With our 13-episode debut season of Batman Beyond in the books, it’s time to pause and take stock, as well as delving into everyone’s favourite: Heavily Flawed Raw Data!
When writing these pieces at The Reel World I opted not to review the individual seasons of Beyond, due to the short length of the first and third seasons. So let’s fix that!
As with BTAS/TNBA, I maintained a ridiculous spreadsheet, using the episode rankings to aggregate the average quality of the episodes each director, writer, animation studio and composer worked on. It’s comically flawed as a model, because a combination of factors impact ranked placements, so it’s just a fun little ‘Here are the raw numbers…’ exercise.
Of note I won’t be commenting on the Animation Studio rankings until after Season 3 because Koko & Dong Yang worked on every single episode but then TMS did the movie, so THEN we’ll have a point of comparison.
But first let’s talk about this as a season of television!
Season Review
While Beyond enjoys a strong following these days, everybody was dubious when it was announced they’d be making a show set in the distant future with a new person suiting up as Batman. Even the creative team weren’t terribly interested, with Bruce Timm swaying his writing staff with the alure of starting from scratch and crafting new characters and concepts whole cloth. A legacy all of their own, not indebted to comics or movies.
The future setting also let the storyboard artists live their cyberpunk and anime dreams, and I’ll truly never get over how quickly they pulled together such a fully realised world. From the iconic superimposed AI news reporters to the weird SportsBall the kids play, the flying cars and turbo elevators, ‘Neo Gotham’ is instantly alive. I put it in quotes because they never actually called it that in the original run of the show to my knowledge. They say it in the JLU, but that was years later.
The purple skylines and roving gangs of Joker wannabes separate Beyond from its parent while also paying constant tribute to it. We still have the old reliable Bat Cave and Old Man Bruce with his faithful hound, Ace (a new addition for the cartoons, but once a staple of the comics). We get cute winks and nods like Hamilton Hill High School, Veronica Vreeland’s daughter, and Bruce beginning to tell Terry a story about Catwoman. But we also get far more overt material such as the returns of Bane and Mr. Freeze, as well as the delightful dynamic with Commissioner Barbara Gordon, long-since over her time as Batgirl and serving Bruce equal parts eye-rolling judgement and undying respect.
Basically there’s way more BTAS in the show than sceptics may have worried, especially given the network originally wanted an out-and-out teen-based Batman show. They’d re-assert that wish for the second season, but this first season is pretty excellent. The two-part opener does a tremendous job establishing the world, the key players and Terry and his new Batsuit. From there we got a string of debuts of original villains, the most successful of which are Inque, Blight, Spellbinder, Shriek and Curaré, who are considered the Big 5 for the entire show. I really liked The Royal Flush Gang too, and most people enjoyed Willie Watt more than I do. Throw in the aforementioned return of Mr. Freeze and you end up with two-thirds of the season featuring strong enemies for our new Batman.
Speaking of which I adore Terry and the Beyond costume. It’s clean and iconic. So many of the Beyond comics from the last decade make little tweaks and they’re never for the better. It maintains the basic visual of Bruce’s cowl, but it’s clearly a different animal. Terry is shorter and skinnier, but he’s also more nimble, and the suit boosts his physical attributes to match or surpass his mentor. Plus all the whacky gadgets. From spring-loaded Batarangs, to cloaking tech, to being able to stick to surfaces and of course rocket boots, he’s packing some serious heat. For some reason my favourite is the advanced microphones in his fingertips that let him listen through walls. Oh and the new Batmobile? Amazing. It flies. The cockpit bathes Terry in dark red light, and there’s a cool red wiring effect that appears on his forearms when he’s piloting it. All of this is smart because it ensures that, again, Beyond is its own animal but also gives them a get-out for those who don’t want to accept anyone but Bruce. Terry having all of these things Bruce didn’t means that if you feel so inclined you can claim the suit is doing all the work and Bruce is the one true Batman.
Speaking of which, having Old Man Bruce as Terry’s coach was a masterstroke decision. Does it mean Kevin Conroy only gets a handful of lines per episode? Sure. But their dynamic is glorious. The reveal that Bruce was still devoted to The Mission long after his much younger sidekicks had moved on is both predictable and shocking, and there’s so much power in the idea that Bruce’s body simply quit on him. Having him retreat from the world and even lose control of his business enterprise evokes The Dark Knight Returns, and I love that while he was willing to beat up some JokerZ to defend Terry, it wasn’t until a mystery was dangled in front of him that he truly opened up. His mind is still sharp which means he’s still in the game, and we end up with what amounts to Peter Parker in Iron-Man armour, coached by Batman. It gave fans a lifeline in the continued presence of their beloved Conroy, while also challenging the actor to mix his game up.
We only get a limited window into Terry in this first season, something Bruce Timm himself realised when they’d already started making it, so there was a hard pivot after the first four episodes. The afterschool special vibes of ‘The Winning Edge’ are a bit cringe, but seeing Terry struggle to keep up with school and his work as Batman really hits that Spider-Man vibe nicely, and his on-again, off-again relationship with Dana is something I wish they devoted more time to. His friends really never get enough to do, and Dana is a criminally under-served character. His family life is surprisingly intriguing given how little time is spent on it, with us learning by the end of the season that Terry spent some time in juvie and lived with his father until his untimely murder. His mother and brother haven’t really done much so far, and again, I would have liked to have seen some exploration of what their separation over the years did to their relationship.
All in all, I think many of the most memorable episodes can be found in this first season, and repeat-viewers likely get even more out of it as they’ve gotten to know Terry and the rest of the world in subsequent seasons and a movie, which squares off some of the shortcomings. There’s still some good stuff to come, but it won’t be this consistently good again in my opinion.
Is it BTAS? No. But we got 85 episodes of that and it was time for something new. We got that too, 24 episodes of it, and while I would have liked to have seen a little more TNBA, I’m really glad they rolled the dice on Beyond. Sometimes it’s pretty bad. Most of the time it’s fine, but worse than the average episode of BTAS, but every so often when it’s firing on all cylinders they’re a truly wonderful companion piece that cements and builds on the legacy of its predecessor.
Director Rankings
- Curt Geda (5 eps)
- Dan Riba (3 eps)
- Butch Lukic (3 eps)
- Yukio Suzuki (2 eps)
I’m pretty sure every new director to join the DCAU after the initial wave of BTAS hires graduated up from the storyboard department, with Curt Geda and Dan Riba being perhaps their biggest success stories in that light. Riba had to finish off a bunch of episodes started by Frank Paur in BTAS and the result was some pretty bad episodes, but once he got to work on his own episodes from scratch it became clear he was very good at his job, steadily climbing the ranks. For the inaugural season of Beyond he helmed 3 episodes that I placed around the middle of the pack.
Conversely Geda hit the ground in Beyond sprinting, directing my top 4 episodes (Meltdown, Shriek, Disappearing Inque and Rebirth: Part 1) as well as one from the middle. This all makes sense, as I enjoyed his episodes of TNBA, which is also where Butch Lukic began directing to more inconsistent results. Sure he did ‘Mad Love’, but he also did ‘Cult of the Cat’. In fairness to him, while I didn’t rank ‘Golem’ or ‘Heroes’ very high, the visuals in both were great, and ‘Spellbound’ was one of the best episodes in that regard too. So another instance of my ‘raw data’ model not necessarily reflecting the talents of those it ranks.
Yukio Suzuki helmed both my bottom 2 though, and I don’t think that’s a data error. They outsourced a group of TNBA episodes for the animation studios to direct themselves, and while I think almost all of them were better than these two, lower quality seems a natural byproduct of having your writing and direction happening on different continents.
Writer Rankings
- Paul Dini (1 ep)
- Stan Berkowitz (4 eps)
- Hilary J. Bader (3 eps)
- Alan Burnett (2 eps)
- Robert Goodman (3 eps)
- Rich Fogel (2 eps)
As always I wonder what would happen if I broke these down into story credits vs teleplay credits. Paul Dini is actually a major reason why, as some of his lowest ranking episodes of BTAS/TNBA were ones where he only has a story credit. Conversely Bruce Timm ended up placing VERY high because of his story credits where Dini wrote the full script. I don’t think one of these two jobs is lesser, and I understand that in reality the entire staff work on every script, so saying ‘Ah, that’s a singular piece of Dini genius’ is disingenuous. I’m not really sure where I was going with that. I’m calling it all writing, I guess?
Anyway, Dini wrote the excellent world-building pilot and then vanished. He will be back, but I’m not sure what he was busy with instead. Superman was still airing when Beyond began, but his episode count on that wasn’t high. Perhaps he was just overseeing the entire creative direction for all of the DCAU. I know Bruce Timm was really keen to do Justice League long before they officially got a green light, so perhaps Dini was working on pitches?
Stan Berkowitz, Hilary Bader and Robert Goodman handled the majority of the writing for the ‘normal’ episodes (Alan Burnett gets story credit on the two-part opener and then likewise vanishes). All of them had some good and bad against their names, so the point differential was minimal. Berkowitz worked on my second and third placed episodes, but that’s about it. Rich Fogel brings up the rear by penning two of my bottom three.
Composer Rankings
- Lolita Ritmanis (4 eps)
- Kristopher Carter (3 eps)
- Shirley Walker (3 eps)
- Michael McCuistion (3 eps)
I really like how communist they were with the division of work here, with each of the four composers working on three episodes each… and then Ritmanis got to do the finale. Thirteen is truly a cursed number! Shirley Walker ended up doing FORTY-EIGHT episodes of BTAS/TNBA, and while she’s a damn legend, that doesn’t seem an ideal way to split things up.
Instead positions 2-4 all had one episode in the top half, one each in the bottom four, and then at least one in the lower middle. Ritmanis rose above by scoring three of my top four.
While I’ve consistently said I don’t know enough about music on a technical level to truly comment on this area… I do actually think the music in Beyond is more… notable? Distinct? Obviously the work on BTAS was great, hitting those evocative Elfman-esque notes, and I can immediately conjure up a dozen or so episodes where I think the music takes it to another level… there was also a lot of silence and simplicity to the audio design. It was a show that was not afraid to linger and brood, something Carter, McCuistion and Ritmanis commented on in an interview about their time in the DCAU. Beyond gave them a chance to get a little weirder with it, with guitar shredding, frantic percussion and how would you know it’s the future without synth?!? I guess what I’m trying to say is after one season of Beyond I noticed the soundtrack more than I usually did with BTAS/TNBA. I’m not saying it’s better, calm down!
Episode Rankings
Not much more to say here given there are 13 individual reviews and a lengthy season review above, but I actually think almost every Season 1 episode is decent to good. Even ‘Ascension’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘The Winning Edge’ have great moments that help build the world or inform Terry and Bruce’s characters. I sincerely think all 3 are better than the dregs of BTAS/TNBA. But I also don’t think anything in the Top 3 touches the upper echelon of the predecessor show. It is what it is as I’ve said many times. It’s a different thing entirely and you may simply not vibe with it. I do, though, and I think there is a higher average level of quality.
- Meltdown
- Shriek
- Disappearing Inque
- Rebirth: Part 1
- A Touch of Curaré
- Spellbound
- Black Out
- Rebirth: Part 2
- Dead Man’s Hand
- Golem
- Ascension
- Heroes
- The Winning Edge
Rogues Roundup
As I’ve said multiple times, the allure of creating an entirely new cast of villains was one of the main draws for the creative team, and boy did they nail that aspect in a huge way. Obviously the BTAS Rogues Gallery is immortal, with their takes on classic Batman villains being some of the best if not outright definitive. They permanently altered how Mr. Freeze and Two-Face were written. Their version of Joker is most people’s favourite. They created Harley Quinn from scratch.
Let’s consider that last point. One of their original creations is now allegedly the third most popular DC character behind only Batman and Superman. So thinking this team can’t be trusted with diverging from comic book source material would be outright lunacy.
The Big 5 for the show are Blight, Inque, Spellbinder, Shriek and Curaré. Even the staunchest of Beyond dismissers like this group. They’re all instantly recognisable and distinct (even if Blight is heavily borrowing from Phosphorous Rex) and have great gimmicks. Inque and Spellbinder are playing in the same lanes as Clayface and Scarecrow, but they’re entirely their own thing and in my perhaps controversial opinion they’re better than the BTAS versions of each. Throw in The Royal Flush Gang (with Melanie and Terry’s romance adding a fun Catwoman-style wrinkle to the ongoing mythos), and even the likes of Willie Watt (who really underlines the show’s visual inspirations) and you have a strong core cast. I can’t stress enough how important it was to find a core group they could use over and over.
They did cave and bring back Mr. Freeze (with a new design), but I think they did it tastefully and of all the characters to come back he made some of the most sense. Another logical candidate will be back down the line. Bane pops up too, but only for a moment as a withered husk.
The JokerZ split the difference between these two groups of original creations and returns. Inspired by The Clown Prince, they make the world feel lived-in, and as I said in their debut, they may seem ridiculous but given how hard a lot of people Stan serial killers these days, not to mention how beloved Joker is in real life… is it really a big stretch? There’s a core group of them that recur over and over (with more to come!), and I think it would have been a fun challenge for the art team to come up with dozens of clown-themed henchmen.
As always we have a group of more forettable foes like Dr. Lake, Jackson Chappell, Mr. Fixx and The Fantastic Four The Terrific Trio, but this is still a stunningly good hit-rate for the first season on the villains front.
- Inque
- Mr. Freeze
- Shriek
- Spellbinder
- Curaré
- Derek Powers/Blight
- The Jokerz
- The Royal Flush Gang
- The Terrific Trio
- Willie Watt
- Dr. Stephanie Lake
- Howard Hodges & General Norman
- Paxton Powers
- Jackson Chappell
- Mr. Fixx
The Matt Signal 
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