Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #244 Batman Beyond: "April Moon" and "Sentries of the Last Cosmos”
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m deep into a look at the complete filmography of troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the filmographies of Oliver Stone and Virginia Madsen for you beautiful people as well.
The young people of Gotham are an unhappy lot, Terry most of all. They brood. They sulk. They complain. They attempt to escape the inexorable horror of being anonymous teenagers any way they can, whether that means combining their genes with those of animals, joining Joker-themed street gangs, immersing themselves in a dangerous world of ultra-sophisticated VR or, in the case of “April Moon”, forcing a scientist to build them badass cybernetic limbs that slice, punch, destroy and generally kick ass.
The kids of Gotham will do anything to stand out and distinguish themselves, up to and including embracing Cronenbergian mad science that renders them a powerful, potent combination of metal and bone, flesh and machine.
The cyber-ruffians with the android flair are led by Bullwhip, who earns his name via his weapon of choice. Then there’s Knux, a robot machine man with crazy metal hulk fists that smash all in their path, Terrapin, an absolute beast in head-to-toe body armor that makes him look like a robot version of Juggernaut and the punningly named Kneejerk, who has robotic limbs that produce deadly swirling blades of death.
We would never see this gang of metallic misfits again but that did not keep the show from giving each of the gang-members a specific look, personality and audacious upgrade.
They’re all monsters but none is as cruel as Harold/Bullwhip, who tries to convince brilliant doctor, surgeon and inventor Dr. Peter Corso (Ed Begley Jr.) to stop developing prosthetics for people who desperately need them and begin developing prosthetics that will turn him and his buddies into low-level super-villains.
Dr. Corso is understandably reluctant to get into the super-villain business but when the gang kidnaps the revered doctor’s beloved wife/nurse April in order to force him into doing their bidding he reluctantly acquiesces.
The doctor is a true romantic deeply in love with his gorgeous, much younger wife but she’s less a faithful spouse than an animated femme fatale who is shacking up with Harold/Bullwhip and an enthusiastic accomplice in his schemes rather than an innocent hostage.
The idealistic doctor’s deep infatuation with his trophy wife makes her callous betrayal even more agonizingly painful. Batman Beyond inhabits a fascinatingly bleak realm of dystopian teenage Noir rich in darkness, heartbreak and moral ambiguity.
“April Moon” reduces Terry once again to a secondary role so that it can focus on the pathos and romantic tragedy at its core, the tragedy of a good man loving a very bad woman and very nearly paying the ultimate price.
Bleak even by Batman Beyond standards, “April Moon” ends with the now wised-up doctor shutting down the gang of cyber-ne’er do wells and then getting ready to “fix” Harold/Bullwhip with a drill in a way that strongly implies that rather than give the man sleeping with his wife the upgrade he demands he will be murdering him with a drill.
And not in a nice way, either. It’s an incredibly bleak, powerful ending to an episode about how life is hard but love, love will kill you if you let it.
One of the many things I love about Batman Beyond is how almost perversely bizarre and non-commercial it is. It’s never afraid to go over kid’s heads with references and ideas that may be too heady and obscure for many, if not most, adults.
"Sentries of the Last Cosmos”, for example, has characters based on Gary Gygax, the creator and ruling deity of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, and, depending on where you look and who you ask, either Bruce Villanch, Harry Knowles or George Lucas.
Eldon Michaels has Bruce Villanch’s wild red hair, Knowles’ formidable girth and George Lucas’ face. He’s the quintessential geek, an aggregation of several prominent nerds voiced, inevitably and gloriously, by Patton Oswalt.
Batman Beyond gets EVERYTHING right. That extends to casting the perfect geek icon for the role, an actor and comedian whose persona and sensibility could not be more in tune with the character and the series.
Ah, but we are getting ever so slightly ahead of ourselves.
In “Sentries of the Last Cosmos” Terry’s classmate Corey Cavalieri becomes obsessed with the popular VR game of the same name.
He’s so good that his prowess attracts the attention of Simon Harper, a behind the scenes bigwig in the world of VR game Sentries of the Last Cosmos players know and revere as “The Wise One.”
Harper, who is modeled after Gygax, uses technology to try to make the fantastical world of the game real by using high scorers like Corey as his minions to his bidding in the real world.
This includes attacking Eldon Michaels, Harper’s professional enemy, for the crime of wanting credit and compensation for being the true creator and architect of the game.
“Sentries of the Last Cosmos” has more contemporary pop culture references than most episodes. References to the Star Wars universe abound, most notably in Terry asking the rhetorical question, “Is Jar Jar lame?”
That line rings a little hack but otherwise “Sentries of the Last Cosmos” is a wonderfully geeky riff on Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and the eternal battle for credit between creators and opportunists, dreamers and money men.
I’m not sure that the small children that were the ostensible audience for Batman Beyond would get a whole lot out of references to Gary Gygax, Philip K. Dick and Harry Knowles but then as we’ve established Batman Beyond was a kid’s show that wasn’t really for kids at all.
That’s a big part of what makes it so special, timeless and unexpectedly enduring.
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