Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #240: Batman Beyond: "Zeta" and "Plague"
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.
A sturdy, oft-employed, wildly over-used template exists for damn near every Batman project that begins at the beginning—with the brutal murder of li’l Bruce Wayne’s parents—and then hits a series of familiar beats while introducing the Dark Knight’s legendary roster of super-villains: Bane, Catwoman, Joker, Mr. Freeze, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Two-Face and various other lesser flamboyantly costumed evil-doers.
That blueprint does not exist for Batman Beyond, however. It provides an origin story for its teen trainee Batman that mirrors that of his geriatric boss but when familiar Batman villains like Bane show up in its weird world it’s in a form that’s borderline unrecognizable.
Instead of leaning lazily on one of the most famous and beloved rogue’s gallery in all of pop culture Batman Beyond had to create an entirely new collection of flamboyant bad guys and gals for Terry and Bruce to square off against.
The difficulty level for Batman Beyond is consequently infinitely higher than most Batman cartoons and superhero projects. The producers and writers and animators did not make things easy. In fact they made things almost perversely difficult, bordering on impossible, but they thankfully sailed over the exceedingly high bar they set for themselves.
I am continually impressed by the depth and richness of Batman Beyond’s supporting characters. Time and time again, the show will create an incredibly nuanced, psychologically complex villain that will appear in several episodes at most.
Batman Beyond is full of one-shot characters that deserve a show of their own but the only Batman Beyond character to receive its own spin-off was Infiltration Unit Zeta, the fascinatingly ambiguous star of “Zeta.”
Zeta gets a memorable introduction when Terry is bored in class and suspicious of the homely, middle-aged woman teaching him for a very good reason. When threatened, she transforms into a figure of super-human strength, agility and speed.
For it seem the “teacher” isn’t human at all but rather Zeta, a powerful, expensive android with the ability to transform into anyone and everyone who was created by the military for sinister purposes.
Zeta is introduced as the villain of the episode but is eventually revealed to be a much more complex and ambivalent, even heroic figure. Somewhere along the way a computer-man created by the military for the purpose of killing attained sentience and began to re-assess its programming.
Like Bruce and Terry, Zeta is skilled when it comes to fighting but has a lot to learn about being human and functioning in society. Zeta can perfectly replicate the appearance and voice of people like Terry’s friend and ally Max but it’s a decidedly half-hearted impersonation that captures the physical essence but misses the spirit and the soul.
“Zeta” is fundamentally about what it means to be human. What makes us human? Is it a matter of having a soul? A divine spark? Is it a matter of living and dying and physically decaying as you lurch towards the grave?
As you might expect, this Batman cartoon for children has the substance and gravitas to do justice to some of the weightiest issues known to man.
“Plague” also revolves around a complicated, morally ambiguous villain who might not be a villain at all and finds Bruce and Terry squaring off against an antagonist able to perfectly replicate the look and sound of anyone he encounters.
Yet the episode doesn’t feel derivative in the least despite its many commonalities to “Zeta.”
In “Plague”, the morally ambiguous villain who might not be a villain is our old pal The Stalker, a cybernetically enhanced big game warrior who came to Gotham hunting the most dangerous game of all: humans, specifically Terry.
But when a super-villain named False-Face with the ability to become other people smuggles a deadly virus into Gotham at the behest of a sinister organization called Kobra, the authorities turn to the only person in the world capable of hunting down False-Face before disaster strikes: The Stalker.
This puts Terry in the unusual and unexpectedly comic position of having to team up with a super-villain who previously hunted him for sport. “Plague” consequently feels like a warped, inspired variation on the mismatched buddy cop formula.
Only instead of pairing a by the book cop mere days away from retirement with a renegade maverick who plays by his own rules but gets results “Plague” forces a gruff teen with one hell of an after-school job to collaborate with a pure warrior who lives to hunt and could not be more out of place in Gotham.
“Plague” consequently has a distinct element of culture-clash comedy derived from both the decidedly different personalities of Terry and The Stalker and The Stalker treating Gotham like an unusually shiny, high-tech jungle for hunting.
The Stalker made for a terrific villain. He’s equally inspired as a reluctant hero and the episode ends on a perfect note of dark humor when The Stalker saves Terry’s life and when his former antagonist thanks him The Stalker sternly informs him that when Terry dies, he will be the one responsible. The Stalker can’t let anything get in the way of his dream of killing Batman 2.0, particularly another bad guy beating him to the punch.
That, friends, is what you call friendship. What else would you expect from a show this deliciously warped and transgressively dark?
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