There have been some weirdly silly, cliche-driven episodes of Batman Beyond, especially in its second season, but we’ve also had our share of really dark episodes that fall into the “nightmare fuel for children” category. This one is one of the latter, and I want to like it.
Batman Beyond: April Moon
If you know your genre tropes, you know how this episode is going to go almost immediately. The music is the clue–this is a crime thriller noir epsiode. The atmospheric, xylophone-heavy jazz noir is the kind of music that plays while a detective narrates about the “dame” that came in and ruined his life.
A group of cybernetically-enhanced hoods knock over some kind of vault, and kick Batman’s ass in the process. He tracks the implants down to a particular doctor thanks to some serendipitous knowledge on Bruce’s part. Batman then interrogates the doctor and relates a photo of his–his fiancee April, standing in front of a moon, to “that old song from the ’90s,” which is “April Moon” by jazz singer Sam Brown. Another bit of serendipitous happenstance, especially considering that Terry didn’t know what the Wizard of Oz was just a few episodes prior.
This is a noir story, so of course April is a femme fatale and was running the show the whole time. After Batman defeats the gang, we cut back to the leader of the gang, who doesn’t know that the doctor knows the truth about April and him, goes back to the doctor for one last surgery, and we cut away as the doctor’s drill approaches the camera.
This is a really weird episode. It seems like writer Butch Lukic was jamming extra hard on this song and artist while writing this story and wanted to do a tribute to it. A Batman Beyond episode is a supremely weird place to do a tribute to a ’90s jazz singer, but sure. The amount of Stuff That Characters Just Happen To Know is unusually high even for this show.
The characters aren’t particularly memorable, either. April looks like the Hello Nurse from Animaniacs more than anything, and the hoods just look like background characters. Their cybernetics are weird, too. One guy has blades that come out of his wrists and… knees? And the knee blades cause him problems multiple times. Also, his Cool Bad Guy Code Name is Kneejerk. The voice cast is just as weird, with a bunch of actors who were mostly active in the 80s and 90s; Daphne Zuniga, Ethan Embry, Ed Begley Jr., and Johnny Galecki all lend their voices to this episode.
The weirdest part of all of it is the ending. The doctor finds out that the woman he loves so dearly has been playing him. We don’t find out what happens to her. The leader of the gang, Bullwhip, is implied to have been killed by the doctor at the very best. It’s not hard to imagine something much worse, though, and that puts Bullwhip in the same breath as Aaron from “Disappearing Inque” and Ian Peek from “Sneak Peek.” Bruce Timm and the Batman animated teams worked around network standards’ “no killing” rules time and time again, and came up with some truly grisly fates for their characters.
So we have this super dark, Double Indemnity-style crime thriller episode predicated on Bruce and Terry just happening to know things, implying that this doctor makes his cybernetic implants by hand, full of forgettable characters voiced by active, then-popular actors, and based on a song no one remembers. I like the ambition of it–noir crime thrillers and dark endings are exactly the kind of thing I like to see in Batman stories. But it’s hard to make the episode make sense with all of these weird, disparate things trying to mash together.
