Terry Dallies With a Girl in a Cyber-Plastic Bubble and Fights Inque's Daughter as My Patron-Funded Exploration of Batman Beyond Continues
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.
You can’t devote years of your life to the masochistic and sometimes futile-seeming quest of watching and writing about every John Travolta movie for an online, podcast and book project without having strong feelings about The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Travolta got off to one of the great starts in show business history. His run from 1975 to 1981 is nothing short of historic. It was one massive hit and pop classic after another.
Welcome Back, Kotter! The Boy in the Plastic Bubble! Carrie! Saturday Night Fever! Grease! Urban Cowboy! Blow Out! It was one home run after another for the hunky young actor, who moonlighted as a pop star with five top forty singles, including the number one smash “You’re the One That I Want.”
That’s good! That’s damn good. And the first project that proved that the future two time Oscar nominee could do more than make teen girls swoon as Sweathog heartthrob Vinnie Barbarino was 1976’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.
It was a huge hit and a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, the rare television movie that is still talked about, referenced and mocked nearly a half century later. It’s a weird fucking movie as well, an ostensibly fact-based but fundamentally absurd melodrama about a strapping young man who is super healthy and virile except for that unfortunate autoimmune deficiency that forces him to live in a bubble and might kill him at any time.
Thanks to The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Travolta will always be synonymous with spirited teenagers living in bubbles. So I couldn’t help but think of the Saturday Night Fever star when watching Batman Beyond’s “Untouchable.”
As its title suggests, “Untouchable” is a riff on The Boy in the Plastic Bubble that finds Terry becoming intrigued and more than a little turned on by Irene, a Girl in a Plastic Bubble.
This is the FUTURE however, so even though Irene sometimes perambulates about in the scary outside world in an old-fashioned “bubble suit”, she primarily uses a sort of digital plastic bubble called an Iso field generator ring that protects her from a world full of potentially lethal threats.
Terry is so obsessed with the ethereal young woman he can look at but never touch that he gushes about her to Dana, his own girlfriend, who is understandably annoyed by his infatuation.
The ISO field generator has a downside, however. When hyper-charged they can become dangerous weapons that repel everything they encounter. This side effect is used for super-villainy by a gentleman unimaginatively known as The Repeller.
Action takes a back seat to surging hormones and romantic melodrama here. Terry catches feelings for the mysterious beauty doomed to remain forever outside his grasp but when he tries to let her down easy by telling her he already has a girlfriend she beats him to it by letting him know she has a cyber-bubble boyfriend of her own.
Like The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, “Untouchable” is both ridiculous and oddly touching. Despite her medical maladies, Irene is fundamentally healthier and more connected to mankind than Terry, who is trapped in various metaphorical bubbles of his own design.
“Inquiring”, the episode that follows, similarly revolves around a strong-willed, charismatic young woman who briefly enters Terry’s orbit. While The Repeller won’t make anyone forget the Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime, I’m quite fond of Batman Beyond villain Inque.
She’s a slinky Femme Fatale whose look and vibe are “Sexy Rorschach Blot.” The Biogenic mutant mercenary is able to shape shift, to move through the world as a liquid, quicksilver slipping and sliding through surfaces, unencumbered by bones or a skeleton or muscles.
While still young, Inque gave birth to Deanna Clay (voiced by Azura Sky), then gave her up. The guilt-stricken super-villain secretly funds her daughter’s life behind the scenes but it’s never quite enough.
One of Deanna Clay’s defining characteristics is that she’s drowning in credit card debt and resorts to juggling charges in ways that ensure she’ll never break free of the prison of poverty. I consequently found her to be the single most relatable character in Batman history.
The perpetually cash-strapped young hustler on the make and her tragic, brilliant but seemingly doomed mother have a fascinating dynamic charged with alternating currents of bitterness, resentment, regret and grudging obligation.
Inque wants to do right by a daughter she has never known and whose absence haunts her already tortured psyche but she comes to realize that it might be too late. Irene is a chip off the old block. Considering that Inque is a sociopathic criminal, that’s not a good thing for mother, daughter or society.
I love the way Inque was designed and the elegant, liquid way she moves but I also like the character’s psychological depth. The world turned her into a monster but she still lunged for one last shot at redemption.
I’ve only got ten episodes left to cover in Batman Beyond’s third and final season and while some element of creative exhaustion has undeniably set it, this remains a bold and distinctive take on some of the most exhausted and over-exposed mythology in all of pop culture.
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