Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #193 Batman Beyond: "Hooked Up" and "Rats"

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. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

In a neat bit of synchronicity, “Hooked Up”, the eighth episode of the second season of Batman Beyond, explores the sinister world of EVIL video games/VR in a manner not unlike two films that I have written about for Video Game Month here at the Happy Place: 1993’s Arcade and the delightfully idiotic 1994 cult oddity Brainscan. 

Given Batman Beyond’s quality and ambition, it’s unsurprising that the cult animated superhero show explores this fertile terrain with a sensitivity and craft Arcade and Brainscan can’t hope to match. 

Like a surprising number of episodes of Batman Beyond, “Hooked Up” is rooted in horror as much, if not more, than super-heroism. In this case that horror is rooted in the evil machinations of a colorfully clad super-villain, of course, but also in the soul-scarring compulsiveness of addiction and the aching, agonizing sadness of lost souls so devoid of hope and happiness that the only way they can steal even a morsel of contentment from a cruel world comes from escaping into poignantly pathetic fantasies of power and acceptance. 

The colorfully clad super villain here is Spellbinder, a former school psychologist named Ira Billings who channeled his free-floating rage towards his wealthy students into tricking them into committing crimes for him. 

Spellbinder is up to his old tricks in “Hooked Up”, only this time he’s using his malevolent powers of mind control to operate a sinister arcade where hopelessly addicted kids are hooked up to sinister machines that allow them to experience their greatest dreams and aspirations in a virtual world so seductive that addicts will do anything to keep returning to it. 

We open with Terry’s dead-eyed classmate Donny delivering seriously painful lyrics of punk rock angst to an adoring crowd of worshipful fans before being led backstage to a trio of lust-crazed groupies. 

If that seems to be too good to be true that’s because it is. In real life Donny is a juvenile delinquent with a shitty home life he escapes via Spellbinder’s virtual reality machines. For a superhero cartoon ostensibly aimed at children, “Hooked Up” is shockingly bold and convincing in its depiction of addiction as a singularly destructive poison that reduces addicts to single-minded obsessives concerned only with scoring the next fix. 

“Hooked Up” is equally raw and unvarnished in its depiction of the despair and hopelessness that leads to addiction. The dystopian world of Batman Beyond is at once so dazzling in its style and unrelentingly grim that it’s easy to see why its characters would do anything to escape it. 

Even Max, Terry’s brilliant and strong friend and wannabe sidekick ends up falling for Spellbinder’s illusions. Only instead of fantasizing about being a rock star with the world at his feat like sad little Donny, Max fantasizes about a world where her parents are still together and proud and supportive of her and her endeavors, instead of being divorced and largely absent. 

Max gets addicted but is able to rouse herself from her single-minded need for escape long enough to save Terry from Spellbinder. “Hooked Up” is Batman Beyond at its cyber-punkiest. When Spellbinder’s VR addicts are lost in their fantasy worlds their all too human bodies float over the machines as if they are in sad little digital wombs they don’t ever want to leave because they feel so safe and warm and good. 

“Rats”, the ninth episode of Batman Beyond’s second season, is just as rooted in horror, albeit of a much different variety than the cyber-punk sadness of “Hooked Up.” 

In a premise that owes much to Willard, Ratboy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, “Rats” finds Terry’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Dana being kidnapped by Patrick, a mutant boy cruelly nicknamed Ratboy on account of his rat-like appearance. 

After being cruelly tormented by his fellow human beings, Patrick decided to make a lair underground where he could hide away from society, collect baubles and tacky little treasures discarded by surface-dwellers and hang out with his only friends, man-sized rats that he is able to control telekinetically. 

Patrick/Ratboy does not even show up in “Rats” until eight minutes in. The cursed rodent-man does not have much in the way of screen time but he makes an indelible impression all the same, at once pitiable, pathetic, grotesque and horrifying. 

Patrick obviously adores Dana, who is understandably frustrated that Terry keeps standing her up on account of his secret life as Gotham’s Dark Knight in training. But it ultimately does not matter. If you live in filth and spend all your time hanging out with red-eyed rodents the size of golden retrievers, you’re never going to be able to compete romantically with a stone-cold stud like Terry McGinniss. 

In a equally fascinating development, “Rats” marks the introduction of a secondary villain named Mad Stan, a half-mad pile of quivering muscles lost forever in a manic monologue about some crazed conspiracy or another. 

Bruce Wayne warns Terry that Mad Stan is damn near unstoppable “when he’s on a rant”, which makes the casting of Henry Rollins as Mad Stan all the more perfect. 

Rollins previously voiced one of the Jokerz but he’s even more brilliantly cast as a sort of demented future world version of himself. 

The potency of Mad Stan consequently comes from the iconic baggage Rollins brings to the role. That’s the kind of audacious master-stroke that makes Batman Beyond such a kooky, transgressive thrill for kids, sure, but primarily for the adults that are its real audience. 

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