Speak No Evil

Plot summary: There’s a talking gorilla on the loose in Gotham, so naturally Batman teams up with it to fight poachers!

(Originally published on The Reel World February 19th, 2022)

  1. Notes and Trivia
  2. Recap
  3. Best Performance
  4. Episode Ranking
  5. Rogues Roundup

Notes and Trivia

Original Air Date: November 4th, 2000

Directed: Dan Riba (12)

Written: Stan Berkowitz (15)

Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD (45) & Dong Yang Animation Co., LTD. (45)

Music: Lolita Ritmanis (14)

Splicing animals with human DNA instead of the other way around was the premise of one if the early Batman Beyond comics released 10 months before this episode. Hilary J. Bader wrote the book and was one of the show’s lead writers, so there’s a solid chance she floated the idea here.

‘See No Evil‘ was a BTAS episode name. Maybe the new Matt Reeves/Bruce Timm cartoon will feature one called Hear No Evil to complete the set. [2024 Edit: LOLOL this cartoon does not exist, I swear] [2026 Edit: Wait, no, it does! No ‘Hear No Evil’ episode yet though.]

This episode is likely intended as a soft follow-up to The New Batman Adventures episode ‘Animal Act’, which featured a gorilla and other animals being mind-controlled by Mad Hatter.

The man Fingers scares away is the same one Terry saved from Jokerz in ‘Hidden Agenda’. He also appeared in ‘Rats’ and will again in ‘Countdown’.

Recap

A gorilla is on the loose in Gotham. Terry overhears some screams and slips off to try and wrangle it, but gets his ass thrown through a shop window because it’s a god damn gorilla.

Terry gives chase for a while, but it hops onto a train and he can’t keep up. A pair of scientists arrive and reveal the gorilla is called ‘Fingers’ and it escaped while they were running tests.

The GCPD wait at the next stop with nets but Fingers sees them coming and bails early into a nearby park. Terry tells Bruce that it seems a little too intelligent as it boarded the only high-speed train.

He investigates the scientists’ lab and finds a hidden chemical used in the Splicing process, deducing they added some human DNA to boost the ape’s intelligence. He lectures them.

Fingers is highly agitated by a news report on a local animal conservationist, James Van Dyle, tossing a park bench at a giant screen and then… saying his damn name!

Terry tracks him down again and they fight atop a construction building. Fingers asks why Terry can’t just leave him alone, explaining Van Dyle captured his mother and sold him to the scientists.

Batman pledges to capture Van Dyle by dawn. He infiltrates the poacher’s secret compound and obtains evidence that he and his crew are illegally extracting the tracking chips of protected species.

Unfortunately, Van Dyle is able to spot Terry and hits him with a stun gun. Luckily, Fingers gets antsy and hops in a cab to come and save him from lions.

Van Dyle’s men open fire, but Batman is able to take most of them down. Barbara Gordon arrives to arrest Van Dyle, and Fingers gives testimony in lieu of the destroyed evidence.

Terry has to intervene to stop Fingers from killing Van Dyle, and then he and Bruce return him to the wild. They plan to reverse the Splicing process, but Fingers insists on remaining intelligent so he can help fend off future poachers.

Best Performance

Quite obviously, it’s Malachi Throne, who last leant his vocal talents to Two-Face’s alternate personality, The Judge, in the final episode of TNBA. A talking gorilla is an entirely different animal. Okay, column over, goodnight everyone! No, but for real, Fingers is the best-written and performed character in this episode by a comfortable margin.

The only other people who get more than a sentence or two are Will Friedle and Kevin Conroy, who are both perfectly fine, and Reiner Schöne, who makes James Van Dyle as generic as you’d expect.

Episode Ranking

For as much as I enjoy this show and often find it fascinating as a companion piece to the BTAS/TNBA era, episodes like this make it hard to defend to sceptics, and illustrate why it coming to an end soon may not have been the worst idea. With a couple of exceptions, Season 3 has been pretty bad, likely because of how thin the creative team were stretched at this time by Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Static Shock, The Zeta Project and the soon-to-launch Justice League. That’s a lot of plates to try and keep spinning, and a number of the best writers from the previous era are rarely, if ever, contributing to Beyond.

Anyway, it’s an incredibly simple story, and I think you’re either the type of person who likes the sound of Batman teaming up with a talking Gorilla seeking revenge on a poacher, or you’re not. I would like to be, but I simply don’t think I am. Or at least this script did nothing to help me be one of those people.

I’ll give them props for bringing back Splicing as a justification for Fingers’ intelligence and power of speech, but even that was borrowed from a comic. The animation is quietly some of the best in the show, but there’s no real signature moment or sequence that I’d recommend.

There’s nothing I can really point to and say ‘that was terrible’, but it’s profoundly dull, and boring is always worse than bad.

  1. Eyewitness
  2. Out of the Past
  3. Meltdown
  4. Babel
  5. Shriek
  6. Disappearing Inque
  7. Rebirth: Part 1
  8. King’s Ransom
  9. A Touch of Curaré
  10. Spellbound
  11. Lost Soul
  12. Sneak Peek
  13. Zeta
  14. Bloodsport
  15. Black Out
  16. Earth Mover
  17. Rebirth: Part 2
  18. Dead Man’s Hand
  19. Armory
  20. Final Cut
  21. Once Burned
  22. Untouchable
  23. Splicers
  24. Where’s Terry?
  25. Hidden Agendas
  26. Golem
  27. Ascension
  28. The Eggbaby
  29. Big Time
  30. Heroes
  31. Revenant
  32. Terry’s Friend Dates a Robot
  33. Sentries to the Last Comos
  34. Mind Games
  35. Hooked Up
  36. Joyride
  37. Ace in the Hole
  38. April Moon
  39. The Winning Edge
  40. The Last Resort
  41. Payback
  42. Plague
  43. Rats
  44. Speak No Evil (NEW ENTRY)
  45. Betrayal

Rogues Roundup

James Van Dyle (Reiner Schöne) (first appearance)

For as great as the upper echelon of original creation villains have been on this show, there are some really dull ones as well, and Van Dyle falls firmly into the latter category. He’s a poacher. He has a techno-eyepatch and a cool stun gun. That’s all.

Obviously if you have a soul you’re anti-poaching, so he doesn’t even need to do anything to make you root for the good guys, but he’s still an uninspired character design. They basically lightly dipped him in a vat of Rob Liefield over-design and called it a day. He only beats out characters that have even less going on.

  1. Inque
  2. Curaré
  3. Mr. Freeze
  4. Shriek
  5. Derek Powers/Blight
  6. Spellbinder
  7. The Royal Flush Gang
  8. Talia/Ra’s al Ghul
  9. The Jokerz
  10. Earthmover
  11. Ian Peek
  12. Dr. Cuvier (and pals!)
  13. Mad Stan
  14. Willie Watt
  15. Robert Vance
  16. Repeller
  17. Armory
  18. Stalker
  19. The Mayhem Family
  20. The Terrific Trio
  21. Agent Bennet
  22. Bullwhip’s Gang
  23. The Brain Trust
  24. Cynthia
  25. Simon Harper (and the Sentries!)
  26. Karros
  27. Paxton Powers
  28. Charlie ‘Big Time’ Bigelow
  29. Kobra
  30. Dr. Stephanie Lake
  31. Howard Hodges & General Norman
  32. Jackson Chappell
  33. Payback
  34. Falseface
  35. Mr. Fixx
  36. The T’s
  37. Ratboy
  38. James Van Dyle (NEW ENTRY)
  39. Ronny Boxer
  40. Dr. Wheeler
  41. Major

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