Batman Beyond, Season 3, Episodes 9-11: Kobra Kai

Batman Beyond, Season 3, Episodes 9-11:

Episode 9: Betrayal

Okay, when I reviewed "Big Time" earlier this season, I definitely didn't know that we were going to get a follow-up to Charlie Bigelow's storyline. Which is... an interesting one, I guess. Bigelow as Terry McGinnis's childhood friend is definitely an interesting prompt for an antagonist, and the episode itself is actually set up pretty well. Bigelow has found himself in cahoots with another criminal lord, called the Major, and he feels disrespected and mistrusted. To that end, he ends up kidnapping Terry in order to find a friend that he can trust, setting up the Major and his goons to be arrested by the police. Of course, ultimately, Bigelow ends up betraying Terry since it's all a play for him to allay suspicion off of himself. In the final fight, Bigelow falls off a bridge into the river below, which is superhero-cartoon shorthand for 'he's maybe dead but we can't show him, but don't be surprised if he shows up next season'. 

The problem here, I think, is that never at any point in the show do I really believe that Bigelow is anything but a piece of shit. His debut episode has made it pretty clear that Bigelow, at best, is an unrepentant terrible influence on Terry. And none of the characters in this episode are willing to give Bigelow much of a chance, either -- Bruce and Max are pretty quick to dismiss him, and while Terry does extend a brief second chance, it feels a lot more... guarded and hollow compared to how Terry had been with, say, Ten. It's admittedly the right move, since Bigelow does end up betraying everyone. And Terry's deal is more of an alternate solution to make sure Bigelow doesn't get killed by his gangster friends for turning himself in. So... I really don't know. It doesn't help that Bigelow himself isn't even that interesting of a character, so while it's neat to see a conclusion to this story arc, it doesn't feel particularly compelling since Terry's already pretty wise to his tricks. 

Episodes 10-11: Curse of the Kobra

Hmmm, okay, this one is a bit of an interesting two-parter? It feels like they tried to do a bit too much with this pair of episodes, though, and none of the storylines really end up reaching its potential. The episode's 'superhero' part starts off with something typical of these shows -- the terrorist organization Kobra show up and steal a super-powerful thermal bomb. Batman loses in a martial arts battle against one of the Kobra goons, prompting Bruce to send Terry to study under one of his old allies, Kairi Tanaga. This ends up forming kind of the bulk of this episode, with Bruce learning under Kairi's tutelage in the dojo. We get some pretty basic 'learn martial arts' stuff, and for the bulk of the first episode, it involves Terry slowly befriending the enigmatic Zander. Zander is a fellow student, and seems to always be in the presence of two mean-looking bodyguards anytime he comes and goes out of the dojo. 

In-between fighting Kobra goons who steal dinosaur DNA research, Terry tries to get Zander to lighten up. The initially standoffish Zander turns out to be up for a day out with Terry, sneaking out of the dojo to eat pizza and play some virtual games with Max -- turns out Zander is very competitive and insists he never loses. Eventually they get into a scuffle with a bunch of the Jokerz, which leads to Zander's bodyguards showing up and taking him home. Kairi gives some cryptic explanations about Zander to Terry, noting that 'his future has been chosen for him'.

And said 'future' turns out to Zander being the leader of Kobra, because the audience sees Zander supervising the transformation of some of the Kobra minions into dinosaur-people with splicing technology. Because of that meeting with Max and his defeat in a video game, however, Zander decides to kidnap Max. Batman arrives a bit too late to save Max, and ends up having his wings ripped off by one of the Kobra goons. 

Part 2 starts off with Terry waking up in the Batcave, and makes it abundantly clear that he's not operating at maximum efficiency, with his ribs. Some absolutely great scripting between Terry and Bruce here, actually, especially that exchange about fault. Meanwhile, Max wakes up in the Kobra base, with Zander essentially wanting the defiant Max as his wife in the new world order. We get a relatively extended sequence of Max escaping and fighting against the two handmaidens that Kobra has assigned to her. At this point, Zander monologues about his backstory -- he was genetically manufactured by Kobra and grown and taught to be the perfect leader for Kobra. 

Which, uh... makes the fact that Zander's huge perfect-leader plan for Kobra being 'we need to turn all of Kobra into half-dinosaur people because dinosaurs are once the dominant species of our planet, but to do that we need to also plunge the Earth into a global cooling because dinosaurs love the cold!' It's such a hilarious combination of Golden Age comic-book plots that I can't even be angry at it. It's so silly, chief of all the fact that cold-blooded animals would actually die faster in the cold. 

It's a bit of a shame, then, ridiculous doomsday plan aside, that none of the real set-ups we had in part 1 really end up paying off. It's probably one of the more exciting action scenes in this show, admittedly, because that one nun-chuck Kobra goon and dinosaur-men is really neat. We even have Kairi suiting up in a ninja outfit to help Batman out, to atone for her failures as Zander's sensei. But all of this ultimately leads to a rather simple action scene, and ultimately Kairi goes down with Zander on the ship.

And... and while the set-up is neat, Zander himself becomes a pretty bland cookie-cutter villain in the end. And it's a shame because the two-parter sets up multiple avenues that the story could have been explored. Terry and Max actually befriended Zander in part 1, and Kairi has the whole 'master who failed to help her student' story going on. But neither of those are really explored at all in the end because Zander is just monologuing about his manifest destiny. The character himself doesn't even come off as particularly conflicted about how different the world Terry and Max shows him is compared to what Kobra told him. For the matter, I probably would've liked it a bit better if Kairi and Zander's relationship was actually shown a bit more, instead of just being kind of tangential. It's kind of a pity, because otherwise this episode could've been so much better. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Kairi is a one-off supporting character in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Day of the Samurai". 
• Dr. Cuvier, the villain from the second season episode "Splicers", show up in the background of Zander's conditioning. So I guess he's a member of Kobra? 
• The game Sentries of the Last Cosmos, featured in season two, shows up here as the game that Max and Zander play.