Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #177 Batman Beyond "Lost Soul" and "Hidden Agenda"
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 three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. 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.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Technology has always occupied a place of central importance in the world of Batman. Where would he be without all of those wonderful toys? That is even more true of Batman Beyond.
Batman Beyond put a gritty, cyber-punk spin on Batman mythology with a suit so powerful that it practically renders Terry a cyborg when he’s using it, half man, half machine.
For all of his youthful agility and speed, the Batsuit does a lot of the work for Terry. It makes him something more than human. The Batsuit is the ultimate piece of technology, something so expensive and advanced and unique that only one man in the world possesses it.
“Lost Soul” use the Batsuit to explore the complicated intersection of wealth, fame, power, arrogance and ruthless ambition. It’s about a power broker who uses his extraordinary wealth, and the power that comes with it, to achieve immortality.
After all, what’s the point of amassing a vast fortune if you’re just going to end up dying anyway, like any old random hobo or short order cook?
A perfectly cast Stacy Keach lends a Shakespearean gravity and complexity to the juicy role of Robert Vance, a computer mogul who has his brain downloaded and preserved through digital means as a way of indefinitely escaping the grim, icy finality of the grave.
The idea is that his brain will function as a ghost in the machine, offering his company leadership through trite aphorisms about how the key to life and business is, “work hard, save your money and remember, the customer is always right.”
The digital spirit of Robert Vance is taken offline and slumbers for thirty-five years until the body-less titan of industry is visited by his grandson. Robert’s son died of a heart attack, leaving both his company and his son in desperate need of leadership and advice.
The power-mad mogul was ostensibly preserved in cyber-ember precisely for such a situation. He’s supposed to help, to provide paternalistic guidance from somewhere in the digital beyond.
Instead of giving his heir wise counsel Robert cajoles his weak-willed grandson into taking him online so that he can experience the modern world after literally decades in cyber-sleep.
Keach has such towering presence here that he does not need a body to be intimidating. All he needs is that voice, with its thundering, ghostly authority and steely will.
Robert Vance needs a vessel, however, for his ferocious ambitions. He wants to be truly alive, not just a digital version of his former self. So he uses his computer genius to hack the Batsuit and gain control of it.
Terry suddenly finds himself in the unusual and unfortunate position of being locked out of what is essentially his work uniform by a malevolent computer spirit.
The relationship between Terry, teenaged trainee Batman and ancient Bruce Wayne, curmudgeonly crime-fighter in semi retirement, gets deeper and richer and more nuanced with each episode.
Bruce is an exceedingly tough but fair father figure but he’s also a ball-busting boss who holds his willing protege to the same high standards to which he holds himself. The elderly Bruce Wayne is kind of an asshole, but he’s endearing all the same.
In order to defeat Robert Vance Terry must defeat the Batsuit, now under the not quite dead computer maven’s sinister control, without many of the tools that allow him to be a crime-fighting, super-heroic badass and not just a teenager who stumbled into one hell of an after school job.
Without the Batsuit is Terry even really Batman? Do the clothes make the Bat-man? Bruce’s vintage Batsuits don’t fit Terry so he ultimately has to face off against the Batsuit with little more than a utility belt to assist him.
Keach is so fantastic as Robert Vance that it almost seems a shame that he never returned to Batman Beyond but there is undoubtedly something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.
The Jokerz are one of Terry and Bruce, AKA Team Batman 2.0’s most frequent nemeses in Batman Beyond but Bruce and Terry don’t square off against the same Jokerz every time.
The last time our heroes tussled with the Joker-worshipping gang with the Juggalo flair the action centered on hulking brute Scab’s desire to make up for a lifetime of feeling powerless and vulnerable by stealing a super-powerful experimental aircraft.
This incarnation of the Jokerz is led by Terminal, a dour, glowering bully with black and white zombie make-up who leads a secret life alongside Terry at Hamilton High as Carter Wilson.
As far as the rest of the world is considered, Carter is the perfect high school student, a clean-cut athlete, class president and contender for class valedictorian.
The Jokerz cut a working class figure but Carter is furtively the scion of a wealthy family whose wealthy mother verbally abuses him for being anything less than the best of the best.
Carter leads a fascinating double life. As Carter he does everything that society angrily demands of him. As Terminal, however, he tries to make the world feel his pain, his rage, his violent, explosive teen angst.
They have fun!
Carter’s mother simply will not accept her son being beaten for class valedictorian by Maxine Gibson, a brilliant black friend of Terry’s who is using her own genius-level intellect to try to figure out the identities of Jokerz and Batman.
At first Max misidentifies Terry as a secret member of the Jokerz but by the end of the show she knows that Terry is Batman, after a fashion, and lets Terry know that she knows his secret.
“Hidden Agenda” ends on a dazzling cliffhanger, with Max offering to help Terry out from time to time when he might need her help, almost like a sidekick.
It looks like we’ll be seeing a whole lot more of Max in the episodes and seasons ahead. As much as I love the Terry/Bruce Wayne dynamic it seems like Max has enormous potential as well and it certainly does not hurt that she adds an element of diversity to the show.
The bad guys invariably steal the show in Batman Beyond and elsewhere but the show would not endure if its heroes weren’t just as complicated, tormented and compelling, and I’m guessing that will apply to Max as well.
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