Catwoman is introduced as a coaxing, beguiling femme fatale in the best of noir tradition, her feline features and sinuous curves blunt indications of the archetype she embodies. She is a kleptomaniac cat burglar who scales walls and thieves jewels and leads her would-be captors in a cat-and-mouse dance, playfully communicated in Dick Sebast's crisscross camera movements and in his streamlines direction. This lovely opening sequence segues into a convoluted mess penned by a charlatan political activist. Catwoman is gradually stripped of her overcoat of seductive traits until she is a mannequin designed to exhibit but two shallow qualities: animal activism and female empowerment, neither of which is treated with any degree of sophistication.
I have a word for Sean Catherine Derek. No child watches this episode and feels any of the punch or sting in the lines about the remarkable fact that Catwoman and Red Claw are women. The excessive dialogue expressing shock and awe at these facts only serves to make the message completely manipulative and ineffective. It is preferable to have Catwoman be a threat, as opposed to emphasizing it with flat lines like, “Our new cat burglar is a woman,” “Red Claw, a woman!” and last but not least, “You have finally met your match; only fitting it would be a woman!” It talks down to the audience, no one takes it seriously, and I personally find it demeaning from a feminist perspective.
On the romantic portion of the story, I find it too is poorly handled. It is classic noir story conventionality that the hero and the seedy woman must fall in love only to come tragically apart by the end of the story. But usually there is some kind of depth, understanding, or chemistry involved. There is no reason other than physical allure that draws Batman and Catwoman to one another. And what’s more, Catwoman is dead serious about some kind of commitment, while Batman actually feels pain as he handcuffs her. Their fondness for danger and physical beauty is all they have going for each other; surely Batman is not so shallow as that.
And to further convolute things, Red Claw must be brought in as the true villain of the story, with Batman representing the other extreme and Catwoman being stuck in the morally gray area, where the gray is so saturated that it's just as fixed and conceptualized as the extremes. This ambiguous approach may have worked for Heart of Ice, but that was an eloquently told story, in which moral decisions do pose ideological challenges. Red Claw is a grotesque caricature of a European terrorist. Her accent is dreadful and every line reads like it belongs to one of the great bland villains of Hanna-Barbera lore, unlike Ferris Boyle, cut from the mold of the ever-prevalent corrupt businessman, hardly an exaggeration of the tycoons that exist in contemporary America.
The entire terrorist angle is intolerable in its length and contrivances. The entire plot is little more than generic super-villainy, yet the writers attempt to add dramatic weight to the whole scheme by peppering up the script with legitimate-sounding police jargon on the part of Gordon. Red Claw’s crude assaults are followed up with Gordon’s talking about Interpol and the feds, making for gross unevenness in tone.
The more I write the more I recall instances of poor story structure. Note Maven and how her existence achieves absolutely nothing, save some more dull dialogue to extract from Selina some of her feelings about Batman, and also to be yet another person that Batman must save from yet another brainless thug. The pseudo-Hitchcock tone of the scene in which Maven is alone in her apartment is not as suspenseful as is obviously intended, primarily because there is not a fathomable possibility for true danger, and it only drags out the story even further.
Altieri and Sebast do an adequate job with what they are given. Any entertainment derived from this entire two-part episode is credited to them and them alone. A meandering story set to decent animation direction is neither a total waste nor a failure of animated television.
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