Plot summary: Now stranded in the future, Batman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman team up with the Justice League Unlimited to try and stop Chronos from tearing apart time itself.

Notes and Trivia

Episode: 13 (S1.E13)

Original Air Date: January 22^nd, 2005

Directed: Joaquim dos Santos (7)

Written: Dwayne McDuffie (4)

Animation: DR Movie Co., LTD (7)

Music: Kristopher Carter (5)

The cliffhanger last time revealed Warhawk is John Stewart’s son. Here we not only learn Shayera is his mother, but his name is Rex, as in John’s good friend Rex ‘Metamorpho’ Mason.

John’s memories of Virgil as a kid are a reference to the Static Shock episodes ‘A League of Their Own’ and ‘Fallen Hero’.

The Dee-Dee’s claim to have killed a Green Lantern. This is presumably Kai-Ro, the GL in Terry’s era, and sibling of popular villain Curaré.

John states the Green Lantern Corps are forbidden to look upon the beginning of time. This is a reference to the supervillain Krona, one of the Guardians of the Universe who did exactly that, inadvertently creating the multiverse in the process.

Hal Jordan makes his first appearance in the DCAU as part of time warping. His name appeared on a plane in Kyle Rayner’s debut, and there’s a statue of him in Justice League vs The Fatal Five, but it’s generally accepted those are just Easter Eggs and he’s not actually ‘a thing’ in this continuity.

You may recall that Joker murdered Bonk in Return of the Joker. The script for this episode refers to the character as ‘Bonk II’. Though of course the death doesn’t occur in the censored version of the movie…

DCAU Debuts

Okay, so this is awkward, as I’m now going to have to introduce Static. When this all started it was meant to just be Batman, so I did BTAS and then Beyond. Then for whatever reason I got the itch to try Superman. And then Justice League just felt organic. This isn’t a racism thing, I also haven’t touched The Zeta Project! I’ll get to them both at some point, I promise!

So yeah, Virgil Hawkins was the creation of Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Christopher Priest, Michael Davis and Derek Dingle as part of the Milestone Comics imprint of black creators and characters. When Milestone folded, Static made his way into DC proper where he joined the Teen Titans. Designed as somewhat of a Spider-Man type, he is a teenager with electromagnetic powers, and of course got his own DCAU cartoon aimed at slightly younger audiences. While he is fair game for animation, he’s struggled to appear in live action due to what James Gunn calls complicated rights issues.

Recap

The two Justice Leagues battle Ghoul’s Jokerz who have had some cybernetic enhancements, and end up proving more than a match for our heroes, who retreat to their hideout.

Bruce, Diana and John are dismayed by the sorry state of their HQ, learning they’re all that remains of the Justice League, with an elderly Bruce Wayne confirming even the Batcave is gone!

They trade notes about Chronos, who has taken control of Gotham and brought all manner of historical buildings and artefacts into the future.

This fucking with the timeline has major ramifications, as Diana simply fades from existence in front of their eyes, and a huge wave of energy appears on the horizon.

After interrogating Ghoul and Chronos’ wife, the League launch their attack, but Chronos brings in The Jokerz to defend himself. Plus a mastodon and whatnot.

Chronos scolds his wife, but Batman pleads with him to engage with the fact the space/time continuum is collapsing around them.

Chronos instead leaps through another portal with Bruce and John giving chase. They barrel towards the beginning of the entire universe, but Batman eventually disables the time device.

Returning to before any of this ever happened, only Bruce and John remember anything, with John shaken by the knowledge he and Shayera are destined to have a child. Oh and Chronos gets stuck on a loop of his wife yelling at him.

Best Performance

I talked about how Peter MacNicol was a perfect little weasel of a man, but remembered to add just enough ‘tweaked’ edge to keep Chronos dangerous. Well, now he leans fully in that direction as the character embraces full villainy, and he’s just as good at that, effectively communicating how scary this tiny little man can be in his own way. It’s something as small as his overly wordy explanation of how time works before casually threatening his terrified wife in a jittery manner. It’s something as big as flipping out at her every choice of word. Just a horrible little man, driven almost entirely by the performance.

Kevin Conroy is fun playing Bruce at two different ages, but I think he lost the Old Man Bruce voice just a little in the time between Beyond and this episode. It doesn’t sound quite different enough compared to before in my opinion. The dialogue isn’t great, but he has some fun with it.

At times I had to fight pretty hard to defend Will Friedle as I think he gets a hard time for his work as Terry. Seems like he fell out of practice on the voice though, or just didn’t connect with the material when he wasn’t the main character, but he’s not great.

Episode Ranking

This is a significantly worse episode than ‘Weird Western Tales’, with more of an ‘and then and then and then’ structure, and utilising its specific era much worse.

Something I noticed when reading a LOT of Batman Beyond comics over the years is how much disdain everybody seems to hold for the character, relentlessly comparing him negatively to Bruce or making big sweeping changes. I can’t remember a single instance of anybody just celebrating Terry and his world. But I figured hey, surely the fine folks who made his damn show would do him some justice! Imagine my shock when he spends the first few minutes of this episode getting his ass kicked by a team he beat by himself (admittedly with some upgrades), and then his plan was to… run away! So he gets to be Wonder Woman in the Justice League opener and have John Stewart condescending him. Yay! The worst part is they DO end up running away, just John conjures a maze for The Jokerz to get lost in, so he gets to look superior for no real gain. Madness. Also this is less important, but Warhawk has an entirely different personality to last time we saw him. People change and grow of course, but c’mon.

Beyond just the treatment of Terry, I don’t think they made quite enough of the setting. Sure you’ve got the Jokerz and Old Man Bruce, but that’s it, really. None of the other big popular villains, and only 3 members of the JLU, 1 of which was new. We couldn’t get Barda and Mister Miracle? Aquagirl? How about a second Diana mirroring the two Bruces? Without that, it means there’s only one woman in the 6-person team… and then she’s the only one to blink out of existence, which feels shitty. Couldn’t we have lost an older Diana or one of the other JLU members? Bleh.

In terms of what IS here, I did enjoy Chronos bringing the Titanic, the Colosseum, the Tower of Pisa etc into the future to use as lairs, and John turning into Hal Jordan for a minute was a cute bit. The scene with the two Bruces taking turns to interrogate Ghoul is one of those ‘sounds better than it actually is’ deals, in my opinion. It was fun to hear the elder one talk shit about the younger one being green and insisting on taking over… but it’s just not all the way there.

I’m so conflicted about the ending. On the one hand I appreciate the cosmic fuckery of a giant hand with a vortex swirling out of it representing the unknowable beginnings of the universe, and even more so the smash cut to Bruce and John looking shaken in the Watchtower canteen. I also liked Chronos getting stuck in a horrible loop. On the other hand the whole thing feels anticlimactic as nothing in the future truly matters, the fight scenes aren’t overly engaging, and the notion of Bruce just casually writing a little ‘undo all’ program based on taking the shortest of looks at the device go beyond my personal limits of ‘Batman can just do shit, man’. I suppose cursing this duo with the knowledge of what is to come and nobody else having any idea is good, but things really just fizzled out in real time.

By not taking full advantage of the era, not having a very interesting version of the potential lineup, not having overly exciting fight sequences, and a kind of iffy ending there’s just so little this episode has going for it. Do I get excited whenever I see Terry McGinnis? Sure! Is that going to make me give the episode a positive review? No! Chronos was fun though.

For the Man Who Has Everything
Fearful Symmetry
The Return
The Once and Future Thing, Part 1: Weird Western Tales
The Greatest Story Never Told
Dark Heart
Initiation
This Little Piggy
Kids’ Stuff
The Once and Future Thing, Part 2: Time Warped (NEW ENTRY)
Wake the Dead
Ultimatum
Hawk and Dove

Rogues Roundup

Chronos (Peter MacNicol) (second appearance)

I talked before about characters stumbling into villainy by accident after getting a small taste. Well, here he is, with a brand new supervillain costume, a cadre of minions, using the Titanic as his base of operations and calling himself the undisputed master of space and time. Plus he abandons Chucko in prehistory just as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs arrives, which is pretty intense.

The touch of him pretending to sleep in a different landmark every night while secretly spending all his nights in the jail cell he was trapped in last episode is fascinating to me, but they just play it for laughs.

The JokerZ (Michael Rosenbaum/Adam Baldwin/Melissa Joan Hart/Dee Bradley Baker/Don Harvey) (first appearance)

Ah man, they’re back! And in Return of the Joker form! Across 52 episodes of Beyond I always loved the idea of this gang idolising a monster in the same way people Stan serial killers in real life, and how it made the world feel ‘lived-in’. Terminal and Scab popped up to try and act as more dangerous figureheads for the group and were solid but immediately discarded. It’s this reconfiguration from the movie that really hit the spot, striking a balance between a legitimate physical threat to Terry, having strong individual personalities, but still coming across like a gang of punks rather than full supervillains. And then as soon as they arrived, the show was over.

To beef them up enough to justify fighting (and basically defeating!) the Justice League they seem to have undergone the same cybernetic upgrade process as Bullwhip’s Gang. I don’t love this, because it turns them into something else entirely, but I do get that Green Lantern alone would likely have wiped the floor with them in their original form. We couldn’t have had a conglomerate of heavy hitters like Inque, Shriek and Spellbinder?

Lex Luthor
Circe
Amazo
Chronos (↑)
Mongul
Galatea
Project Cadmus
Dark Heart
Tobias Manning
The Jokerz (NEW ENTRY)
Solomon Grundy
Brimstone
Ares (and The Annihilator!)
Mordred (and Morgaine le Fey!)
Mordru