Batman Beyond is better than whatever this episode is supposed to be. This episode is made up of off-the-shelf TV show parts bought at the same store as “Terry’s friend dates a robot.”
Batman Beyond: Plague
Nelson Nash returns from the tropical island of Saint-Denis, and airport security finds a green vial on him. They’re surprisingly chill about it. Because the guy is an agent for Kobra, a snake-themed terrorist organization looking to release a fast-acting plague on Gotham. The man carrying the canister is a criminal named False Face, and the only person who can truly track this shapeshifter is none other than Stalker, the problematic hunter whom Terry fought in episode 2×06. A hero working with a villain? Never!
Pointing out plot holes in Batman Beyond is a fool’s game, because there are so many everywhere that all you can do is hang on for the ride. But when the ride sucks, it becomes impossible to ignore them. It’s not that there aren’t good ideas here. Kobra wants to spread the plague via the hand-to-hand transfer of money. That’s not a new or novel idea. Ubisoft’s 2016 game The Division used the idea as a jumping-off point; Batman Beyond was just ahead of its time in this respect. It’s a scenario that governments and banks have had to analyze, especially beginning in 2020. And because Batman Beyond works on the same logic that video games do–that it’s way more fun to have physical money than a credit card–the idea still works despite the futuristic setting. It’s also novel and weird to see a futuristic airport as imagined in a pre-2001 world.
From there, though, the show quickly runs out of ideas. Stalker hunts down Nelson and forcefully interrogates the obnoxious but otherwise harmless teenager, and then throws him off of a building. He lands on a car, so everything is okay. We’re talking like 40 feet here. I didn’t realize cars in the future were so soft on top.
Batman comes to blows with Stalker, only for the government organization we met last week to show up and tell him that Stalker is working for them to hunt down Kobra. This isn’t GI Joe’s Cobra, but they look, sound, and act similar enough that it feels like they just put a different label on the same tin. Batman’s relationship with that agency was tenuous in the previous episode, which was their first appearance in the series. And here he takes them at their word.
And then there’s Stalker. It’s not hard to believe that he would be willing to work with Batman for the right reason, but we’re never given a reason other than that it’s the right thing to do. The NSA lifted him from prison, but we’re never given a reason why we should accept that he’s doing this and that Terry should trust him. And yet, he does. Later, when Stalker tracks False Face via his nanite tracker thing, Terry doesn’t seem to have any memory of it despite being subjected to it before.
Kobra, like the Society of Assassins, is a vague, unthreatening villain in this episode–their first appearance. The real villain is a sick jerk. Kobra infected False Face with the virus, just in case their first plan went awry. Based on how fast the contagion begins to act on the hapless hoodlum, though, it sure seems like they planned to infect the city anyway. So why not make that the plot?
False Face is an old Batman villain that we don’t see very often, and I love that they brought him back. It’s too bad it was in such a boring episode. He can rearrange his face in just a few seconds to completely change his look. His default design is pretty good–it reminds me of the late Darwyn Cooke’s design for the Richard Stark character Parker.
And then when Batman lands a strong punch on False Face’s false face, things go real weird for him as his face deforms and twists–something the show does nothing with. Another thing the show does nothing with is the fact that this character was voiced by Townsend Coleman, the actor behind Fox’s The Tick animated series. Coleman is a hilarious voice actor. He never appears in the series again after this, and doesn’t get any comedic lines. Why?
This episode is powered entirely by tired cliches. Other Batman episodes use cliches as a starting point, but manage to do more interesting things. This one feels like it was written in record time to get it out the door.
