TNBA reviews: Joker's Millions

There are few episodes of Batman where the Joker is not predetermined to boast some form of victory, laughing uproariously in the face of death or defeat. In his otherworldly resilience and archetypical presence as Batman’s inverse in morals and mannerisms, he seems more ethereal than human, and this simultaneously promotes mythical readings of the characters’ never-ending power-struggle and supplants any stab at realistically looking at the nature of evil with an iconographic abstract of a character that resembles Hannibal Lector in his apparent immortality and undeniable enticement.

The New Adventures of Batman represents a period in the Joker’s animated history where his supernatural ghastliness is whittled down significantly to expose a more whimsically human specimen who just happens to be Gotham’s most notorious psychopath. In Joker’s Millions he is just as much a victim of plot twists and surprises as the rest of the characters, no longer equipped with his usual unconditional and unexplainable superiority to the laws of chance and physics and life in general. Paul Dini intersperses his script with comical suggestions of the Joker’s non-mythical existence, a whirligig examination of the many vicissitudes of a working-class criminal. Strapped for cash, a tenant at the down-and-out Chelsea Arms apartment building, and oddly vulnerable, the Joker reveals yet a new dimension to his usual plastered-smile extravagance that comes with Dini’s love of creating sit-com scenarios and familiarizing his favorite characters within their comparatively down-to-earth contexts.

Complementing the light-hearted plotline is an unprecedented barrage of tricks and veneers that elevates Millions from the buddy comedy likes of Harley and Ivy or the Honeymooners lampooning of Harlequinade to an embrace of 90s comedy customs. As such, the feeling is less screwball and more contemporary. Not only are there freeze-frame gags and subtle background touches à la The Simpsons, but the satire of political corruption that manifests in ironic, deadpan delivery and digs at topical controversies (the appearance of a Johnnie Cochran caricature seems to associate the Joker with O. J. Simpson) is similarly modern in its jaded deprecation. And yet the pace is so jumpy that these drive-by political jabs mesh within a jovial schema of colorful montages and cartoon vivacity. In short, Dini has a handle on divergent forms of humor that blend effortlessly in his screenwriting.

This fusion of old-hat and modernist comic sensibilities ultimately says something about the Joker and Dini’s particular skill as he strives to constantly reinvent the character. The contradictory modes of comedy function as an extension of the tonal contradictions of his previous Joker/Harley comedies, which satisfied both grim, psychological realism and screwball zaniness. Joker’s Millions, after boiling it down, is an adaptation of a Silver-Age Joker adventure in a series that typically plays him for ghoulish menace, yet another oxymoronic creative decision and the one that most aptly reflects Dini’s boldness in his decree that multiple versions and interpretations of the same character coexist in streamlined continuities. The Joker of Joker’s Millions conflicts with that of Mask of the Phantasm, but this illogical flexibility compensates by fostering an immensely satisfying range of unpredictable personas and dimensions of character that seeks to demolish our dogmatic precepts about serialized continuity.

Dini is a formidable artist working within the humble art of television screenwriting who feels free to mix and match seemingly incompatible genres and formats into wildly inventive wholes. This defiance of the established order is what has made him so hard for certain fans to accept as he inevitably veered away from straightforward melodrama (not that he has not successfully tried his hand at them since) and into more formally adventurous terrain.

S:TAS reviews: Heavy Metal

Not since Jimmy Olsen’s quip about Barney the Purple Dinosaur in Feeding Time has Superman: the Animated Series been so caught up in capturing some kind of cultural zeitgeist, and no, this is not the zeitgeist captured by anyone with the competence of Frank Tashlin in the fifties—the rise of comic books, rock and roll, and television—but rather that of bad nineties sitcoms and superficial surveys of black culture. Heavy Metal’s hip posturing begins with its title and worms its way through slapdash representations of the ghetto, a bizarre synth beat set to a bank robbery, and a sass-talking niece thrown in for good measure.

Like Father’s Day, Heavy Metal flounders along a string of shoddily animated fights in a neighborhood that sloshes around in its wavering spatial layout. Thanks to its warbling pace and a surfeit of over-ambitious moving camera shots that strip all semblance of stability from the environments, Heavy Metal is even less cohesive than Father’s Day, which at the very least had concentration on its rambling brawl. It’s hard to tell where exactly certain actions take place in relation to others, given the rotating geography of the ironworks neighborhood and the zip-line car chases that seem to go in circles. Metallo’s spidery movements are not only the best part about the fight scenes, but also the best part about his character.

Action Figures left off with an ominous mirror reflection that contrasted the obsessive embrace of a new identity with amnesiac identity confusion, a bit of presumptive sci-fi foreshadowing that could have very well opened the floodgates for any kind of meditation on the cyborg phenomenon. An already amoral monster that just happened to be human was stripped of even that categorical moniker, leaving the viewer to wonder about the ramifications such a change might entail. Heavy Metal peremptorily cuts off any further discourse on the subject to have Metallo regress even further beyond the intimidation he exhibited as the terrorist in The Last Son of Krypton to become a common thug and shameless mouthpiece for street-smart lingo, including such commonly used phrases as ‘back in the hood’ and ‘super-fly.’ While The Way of All Flesh and Action Figures gave one the impression that A-list actor Malcolm McDowell was matching an excellent series with his superlative voice talents, Heavy Metal removes all doubt that he’s doing his work for an easy paycheck.

Character is non-existent in this pop culture grab-and-go. Steel, voiced by a monotone Michael Dorn, doesn’t in twenty minutes move beyond the stolid rigidity of his first appearance in Protoype, while Superman spends most of the time straddling fire escapes or supine on a recovery bed. The pair of square-jawed heroes foils with Metallo and Irons’ niece Natasha—an emotive, comic relief duo—and vice-versa until each figure occupies some grotesque extreme. As the two heroes finally shake hands, the intended effect is of a ritualistic adding on to a roster of ever-expanding heroes. But since the designated upstart lacks any discernible significance beyond his surface attributes as a basket-ball jersey wearing ghetto representative with a cool-looking getup, the resonance of that effect withers in place of a gracious relief that the only remotely dramatic event after twenty-two minutes of listlessness has finally happened.

S:TAS reviews: The Late Mr. Kent

As Superman stands overlooking his own funeral while delivering the beginning of a monologue that spans the length of an episode and evokes the noirs of Billy Wilder in more ways than one, the first thought is that The Late Mr. Kent is an ambitious genre exercise. But as the plot unfolds, one may very well get the even stronger impression that the writers are taking advantage of a breach in censorship enforcement for bold, politically conscious directives, a wave of social critique towering above the series’ usual ripples of action fantasy that somehow takes precedence over its own narrative stylishness. Following Prototype, which glorified an instrument of hi-tech militarism, The Late Mr. Kent treats its charged subject matter with a frankness and seriousness that is disconcerting for any viewer, let alone its intended audience, and it is this audaciousness that makes it the series masterpiece, even among works of equal quality.

All throughout The Late Mr. Kent, many surprising series firsts abound, and the most integral to an assessment of the episode’s politics and how its politics tints our perspective of series convention is its treatment of everything beyond Superman’s existence as a real-life phenomenon. Instead a super villain, the antagonist is a corrupt cop, that essential American archetype that didn’t even rear its head in the grimy streets of Gotham. In confronting his real-life adversary, Superman functions primarily as his real-life counterpart, Clark Kent, acting on his exclusive knowledge that small-time thief Ernest Walker is not, in fact, guilty on one count of murder, his strenuous efforts to exonerate the innocent man reminiscent of the portrayals of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men and all that that film did to revere ambitious, moralistic journalists as the keys to dismantling political corruption. Shots of Clark working late in the empty pressroom surely arise from the film’s milieu of vast, empty interiors dotted only by the two tireless heroes thanklessly working away. The Late Mr. Kent is more engaging, devoid of ‘historical relevance’ but full of introspection that raises moral questions about the volatile commingling between the altruism and self-righteous opportunism inherent to using one’s prestigious occupation to right a wrong. Clark’s ego peers through the cracks in his one-upmanship with Lois and desire to drive straight to the governor’s office to claim a victory for his career when Superman could have cleared the man with far less of a hassle.

The device of Clark delivering a monologue about his investigation, another first, is not merely an implicit way of gaining stature for narrative exceptionalism, but it also permits a voyeuristic identification with the series protagonist not to be found anywhere else. The results simultaneously engage our sympathy for our victim of investigative shortsightedness in following the efforts of his benefactor and create uneasy questions about the egocentricity that his status as both superhero and professional journalist entails. In clearing Walker, he finds an opportunity to claim an intellectual victory instead of a superheroic one, and this achievement means more to him than his moral objective. In fact, neither Clark nor Superman seems to show much warmth or sympathy toward Walker, as if he is following an ideological procedure without demonstrating any care for the person in jeopardy.

This is almost nothing compared to the less-than-admirable depictions of Lois and Jimmy. In the only moment that doesn’t quite ring true due to Lois’s typical skepticism of corporate and political higher-ups, she and Jimmy succumb to a bout of conservative complacency, writing off an innocent man’s execution because he ‘probably’ did it. Given that the supposed killer is a black ex-con living in a low-rent apartment, the class observation couldn’t be any more acute. With implicitly shady moral judgments of our usual heroes, screenwriter Stan Berkotwitz calls attention to deep-rooted social biases and ambivalences in people we tend to accept as the good guys and allows us to meditate on how ingrained certain social ills are in our society without ever quite placing us in disquietude.

The crux of the episode is the announcement of Clark’s death, which in addition to posing some nice psychological queries about how living the life of a human is key to Superman’s psychological and presumably moral well-being, it also gives Superman, the only fantastical element in an otherwise real-world episode, incentive to intervene. His intervention begins to jigsaw our straightforward imaging of how Superman’s immense power meshes with the convoluted mainframe of legality and political legitimacy. Further still, this pivotal moment acts as a counterpoint to the off-screen murder of the woman supposedly killed by Walker; if her death is unable to garner our emotional involvement, then Lois’s reaction to Clark’s death fills the void, and continues to ground the story in a kind of grim, fatalistic world where death is a reality, despite what convention tells us, and the institutions we tend to trust can very well be what brings it about.

After Superman regains the upper hand and learns that Bowman is the true killer—an ingenious move given that Bowman has appeared in the series before and therefore possesses some precursory reasons for the audience to doubt his culpability—he shows up at the governor’s house to clear Walker only for us to encounter yet another sting against the political establishment: the governor has chosen to attend the execution to gain votes for an upcoming election. This chilling touch that deftly comments on our society’s obsession with violence and the equivalencies we draw between supporting carefree killing and possessing the image of stern authoritarianism, immediately segues into a panorama of politicians staring indifferently at Walker as he awaits execution. If the action has already climaxed at the helicopter battle, then our dramatic investment climaxes here, at a pictorial assault on our willful negligence of the ruptures in a system that can very well put innocent men to death and the inhumanity with which we approach these cases that fall through the cracks. Perhaps Clark Kent’s minor transgressions against corrupt authority were never adequate to bring a man to justice, given that the final solution, after so much meticulous investigation, is for Superman to barge right into a government facility, a superheroic victory after all.

We then witness Bowman’s death at the hands of the law, a mirror image of Walker’s near-execution that draws a kind of parallel. One may see this doubling effect as Stan Berkowitz’s way of juxtaposing black and white abstracts of innocence and guilt so as to reward the audience with the gratifying killing a man who finally ‘deserves’ it, and yet the retainment of the same cold row of political figureheads and absence of any dramatically affirmative cue of finality endows this final death with the same air of eerie tranquility. Though none of the good guys end up dead, the philosophical underpinnings of The Late Mr. Kent dictate that someone has to die, and it is up to us to determine whether this is a necessary return to equilibrium or a somber reflection on the way the world works. The final gesture can hardly be said to be celebratory.

As Clark Kent’s monologue begins, he chooses to discuss luck and make the kind of hard-boiled overarching observations that come across as some kind of pretentious stipulation for prestige. And yet what he says about luck’s predominance is hardly irrelevant to the story, which is about chance in all its extremities and interpolations. We entrust the development of all stories to Superman’s deterministic action, and yet The Late Mr. Kent reminds us of how much luck factors into every little incident that allows him to come through in the end. And it’s not just Superman’s luck. While he is lucky that the fisherman had bad eyesight and that his childhood sweetheart was around to help with a cover story, Walker is equally fortunate that the reporter working on his case just happened to be Superman in disguise and that the pizza place actually had delivery records. In an episode where the events that transpire are troubling enough, we are nudged to wonder how things may have turned out were it not for the convenient reversals of fortune that ultimately win the day.

In the end, The Late Mr. Kent offers us the fullest realization of the clash between an interplanetary being and the struggles people face on a day-to-day basis, demonstrating that our imperfect social and political systems can stand as hindrances to even the most super powered being and that there is a wealth of real world problems that can’t be chalked up to the usual preventable, physical chaos. For every catastrophe that requires swashbuckling heroics, there is one that hinges even more on everyday happenstance and amid all the fluff that diverts the viewers’ eyes from the hard facts about the world we’re living in, there is a rare twenty-minute action cartoon that dares to say something.

S:TAS reviews: Prototype

A soap opera blueprint, Prototype is weak-minded science fiction that seems just as dependent on supercilious observance of one-time characters as Target, another Hilary Bader script. An excellent screenwriter responsible for the densest episode of Superman, A Little Piece of Home, she often eases into a satisfaction with rudimentary materials and tentative ideas that reduce characters to types and follow old formulas. If I gave the producers the benefit of the doubt, I would offer Prototype the one praise that its title bemusedly applies to the conditions of its making as well as to its leading character.

That character, Sergeant Corey Mills, is an all-American military hero with blond hair and blue eyes and who doesn’t get five seconds of screen time without his appendages being radically foreshortened to emphasize his dynamism. The story is about his neurological dependence on and addiction to his LexCorp manufactured robotic police suit. A broad assessment would be that Prototype is covertly about Luthor’s corporate monopoly on government and the dangers of capitalistic shortsightedness, but not only does that not account for its deficiency of commentary and overabundant fight scenes—this is one of the first time the viewer’s childish astonishment at action scenes is supposed to extend to military weaponry—but it also betrays Luthor’s typically cautious character by depicting him as wholly irresponsible. Prototype can also be said to be about police brutality, but only in that it shows an upright hero descending into self-absorbed power-hunger on the flimsiest of conceits that has nothing to say about how authority figures actually do come to abuse the law. Given that Mills steals the suit right under the noses of Turpin and Sawyer, one could say that it’s just as much about police laziness with equal validity.

Even as a run-of-the-mill story about an upstanding citizen who succumbs to power hunger and suffers accordingly, Bader feels content, like so many Disney producers do, to breeze right along and plunge Mills and his swooning wife into a trench of marital despair. Mills has but one introductory scene before he resorts to excessive violence, and we have to take on faith that he and his wife were in a dreamboat of a marriage before his reliance on the suit’s power begins tearing it apart. Character arcs are not suited for twenty-minute cartoons, because they stop looking like arcs and start looking more like elongated parabolas. Mills’ progression as a character hits its peak early on and the hyper-dramatic developments never subside afterwards. It doesn’t help that Xander Berkely, who voices Mills, gives an abysmal vocal performance, all but expected when assigned the role of a hollow man whose lust for a personified set of body armor ignites an agonizing fever pitch.

One of the few pleasures is an off-kilter, improvisational fight scene that drifts along with no clear purpose until Superman uses power plant wires to finally defeat Mills. A blast from Mills’ laser renders Superman temporarily blind, denoted by sharp, dissonant piano notes and out-of-place subjective slow motion. The storyboarding is surprisingly mobile for an episode so poorly animated, giving Superman leeway to backward somersault after an assault and makes the journey of the ever-relocating action feel fluid. Another of the small pleasures is the debut of John Henry Irons, an S:TAS mainstay.

S:TAS reviews: Bizarro's World

Bizarro appears to be the ambassador of mental disability in the DC Animated Universe, a drawling, well-meaning half-wit who inadvertently causes harm to a great many people. In Bizarro’s World, he almost obliterates Metropolis with the fuzzy aim of retelling the story of Krypton’s destruction on Earth; conceivably the same decimation made possible by a duplicitous supercomputer is now enacted through the bumbling confusion of a freak scientific accident with a brain disorder. The most ethically conflicting question raised in conjunction with Bizarro’s handicap is whether Superman is conveniently refusing to help him assimilate by placing him within a figurative playpen, patronizingly relocating him under the guise of granting him a reward.

Of course these musings are an over-ambitious exercise short-circuited by the obvious position taken by the episode and its screenwriter Robert Goodman, that Bizarro is a suitable target for our derision and that Superman is never ambiguous in his upstanding actions. Goodman is a master at fun, naïve celebrations of undiluted heroism, but his screenplay for Bizarro’s World has a slightly mean-spirited edge in the way Bizarro is treated as a fragile distraction that must be disquieted by white lies and patronization, but only after Superman himself attempts incapacitation by way of Kryptonite. If Identity Crisis was a celebration of stupidity as heroism incarnate, then Bizarro’s World treats it with an air of condescension.

The instance that comes closest to doubling as evidence for a rereading of Superman’s supposedly spotless ethics is when Bizarro finds the last survivors of the Preserver’s ship caged behind glass walls in the Fortress of Solitude. Superman’s taming and encaging potentially harmful organisms seems thematically tied to the way he comes to treat Bizarro and remove him from human civilization, and Bizarro’s instinct to free the creatures seems hardly disagreeable. Indeed, his gut morals may come across as more reasonable than Superman’s top-down compartmentalization and classification of the various species. Goodman never comes close to any explicit suggestion that Superman is in any way acting contrary to virtue, but I believe it is possible to find fault in his methods, a position supported by the morally gray prism of Justice League Unlimited. When viewed under that prism, Superman’s ideological faults extend back to S:TAS, whether Superman or the audience was aware or not.

An aspect I find more worth reading into than a deep-rooted ambivalence towards Superman’s moral actions is Lois’s maternal relationship with Bizarro, who in his infantilism seeks out a look-alike for Jor-El but not for Laura, settling on Lois instead. Bizarro’s fascination with Lois is preconfigured not by the information of the Brainiac orb, but by his previous conditioning as a clone of Superman. Even though Bizarro now knows himself to not be Superman, he still harbors an odd, Oedipal affection for her. Naturally his drive-in movie antics in the abandoned cultural center stem from Superman’s own attraction toward Lois, but with Bizarro’s mental defects, his idealization and compulsory protectiveness of her couple with her self-aware placation yield several possible psychological implications from which Lois could perceptibly draw intriguing inferences about the original model.

S:TAS reviews: The Hand of Fate

This piece of filler scripted by both Stan Berkowitz and Hilary Bader pits Superman against both a demonic lord bent on enslaving humanity and the self-defeating cosmic isolationism of his former friend and ally, Doctor Fate. Both writers seem at a loss for handling dialectics, fumbling by with platitudes about good and evil and the point of doing right in the world without producing any convincing rhetoric. On a moralistic level, The Hand of Fate functions admirably as a gut-level statement against defeatism and inaction that surely appeals to kids, but its didacticism is too cut from a mold to get anyone else to care.

And yet this dialecticism is borne of a relationship between heroes developed off-screen that broadens the reach of the DC Animated Universe. Fate represents a particular genre and philosophical attitude—magical fantasy and metaphysical attunement—and The Hand of Fate sufficiently lays down building blocks, even in its simplification. His position on life is unexplored and the dramatic conflict duly suffers, but the similarly unexplored trans-dimensional bewilderment of his ancient stone spire bids imaginative gap filling and the potential for future exploration. That we are invited to ponder a sub-realm of mysticism treated matter-of-factly in spite of the fact that we are only now introduced to it conjures a conception of this universe as a surface just waiting to be probed in greater depth.

Compared to the Flash of Speed Demons, the only previous team-up episode we have been treated to in S:TAS besides World’s Finest, Fate is a more obscure character featured not as road-movie foil, but more ambitiously as an ideological position. It is implied that Superman first met Fate long ago, and this in media res leap into a relationship history stimulates the imagination in the same way the slight inklings of visual information on Fate’s boundless fortress do. Though Superman and Fate’s dispute is axiomatic, the producers’ boldness in ridding themselves of the impulse to lather on back-story and follow every detail of the former’s growth as a hero is refreshing and, on hindsight, a masterstroke. Making the most of each new character spotlight to cover all the bases fails to anticipate any future chance of development; Fate is featured again later on, and so retrospectively the decision not to do as much with the character as possible in his debut is the right one.

Even more attractive than either the story or the implications about continuity is the disarmingly retro look. The sharp angles of Karkull’s minions, airbrushed backgrounds, and bright green swirls of magic energy seem cribbed from a miscellaneous fifties sci-fi magazine. The zigzag declivities of the cavernous walls of Karkull’s vertiginous lair are undoubtedly modeled on the slants and sharp edges of German Expressionism. The stylistic homage extends to the subject matter: long-buried supernatural horror unearthed due to some poor fool’s selfish opportunism. For all of The Hand of Fate’s narrative weaknesses as a morality play, it has a surprisingly firm grasp on both the aesthetics and thematic elements of its source material.

S:TAS reviews: Father's Day

For a work with its title, Father’s Day has very few things to say on the subject of paternity, aside from niftily segueing between two diametrically opposed father/son relationships. But as for the dynamics of fatherhood, most episodes of TNBA have more to say about what it entails—mentorship, mutual respect, emotional distance, etc.—than Father’s Day musters over the entire course of its blow-trading eternity.

One of the common misconceptions about fiction is that action always propels narrative. Of course that is true in most cases, but in Father’s Day, taking a card from Hollywood action movies, the action grinds the narrative to a halt and generates a stasis. As soon as Superman and Kalibak begin bare-knuckle brawling, the story seems to dissipate, the suspense dwindles, and it’s as if the rest of the world is interminably paused. Superman’s objective is to rescue his father from the rubble of a recently ravaged restaurant, Kalibak’s murderous intent preventing the task from getting done. The viewer’s expected reaction is to clench his armrest dreading that Superman might not reach his father in time, but as the fight persists, the effect is more like running on an activated treadmill in the hope of reaching the end and having to wait a good fifteen minutes before Superman finally decides to press the ‘off’ switch by hurling Kalibak into the sky.

Director Dan Riba can only keep the fight going by cutting corners via temporal and logical inconsistencies. Not only does Superman decide to walk to the site of Jonathan’s entrapment under the rubble after temporarily incapacitating his foe, but he also manages to take but two steps before Kalibak traverses a far greater distance to resume their trifling skirmish. Superman defeats Kalibak by flying the flightless fiend into the air, though it is never clear why he was unable to do this earlier. With the freelance writers drawing fruitless parallels between the two opponents at every juncture—their differing relationships with their fathers and opposing moral principles—the extended sequence reeks of a pretentious vanity, and the most grabbing of all the characters’ differences is their physical disparity—handsome upright Man of Steel and clunky, dwarfish ogre. Kalibak’s physical deformity, however, seems to be cruelly associated with his insecurities as an unloved son.

Father’s Day trumpets its importance as an integral piece of the Darkseid arc, though it depicts Darkseid at his least menacing by turning him into a parody of Darth Vader with forced mythical undertones. His strained, soliloquized “I have no son” and his arbitrary mandates posit him as a dictatorial profile as opposed to a character. In Apokalips…Now! he is the plausible embodiment of an abstract evil; in Father’s Day, he has too much in common with pop culture archetypes and too often shares the same physical space as his minions without any directorial effort to distinguish him. Darkseid’s ‘plan’ to kill Superman is silly in the key of a good Superfriends episode, and yet amazingly with greater plot holes circling around his own sincerity. If it is integral to kill Superman, why does he refuse to commit the deed himself at the end, using a nonsensical faux-profundity with phony gravitas, “Superman cannot be killed in one stroke,” to justify his reluctance?

TNBA reviews: Never Fear

Stan Berkowitz finally takes the Scarecrow in a direction that amplifies his menace and taps into his former position as a university psychologist. Batman: the Animated Series attempted three different routes with the character—revenge-crazed wacko, maniacal anarchist, and sharp crook out for a profit—and it became readily clear that the former two slipped far too easily into silliness. A man as intelligent as Jonathan Crane shines behind the veil of underworld business deals, and in his role as the manufacturer of a new product that eliminates fear, he simultaneously functions as an odd satirical target—the corrupt head of a pharmaceutical firm—and as a brilliant madman posing fascinating questions from both psychological and sociological standpoints.

The most harrowing of Never Fear’s many presuppositions is that morality and ideology, or at least certain moral and ideological tenets, are ultimately borne of fear, an emotion whose benefits we associate more with self-preservation than with developed human thought processes. For the first two characters exposed to the gas we are introduced to, fear serves as a failsafe device for physical safety and social security. When Batman, whom Berkowitz takes for granted is more guarded and mentally developed than these two men, becomes exposed, fear is viewed instead as a moral failsafe, and whether or not this is a valid theory is ultimately irrelevant when viewed in light of the thoughts and ideas it raises. Berkowitz and Conroy, who gives Batman a vicious edge, work closely to place the viewer in the position of a character so far the equivalent of a marketing device for kids. The transformation from mentor and guardian into a deadly, irresponsible authority figure invokes a paternal terror so far unmatched in the DC cartoons.

The character-specific effects of Berkowitz’s thought experiment intertwine with broader ideas about how people construct their morals and how what is taken for granted about behavior often corresponds to social conditioning. This is aptly demonstrated in the second test subject’s sudden assertiveness, having his whole life been stricken with the fear of offending the established social order. There are several morsels of ideas pertaining to the sociological importance of fear and the inhibitions it places on people, all of which accumulate in the logic behind Scarecrow’s grand scheme, to advertise fear as a hindrance only to demand big money for an antidote once his new toxin submits Gotham to utter chaos. “Fear is the glue that holds society together,” he addresses to the camera, and it is a statement that may very well have more than one implication.

Scarecrow himself now resembles a ghastly, grim reaper figure whose only concrete accoutrements are his hat and coat, walking stick, and noose dangling around his neck. The details of his actual person are deliberately enigmatic; not only is his face a sludgy swirl of malformed skin, broken up by shadows and craggy teeth, but one has no way of knowing whether this is actual physical deformity or an extension of his costume. His horrifying physical demeanor may as well be a promotional image for all of the foreboding imagery that Never Fear gets away with. The blood-red skies of Gotham finally work as a figurative device, a premonitory canvas against which all of the action takes place. The production team also exploits a censorship double standard to make us believe for an instant Bruce Wayne has met a grisly end in a whirlpool of blood. Never Fear takes the opportunities offered by Warner Bros. lax censorship to reflect its grueling story in equally horrific imagery, a formal synthesis that makes it a surefire contender in any canon of greats.

TNBA reviews: You Scratch My Back

With You Scratch My Back, Timm and company take the opportunity to undo the damage done to the Catwoman character by Sean Catherine Derek by making her a seductive thief and leaving her at that, no silly animal rights activism to be had. Her former persona was an uneasy coexistence of infantile play and grown-up responsibility that failed to mix. You Scratch My Back strives to be playful, relying on Catwoman as the agent that can make it happen, but doesn’t quite break free of the shackles of murky Bat-Family drama.

The second appearance of Dick Grayson in TNBA, following his cameo at the end of Sins of the Father, obfuscates more than it clarifies. The twist of You Scratch My Back is that Nightwing was in cahoots with Batman and Batgirl all along, a double-cross to match Catwoman’s own backstabbing. Rethinking the episode’s prior events, how much are we to take with a grain of salt? If the twist is any indication, much of Nightwing’s apparent begrudging towards Batman is only play-acting. The endings of both episodes place Dick on good terms with his former allies, leaving us confused as to the authenticity of his assertions of independence. An odd scene between Dick and Barbara, who in this series has so far come across as a vacuous sidekick, is particularly cloudy.

Though Nightwing is a more viable sucker for Catwoman’s seductions, their relationship is never as fun as that between her and Batman, whose square-jawed humorlessness and broad physical girth contrasted wonderfully with Catwoman’s petite sensuality. Our inability to read him as a character due to the prolongation of his back story, a move whose only benefit is that it makes that revelatory episode a treat once it finally rolls around, leaves Nightwing out in the cold as a slick action hero without an ounce of discernable character. A theoretically whimsical tale of shifting allegiances and compounding surprises doubles as a puzzling, pseudo-serious character introduction that is unfortunately unable to serve two masters.

But fortunately enough, the opening unfolds before we have the chance to think about such incongruities, during which we are treated to the apotheosis of all that Timm and Murakami hoped to achieve by their lean character redesigns. Nightwing launches an assault on a gang of South American smugglers and Dan Riba seems to channel the character’s flair for showmanship in his directorial gymnastics, detailing extreme gestures coupled with camera movements so erratic that the analytical cuts that highlight the impact of such gestures feel like fluid transitions as opposed to abrupt, disorienting reconfigurations of space.

These literal and figurative acrobatics reach an excitement lacking in the story, Riba making up for its destabilization by proving how adept he is at regulating his technique. In Batman’s fight against Enrique El Gancho, the closest thing the episode has to a set piece, Riba tones down long shot martial arts displays for close-in shots that absorb the two characters’ voluminous figures—low angles and medium shots abound. Riba pulls the camera with the weight of his characters, instilling in the viewer a comprehension of their physical exertion as they spar with one another. If that isn’t evidence enough of Riba’s achievements, he also employs a soft lighting effect to reflect the nighttime fog of the shipyard, a lovely glaze that does wonders to enhance the atmosphere.

TNBA reviews: Double Talk

Double Talk is the first formalist triumph of TNBA, not quite nearing the best of B:TAS’s many experiments, but surpassing the dryness of the new series’ previous efforts. It is the first episode to construct multiple psychological spaces and offer any semblance of psychological subjectivity, not essential qualities for an action cartoon but far preferable to the connect-the-dots linearity of the previous installments.

As the second spotlight for the Ventriloquist, it is difficult not to compare Double Talk to its precedent and superior, Read My Lips, an episode that excised the psychoanalytical dream sequences that Double Talk thrives on in favor of snazzy genre flourishes. Double Talk has more in common with the up-close character probing of Two-Face, and indeed, both episodes share many of the same formalist features that make each one such a compelling psychodrama—color tinted interiors that erupt from the mental anguish of their respective protagonists, opening dream sequences in which the suppressed identity terrorizes the nervous host in an abstract space, and bombastic set pieces that gradually recede into periphery as the protagonist’s psychological turmoil moves to the forefront.

In trying to emulate both Read My Lips and Two-Face, Double Talk fails to meet either one. Its stylization persists as long as the subjective set pieces do, making the more ‘objective’ or plot-oriented sequences just as stale as those in Cold Comfort or Sins of the Father. Keeping its stylistic strengths apparent for its entire duration, Read My Lips has a rhythmic edge, one that enables it to float back and forth between fairly personalized dramatizations of Wesker’s disorder and the surrounding rat-a-tat action that synchronizes to the palpitating jazz score with a dance-like finesse. As for its attempts to match the intimacy of Two-Face, it lacks the slow, methodical pace of that episode’s two-part format and the believable spatial evocations of its meticulously painted backdrops.

The most fascinating aspect of Double Talk is that it seems to split off from one of the core ideological foundations of B:TAS, that being that all villains are so possessed by their psychoses that there is no hope of reformation, a Calvinist, predeterminist underpinning that at its worst yielded moments of bitter, shoulder-shrugging defeatism. Wesker finally rids himself of Scar-Face, asserting his dominance as he riddles the dummy with machine-gun bullets. It is a moment that sadly lacks the visceral impact of Read My Lips’s similar climax, in which Boy Kirkland exercised canted perspectives and focal shifts while maintaining a hectic tempo to hammer home Wesker’s psychological devastation. In Double Talk, Geda doesn’t show any such feel for Kirkland’s psychologically acute framings, anticlimactically cutting from Wesker’s triumph to an optimistic affirmation of Wesker’s newly acquired happiness, a sudden and fleeting catharsis that clearly merited more time.

Double Talk is still a success, the first entry in the TNBA line-up that exhibits some regard for human troubles and doesn’t simply flatten its concerns into passionless artifice and that, besides Holiday Knights, achieves a visual style that has more dimension than cardboard.

TNBA reviews: Cold Comfort

Before one attempts to analyze Cold Comfort as a continuation of the Mr. Freeze saga, one could very well analyze it as a camp version of Heart of Ice. It redoubles certain scenes, as when Freeze leaves behind a henchwoman whose leg has been frozen, but drains from them all the nuance and replaces them with kitsch; what was once a suffering thug who posed a moral choice for Batman and who illuminated the fierce extent of Freeze’s inhumanity is now a retro female in Eskimo garb who makes bad puns. Heart of Ice daringly strove for Citizen Kane allusions and the self-destructive undertones of a Greek Tragedy; Cold Comfort almost sardonically juxtaposes a most human despair with unfeeling surroundings.

While many fans despise Cold Comfort for doing injustice to the ending of Sub-Zero, in which Mr. Freeze finds happy for the first time in his animated career, having overheard the news of his wife’s recovery before hobbling away through the snowy wilderness, I fail to see why they prefer to accept that fates are sealed in uplifting, melodramatic movie endings and abject from eventual changes and redirections. If fans wanted to, they could ignore Cold Comfort in the same way that one might ignore all of François Truffaut’s sequels to his masterpiece, The 400 Blows, preferring an instant of freeze-frame finality to the reality of continuation, but I feel this is counterproductive.

The premise is that Freeze returns to Gotham to arbitrarily shatter the hopes and dreams and happiness of all of its citizens in mass retaliation for his inability to achieve his one true happiness, Nora, who has run away with her doctor after Freeze failed to return to her. Though this bitter drive for ruination unfortunately converges on a singular act of doomsday destruction, the notion of a ruined man systematically sharing his suffering with a complacent world of successful and satisfied citizens is an appealing one. It is a story that divides sympathies as we endure the sadness of the people whose life work Freeze has remorselessly destroyed, yet with the knowledge that none of these people have suffered more than the agent of their destruction, who simultaneously deserves the most of our empathy and the most of our hatred.

But the weight of such a tale is deflated both by the sterile animation direction that plagued Sins of the Father and the aforementioned camp value that is surely endemic of Hilary Bader’s sense of humor. It is worth noting that Bader did not work on Batman: the Animated Series, and therefore her history with the Mr. Freeze character is not as entrenched as it was for Boyd Kirkland and Paul Dini. She seems here to thrive on the same penchant for corniness and derision that made Target so funny. However, Freeze is a character with a history, not a prototypic angst-ridden wacko; the ’66 Batman callbacks and fifties sci-fi artifacts are only so much fun until they jut up against the melancholic strains of Ansara’s vocals, at which point the whole enterprise seems to collapse.

Bader does manage to cleanse the sickly aftertaste of the ending to Sins of the Father with brief bonding moments between the four members of the now-established Bat-Family. Already Freeze has pinpointed Batman’s attempts to manufacture a surrogate family, reminding the viewer that these new communal relationships are just as much psychological crutches as anything else. Whether a family in a traditional sense can exist for crime-fighters is a pressing inquiry that comes to root out the more disturbing undercurrents of these new relationships, all of which end up amounting to some tragedy.

TNBA reviews: Sins of the Father

Already in Timm and company’s second entry in their new Bat-verse, many of the permutations and overhauls of the previous series are taking their toll. In fact, Sins of the Father is possibly the single episode of TNBA most populated by new problems, each of which is invariably tied to the new directive for faster paced Saturday morning packages, the move to Warner Bros. clearly imposing a commercial restraint for every censorship rule it lifted.

The first is that it is marketed as an origin story, and as the episode immediately following Holiday Knights it almost seems posed to immediately console many of the confused fans that saw the series debut in disbelief. As such, it is wholly devoted to serving its explanatory function without regard for artistic competence, as if the story of Tim Drake’s origin is a continuity roadblock that needs dealing with as soon as possible or paperwork that Rich Fogel is wearily completing as a prerequisite for writing better screenplays. And as this new series is a pre-ordered package of exactly twenty-six syndicated shows, the freedom to embark on multi-part storylines has significantly dwindled. It also defeats its own purpose of weeding out confusion that Batgirl’s affiliation with Batman raises as many questions about her as Tim Drake's origin answers about him.

Secondly, the animators’ rigid adherence to rigid models may mean that lips don’t slide out of place or that the characters don’t slosh around in motion, but it often does lead to robotic action and lopsided movements. If the angularity is intended as springboard for fluid animation and hyper-exaggeration—as admirably demonstrated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha’s animators in World’s Finest—then the team at Dong Yang failed to take notice and instead treated the model sheets as dictum. Unfortunately, Curt Geda’s direction and his team of storyboarders share much of the blame, who in their obvious detachment from the material fail to follow even the most basic rules of classical continuity, resulting in mismatched action and an inability to maintain scenic consistency from shot to shot.

Thirdly, as a story it cares more for types than characters. Tim Drake is a punk kid who wants revenge for his father’s death—an infantile fantasy that carries none of the metaphysical weight of Batman’s abstract vengeance that is more rooted in altruism than in self-gratification—Two-Face the arbitrary antagonist, Batgirl the peppy sidekick, and Batman at his most vacuous and cold-hearted. One of the few malignant side effects of the transition between series was Batman’s increasing apathy and smugness, and in Sins of the Father he is an unfeeling, monolithic machine who treats Tim like a background prop and can’t even spare an offhand moment of sympathy. Alfred picks up the slack in his efforts to console Tim, but even his paternal impulse is undermined by his less affective design.

As if compensating for this soullessness on the part of the rest of the production crew, Walker does try to enliven things through her music, an effort that unfortunately dismantles into reprisals of character themes that seem terribly out-of-place and unsuited to the moments they accompany, especially when she needs to find something schmaltzy to go with Tim’s unconvincing grief. This attempted sentimentality extends to the ending, in which Dick Grayson makes an impromptu visit to Wayne Manor.

Fans who complain about the growing Bat-Family, which is clearly sowing its seeds in these final few shots, seem to me zealously loyal to an image of Batman as a lone, stoic individual, a reductive mandate that fits Batman into a constrictive anti-hero, Clint Eastwood mold. I was always partial to the idea of a Batman gradually forming communal bonds and never felt that he should be barred from such relationships. However, this sudden, out-of-the-blue arrival of the old Robin met with awe and smiles and nudging foreshadowing stands as the most convincing evidence against such an enterprise should it be accompanied by unconditional, cornball camaraderie.

TNBA reviews: Holiday Knights

It is quite possible to start anywhere in Batman: the Animated Series, provided the episode you have selected is one of the remote few that hark back to a previous storyline, but even then it is far from a puzzling affair. Holiday Knights irritated so many fans because even though it kicked off a similar anthology series, it conflated several continuity mysteries and a visual overhaul with a most anthological structure of three unrelated vignettes, each rushed and whimsical, and yet intentionally posing questions to the viewer that it wryly refuses to answer.

Each segment serves a specific purpose, and the first mini-story about Harley’s and Ivy’s holiday shopping spree is the most flamboyant about the series’ new courage in going after even more extreme tonal departures from the usual dark nature of the show. Batman: the Animated Series featured many a screwball comedy, but rarely any so self-conscious as this. Harley and Ivy wink to the audience, make cheap gags in unlikely situations, and even star in a colorfully abstract fashion show montage set to a perky musical rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. This opening segment, arguably the most Christmas-y of the bunch, also gallantly expresses the new design preferences for hard shapes over sinuous lines and shadows, possessing a chic angularity as out of a fifties Warner Bros. cartoon. The shot of a retro, symmetrical department store grounded behind the circular contrasts of falling snow is exemplary of this new geometric style.

If the Harley and Ivy romp is designed to communicate a more stylistic openness for The New Adventures of Batman, then the lesser story that follows sets out to confuse our perception of series-to-series continuity. B:TAS was serialized to the point that one may as well start in the middle, but certain characters had their own miniature arcs, which set aside episodes as diverse as Mudslide, Second Chance, and Avatar as direct continuations of previous installments. If there were any character whose fate was left dangling by the end of the series, it would be Clayface, who in Mudslide was presumably left to a watery grave. It is hard to conceive that Paul Dini would resurrect him for the new series’ debut without any intention of befuddling diehard fans and making a deliberate point to throw out continuity in the spirit of holiday fun. Regardless, this remains the weakest of the three, the high point being Harvey Bullock’s hilarious undercover position as a department store Santa, perhaps the closest thing in all three parts to a demonstration of the awkward marriage between holiday festivity and the dark subject matter we typically associate with Batman.

The third segment all but eradicates the colorful, comical attributes of the first two, ironic given this is Joker’s show. Where World’s Finest exploited the new Joker design to its manic extremities, the stiff on-model work here demonstrates where the new design fails, gambling away many of the character’s iconic features capable of enlivening the most poorly animated B:TAS shows for a desired cartooniness that doesn’t always pay off. If this final vignette serves any function, it is to shock the viewer by bluntly alluding to death and mass murder and having Batman suffer a bullet to the arm. Unable to reach the nuance of the best Joker spotlights, this third segment only seems concerned with its most basic operations, the first of which is the shock value, the second of which is the surprise of a new Robin, and neither of which quite pay off.

But the segments are somewhat unified; all of the events are related in the sense that they take place within close temporal approximations of each other, reinforcing a sense of networking wherein multiple heroes can be involved in different struggles in different parts of the city, though the impact of this multiplicity is undercut by structured sequence and tonal dissociation. Each one does, however, end with a familiar holiday tradition playing a part in the capture of each of villain—a Christmas tree, Santa decorations, and the New Years countdown bell—imposing an amusing pattern. When Batman holds his ritualistic New Years Day sit-down with Gordon in the coffee shop, the vignettes start retrospectively blending together into a single string of compounding, exhaustive threats, each just barely overcome. This ending at once expresses a weariness at events past and a celebratory look forward to things to come, marking Holiday Knights as the quintessential transition between Batman: the Animated Series and The New Adventures of Batman, whatever its faults.

S:TAS reviews: World's Finest

As the first major DCAU crossover, a sprawling three-part story with production values fit for a feature-length film, it’s no surprise that the episodes comprising World’s Finest were spliced together and marketed as a direct-to-video feature. As in any crossover, no hero can take dominance over the other, and so World’s Finest thrives on symmetries and character collisions and an undying spirit of one-upmanship. Only rarely giving way to dubious characterizations as a result of this preordained law of friction, World’s Finest stands as a testament to the complexity and stylistic immensity of the DC Animated Universe, accelerating its bloom into a colossal self-contained entity of intersecting narratives and interlocking characters.

The characteristically vivacious Superman opening bleeds into the now-crimson red sky of the redesigned Gotham City, its craggy skyline in canted frame before our viewpoint descends via dissolve into the city’s hazy, pitch-black underbelly. A shift from blaring, triumphant orchestration to intermittent rain and thunder is followed by another shift from a long shot overview to a more honed in shot of an unassuming antique shop nestled in the street-level blackness. As the shopkeeper closes up, Harley Quinn and the Joker, now revamped to look simplistically angular and more prone to garish cartoon poses and more flexible facial expressions, slip in and steal a jade dragon. We then cut to Batman and the police at the scene of the crime, trying to make heads or tails of Joker’s thievery.

This introduction to Batman and Gotham city, characterized by descent and mystery, segues into our introduction to Superman and Metropolis, now characterized by ascent and directness. Superman has to save Air Force One from terrorists in a grandiose scheme that couldn’t attract more attention if it tried, a crime that starkly contrasts with the puzzling and subdued thievery of Joker’s midnight escapade. Soon enough, Lex Luthor is abducted by Harley and the Joker, whose cartoon motions jut up against Luthor’s stone-faced sturdiness in a comical straight-on medium shot, and the major players are soon all introduced with ample contrasts divvied between each pair.

Lois Lane remains the pivot point, a character with no counterpart, who finds herself privy to moments of romantic insecurity and equally invested in both Superman and Batman as the story progresses. As S:TAS has developed, we have seen her and Superman’s bond subtly evolve, but this evolution is the accumulation of dropped hints and bits of foreshadowing as opposed to tangible marker points that trace a clear growth in the couple’s relationship. As Lois fumbles in an attempt to ask out the Man of Steel, she is presumably just as clouded on the issue of where they stand as we are, solidifying her as the most identifiable and perhaps most important character in the story. Throughout World’s Finest she becomes important to all of the other central characters, becoming the Joker’s bait and the object of Batman’s and Superman’s mutual affections while never diminishing into an objectified plot puppet. She retains her dignity through her unquenchable humanity, thanks in no small part to Dana Delaney’s impeccable voice acting and her exclusive privilege to the episode’s most naturalistic lines of dialogue (“Regale him with madcap tales of the nightlife in Smallville,” “burning, stinging iodine,” and her self-deprecating self-mutterings after she flubs her date attempt with Superman).

Batman and Superman, meanwhile, are subject to several mixes and matches with other characters and each other due to their dual identities. The first time Batman and Luthor meet they meet as business partners, Bruce Wayne of Wayne Enterprises and Lex Luthor of LexCorp engaged in a business venture, an encounter that adds a delicious dramatic irony to Batman’s eventual interrogation of Luthor in his high-rise apartment. Part of the story’s appeal is in studying how an outside organism transforms the status quo of his new environment; Batman has a transgressive disregard for legal boundaries that Superman could never possess out of care for his public image, making this interrogation scene the first time we have the pleasure of seeing Luthor truly afraid, his domain unexpectedly impeded upon by a being ironically more metaphysical than Superman. Additionally, out of costume, Bruce Wayne exacerbates Clark Kent, whom we see aggravated for the first time, through encroachment on his own territory on two fronts—his going out with Lois on Kent’s front and his vigilante exploits on Superman’s—a double-edged sword that neither identity can do anything about, as each character’s secret is at the other’s mercy. All throughout there are unexpected meetings between Batman and Superman, Clark and Bruce, and Bruce and Superman, each new encounter carrying with it its own surprising charms that engage our amusement while defamiliarizing our favorite heroes.

These character interactions are too numerous to list in detail or to do any justice to their particular delights, and the plot too capricious to trace point-by-point with any success. There are traceable patterns that persist throughout, however, that yield more dichotomous enjoyment and toy with the central theme of dualities between characters. For instance, as Superman and Batman grow more at ease with each other, due in no small part to Lois’s revelatory discovery that Batman is her boyfriend in disguise and the gradual evaporation of their knee-jerk biases and assumptions about each other, Joker’s and Luthor’s hatred for one another only escalates. While Batman and Superman are bound indefinitely by their heroism in spite of their differences, Joker and Luthor are hopelessly mismatched as anarchic force of insanity and uptight, methodical businessman. Their key differences are underlined in a few surprisingly thoughtful instances. For example, we know that Luthor is an entrepreneur with his company logo on just about everything who yet tries to sever all traceability to the crimes he pulls, marking him as duplicitous and hypocritical. Joker, while more brutal, is infinitely more honest about his entrepreneurship, stating that he likes “to personalize all my stuff” before taking to the skies in an enormous smiling aircraft that rains fire on the city of Metropolis.

With Batman’s and the Joker’s arrival in Metropolis, we are immediately privileged to sights so far veiled by Metropolis’ established schematic. As the series deals more in bold shapes and long shots and enormous spaces, there is rarely any room for idiosyncrasies. However, thanks to Batman’s gothic influence, we now travel to the clustered alleyway suburbs that house the Metropolis mob and a seedy strobe-lit nightclub called Rocker’s. Thanks to the spatial configurations of camera pans and zooms, each of these new environments has some proximity to an already familiar space; the mob sector on the city outskirts and Rocker’s close to Hobb’s Bay. Other new spaces include two restaurants, one on a 1920s style rooftop of sloping stained glass backdrops and stylized shadow play and another a ritzy, palatial suite encircled by golden archways.

The story is told with an adrenaline rush to accommodate all of the chance encounters and plot progression while still making time for show-stopping set pieces. Each part includes at least two high-octane action scenes, all bathed in some unlikelihood. Bruce Wayne’s bullet-dodging skills are daunting, not to mention all of the particulars of the third act’s cataclysmic hellfire. But it must be remembered that World’s Finest is foremost an adventure between two great heroes that has to be exciting before it can be a series of intelligent character studies, a thematically unified story, or an atmospheric visual tour-de-force.

Fortunately it is all these things and more, a fusion of seemingly incompatible elements that overlap into a succulent dish. Confounding ideas of heroism—both heroes’ approaches to doing right are selective, each concerning himself with areas that fall outside of the other’s radar, and both possess conflicting moral ideologies and equally self-important assumptions about the other—before unifying them, World’s Finest is euphoric on a gut level and uplifting on an ideological one. It ends with Clark Kent in silhouette looking out at Bruce Wayne’s plane bound for Gotham in the distance, capping World’s Finest with a bold, encapsulating image that concludes one story while looking ahead to many more to come.

S:TAS reviews: Ghost in the Machine

Ghost in the Machine is the richest S:TAS entry since A Little Piece of Home and in my mind the series’ greatest achievement, standing side by side with The Late Mr. Kent. A Little Piece of Home stands as its forerunner, forging connections between characters and charting out new architectural spaces and plot continuities. In both episodes, there is no main character, the idea being that Metropolis is too vast a universe to confine any stories set in its expanse to the focus, much less the point of view, of any one character.

But if A Little Piece of Home was something of a genre exercise, pitting Superman against Luthor in their first direct skirmish, mechanized T-Rex and all, then Ghost in the Machine is far more ambitious. It is a story told from all sides of a recent development, the disappearance of Luthor, and in the process it humanizes both Luthor and Mercy, peeling back their professionalism and corporate invulnerability to observe them in a state of urgent anxiety. Intersecting with the narrative is the source of the conflict, the return of Brainiac, which overcoats the mystery with a tone of gothic science fiction and the peripheral development of yet another character arc. Analyzing everything together yields a multifunctional artwork too immense to be reduced to any one of its myriad strands.

If any theme takes precedence it’s that of Mercy’s submission to Luthor, one elucidated less through dialogue than through behavior. To fault the climax, in which Luthor evacuates a collapsing basement storage facility and leaves Mercy to die, for explaining their dynamic in the most recycled and dramatic manner, is to ignore the fact that Mercy’s sycophantic relationship to Luthor is depicted in subtler terms at the beginning. Mercy takes the care to remove a miniscule hair from his suit before a demonstration only for him to selfishly ignore her concerns afterwards, stating aggravatingly that he would prefer to discover the problem (the failure of an electronic device intended to divert two sidewinder missiles away from a LexCorp demonstration) alone and firsthand. Her subservience to him is met at all moments with coldness, a clash that spills into the characters’ physical dispositions; Mercy’s eyes are constantly transfixed on Luthor, but she is lucky if he reciprocates with a glance.

This opening scene also corresponds to a broader, almost equally pertinent theme of the interchangeability between professional and intimate relationships. Luthor’s interest is in Mercy is borne of her worth to his and his company’s security. He sees her as no more than a bodyguard, but she views him as far more than an employer, and naturally Luthor’s status as corporate tycoon so easily dissolves into a more abstract image of indomitable power and stature, making her fascination with him that much harder to suppress. Luthor’s entrapment in the basement of LexCorp strips away his professional armor and untouchable status, humanizing him in the least flattering way by underlining his physical weakness and not in any way assuaging our view of him as a rotten person. This humanization not only paves the way for Luthor’s inevitable act of neglectful self-preservation—his having to act under harmful conditions in his state of vulnerability perhaps makes this the first time he has clearly expressed his opinion of Mercy’s value as a human being, which he has supposedly been able to mask for years by his guarded, stone-faced demeanor—but is also visually manifested in the descent from the streamlined, untouchable peak of LexCorp to the dank, unmonitored basement.

Lois and Clark are allotted a few interludes to let us in on their reaction to both the failure of Luthor’s magnetic device and his disappearance, which isn’t validated until Clark, in an act of headstrong initiative, charges into Luthor’s office without secretarial leeway. There is a sense of temporal continuity whenever one of their scenes pop up; the first time we see them driving back from Lex’s demonstration and the second time Clark is speaking to Lois over the phone from his apartment, ample evidence suggesting that it takes place the night of the previous scene. Though Lois and Clark do not get much screen time, one part of their exchange again emphasizes the blurred line between a professional and intimate relationship. Lois responds to Clark’s statement that Mercy only hovers around Luthor because it’s her job with “it’s no wonder you’re still single, Kent.” In having Lois amusedly recall this notion, screenwriter Rich Fogel is possibly alluding to Lois’s and Clark’s own relationship and its potential for becoming more than just a journalistic partnership.

Brainiac, meanwhile, is plausibly resurrected as having dwelt in the circuitry of LexCorp’s computers since the events of Stolen Memories, replacing our initial impression of him as congruent to that of his robotic personage with one of a more hauntingly ubiquitous, parasitic presence that defies physical limitations. As in Stolen Memories, Brainiac proves himself to be just as inextricably tied to Luthor as he is to Superman, all three of whom exist in adversarial relationships with each other. It is also fitting that Brainiac’s subplot is secondary to both Luthor’s and Mercy’s; our human interest gravitates towards their relationship instead of to the cold, unambiguous threat of Brainiac, who seems to provide the central conflict and little else. He serves the same function in almost all of his appearances, ever the silent predator in a perpetual state of concealment.

And so what of Mercy? She is left upon Luthor’s disappearance in a state of insecurity, as for possibly the first time she has failed in a job that means just as much to her financially as it does psychologically. A few words to Superman reveal that she was once a stray who lived on the streets before she was taken in by Luthor, an act that to her means beyond all doubt that he deeply cares for her. This seems like mere obligatory background info that doesn’t necessarily tell us more than we already know, but when it is merged with Luthor’s climactic moral choice, which is in itself seemingly contrived, we are left with a revised conception of Luthor, a man whose every philanthropic action is performed in his own self-interest and whose concern for others amounts to nothing, even when they have known him and believed otherwise for years. In the case of Mercy, whom we see during the aftermath in the driver’s seat of Luthor’s limo with a drooping face and who refuses to make eye contact with Superman, she still does believe it; her relationship to Luthor is just as unhealthy and abusive as Harley’s relationship to the Joker, both results of compulsive denial and obsessive dependence.

Ghost in the Machine is a juggling act between multiple subplots and multiple action scenes that manages to flesh out characters as they come to terms with themselves and their ever-changing relationships with others. From the concentricity of Ghost in the Machine, wherein a singular event is treated from a multitude of vantage points, we emerge with a newfound knowledge of all the characters, the rubble and debris that mark the catastrophic climax emblematic of what it took for us to get there.