. Worst of all, it sounds like Kevin Conroy had a head cold during this episode, depriving us of what has consistently been one of the show’s greatest joys. It’s not a terrible episode – it is at best passably, passively watchable – but it is also not especially memorable.
Writers: Paul Dini and Stan Berkowitz
Director: Butch Lukic
Villains: Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) and Thomas Blake (Scott Cleverdon)
Next episode: “Animal Act,” in which Nightwing wrassles a gorilla in a trenchcoat.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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