Batman Beyond, Season 3, Episodes 12-13: Beyond

Batman Beyond, Season 3, Episodes 12-13:

Episode 12: Countdown

Okay, I didn't know we had a crossover episode. Especially one that came relatively late into the season. So that shape-shifting robot Zeta from earlier in the show wandered off and got his own spin-off cartoon, which... okay? 'Countdown' basically brings Zeta and his supporting cast in for a little romp in Batman Beyond. Zeta has a brand-new more humanoid robot head, and a new best friend called Ro, as well as a bunch of men-in-black agents hunting him down. It's a pretty standard showcase of a character's side-cast, I guess. 

The plot itself is... it's all right? If we're being honest, it's more of Batman and Ro teaming up instead of Zeta, because Zeta spends almost the entirety of this episode disoriented and walking around all confused with a bomb strapped onto his back. The main villain of this one is Mad Stan, who, despite all odds, graduates from being a recurring gag into an actual main villain in his own episode. In-between ranting about the 'dirty feds' and 'basic human rights' and all that, Mad Stan thinks that him running across the shape-shifting Zeta is the government trying to spy on him, and he straps a bomb onto Zeta and sends the oblivious robot to the department of health.  

Meanwhile, Batman and Ro kind of just... track him down? Agent Bannett and his little squadron of men-in-black government people are also hunting Zeta down, and Batman ends up thinking that they would help. Turns out Mad Stan is right about these 'dirty feds'. Ultimately we get a pretty neat identity-switch with Zeta pretending to be Batman and jumping in the Batmobile, while Terry dresses up as a janitor. Not the biggest fan of this episode, if I'm being honest -- I feel like they really could've made for a bigger event out of this, but it's otherwise all right. 

Episode 13: Unmasked

And here we go with the final episode of Batman Beyond, although it really doesn't feel like a season or series finale -- especially jarring with a title like 'Unmasked', yeah? Thankfully, the show would have a much, much more fitting finale in the episode 'Epilogue' in Justice League Unlimited. Or depending on your watching order, that one Joker movie (which we'll cover on this blog eventually) would also make for a far better season finale. 

'Unmasked' is a flashback episode, with the entirety of the present-day scenes just showing Terry and Max discussing the importance of secret identities. Due to Terry's Batman activities, he blows off poor Dana Tan again. Kinda sucks that this plotline has kinda been built up in season three, how Terry's struggling to juggle his Batman life and it's putting a wrench into his relationship with Dana, but there's no real payoff to that. 

The actual storyline in Batman's flashback is actually surprisingly darker than I expected. When Batman is rescuing a boy trapped in a burning building from a fire, he had to take off his mask to calm the terrified boy down. The villainous Kobra, led by the orange-suited Korba One from season two, just happen to have a memory-reading machine (which they really could've used for a world-domination plan; it couldn't have been worse than Zander's) and they plan to kidnap this boy in order to get Batman's secret identity. 

The actual way that Kobra kidnaps the boy -- by sending a second team disguised as policemen -- is definitely something that actually caught even me off-guard. And just like "Curse of the Kobra", we get a recurring elite Kobra goon with exotic weapons that makes the fight scenes a bit more exciting. Kobra One actually even straight-up almost kills the little boy by snake pit if Batman hadn't shown up, and actually even kills one of his minions whose crime was warning his brother of a Kobra bomb. And then Kobra One, seeing his defeat, proceeds to kill himself by jumping into the snake pit. Considering how sterile cartoons became in the past couple of decades in terms of death, it's actually surprising (and somewhat refreshing) to see scenes like this. Perhaps the darkest part, for me, is that Kobra One's death is all for nothing because little Miguel didn't even really catch Terry's face, and puts in the face of the toy he's obsessed with, Sergeant Sam, in place of it. 

Anyway, it's an all right episode. Again, a bit of an odd way to end the season, but still a pretty solid episode in its own right. Some neat interactions between Terry and Max, and a pretty neat exploration of the superhero secret identity conundrum. The third season does have a bunch of rather solid episodes under its belt, for sure, although I don't think either the second or third season really reached the same high as the first season of Batman Beyond. It's been fun, though! We'll cover the movie a bit later.