Batman: TAS - Episode 5 - Pretty Poison

Yay! Another new villain is introduced. New as in we haven't seen them in the previous four episodes, not new as in newly created for this show. That honor's reserved for Harley Quinn and Livewire (later in the Superman series). Bet you can't guess who the new arrival is! What? You guessed? Cheater, you probably looked it up on Google, didn't you? Damn them. Yes, it's Poison Ivy, the sometimes sultry, sometimes strangely suited, seductress of Springtime and Summer. Hey, I alliterated! Sorry, won't do it again.

The episode begins in a sepia toned flashback. We see a pair of hands dig a rose out of the ground and put it in a pot, then the camera pans up to show Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne given the honors of breaking ground for the new Gotham Penitentiary, the dream of Gotham's new District Attorney (Dent) and funded by the Wayne Foundation. The sepia tone ends as Bruce and Harvey shake hands, and the scene becomes a picture in the newspaper that is torn out by the same gloved hands that dug up the flower, and we see them pin the newspaper clip above a little box of roses. Then we see the field of wild roses get dug up and replaced with the State Penitentiary, 5 years later.

We see a prison break, which serves two small purposes: we see the cops in their offices alerted of the break, running out of their room, just as Detective Bullock is about to stuff his face with a donut. He drops it and follows the rest of the cops out of the room, but then comes running back for his donut. The second reason is so that when the escapee is caught and asks Batman who he is, he can say, "I'm Batman".

I guess there was actually a third (and most important) benefit to this part, we get our first look at Lieutenant Renee Montoya, who is one of the characters that was created for the Animated Series and moved to the comics. In fact, she was adopted by the comics before her first animated appearance. We could go on about her future as the current The Question, or about her being a lesbian (her partner is the modern Batwoman that appeared during 52) or the twisted relationship she has with Harvey Dent/Two-Face (all these are from the comics anyway), but we won't. Suffice it (for now) to say she's Harvey Bullock's partner, and a much more reasonable and likeable person than he is.

Anyway, intercut with the prison break arc we find Harvey Dent at a very fancy restaurant with a hot redhead, they're waiting for Dent's friend Bruce Wayne, who's running late (of course, he's chasing an escaped convict). Dent talks about Bruce always being late, probably working on business with a high-class crowd (cut to Batman chasing down the con), he's really busy but always able to get his kicks (cut to Batman kicking the crap out of the convict), there's nothing we don't know about each other ("Who are you?" the con asks quivering in fear. "I'm your worst nightmare!"). Ha ha very funny, or not, but somewhat amusing. I thought it was good to know that Harvey and Bruce are close friends, but the whole prison break seemed rather pointless, mostly an excuse to have some action at the beginning of the episode.

Bruce eventually joins Harvey and the as-yet unnamed redhead with the low cut red dress for dinner, and he tells funny stories about Dent. After a while the redhead says she needs to go, and she gives Dent a very long goodnight kiss, so long that Bruce becomes slightly uncomfortable and looks away, and the kiss goes on and on and on. Seriously. For like 20 seconds. Dent is quite pleased by it and promises to call her. As she walks away her hips swap enticingly and everyone in the restaurant turns to watch her go. They've obviously gone to great lengths to let us know she's perfectly desirable,therefore we can draw the conclusion that she's completely evil.

Bruce asks Harvey if she has a sister, and we finally get her name (unless I just didn't notice it before, which is possible), he calls her Pam, and tells Bruce he asked her to marry him. Then he pulls on his collar saying it's hot in here. Bruce is surprised and sprays his coffee all over the table, "Harvey, you can't be serious, you just met her last week!" (Boy, those words will come back to haunt him in The New Batman Adventures). Harvey protests that he knows he's found the right woman and why wait, all the while mopping his face with a napkin, sweating and obviously uncomfortable. Harvey says, "The moment I laid eyes on Pam, love hit me right in the face." His eyes roll around in his head, he gets a funny look on his face, and he face plants into his dessert.

Bruce finally realizes that something's wrong with Harvey (World's Greatest Detective, indeed!) and he is rushed to the hospital. What a surprise. Somebody calls Commissioner Gordon about Dent, and he rushes out of his office yelling, "Harvey Dent's in a coma at the city hospital!" And again, cops run out of the room, and again Bullock comes back to grab a donut. Heh heh, what a fat slob.

A doctor tells everyone that Dent was poisoned, and Wayne tells the cops the cafe they ate at was The Rose Cafe. But Bruce doesn't think it was food poisoning. He sneaks into the hospital lab and steals a sample of Harvey's blood. After analyzing it back at the cave (there's that phrase again) he learns it's a poison derived from a wild thorny rose, which Alfred tells him is extinct. Now they can't synthesize an antidote, oh no!

Bruce returns to the hospital and Pam shows up to cry about Harvey. When Bruce walks her to her car he's suddenly suspicions, remembering the kiss earlier. He heads for home and calls Alfred to find out anything he can about Pamela Isely. Again, I think this is the first time her full name has been mentioned, but maybe I'm not paying close enough attention. They discover that she's a research chemist with a cosmetic firm, and she has PhD in Botany, and she gives lectures on endangered and extinct plants. "I think Harvey's engagement is off," Batman says, before leaving to investigate.

Isley has quite the impressive greenhouse, full of plants of all shapes and sizes. The cosmetic fragrance business must pay really well, because in a city that's supposed to be a dark, corrupted version of New York, a home that size with greenhouse that big in the middle of the city must cost a small fortune. Batman enters, and as he runs through the place a section of floor falls out beneath him, dropping him into a pit filled with large, very spiky cacti. He manages to grab a flowered vine nearby and hangs precariously over thorny death, then swings out of the pit. As he lands on the floor, the vine suddenly wraps itself around his arm, and the flower opens its toothy maw(!) and chomps at him. More vines entangle him, squeezing him and finally dragging him towards a giant plant, with a large, even more toothy maw.

Batman manages to put his feet on the thing's mouth and keep from getting eaten, Pamela stands in the shadows wondering what her "sweet little flytrap caught this time", then commenting that Batman's a little big for a fly. We can just vaguely see that she's now in her Poison Ivy costume, a green corset with green tights, and slightly finned gloves and boots. She seems to have a thing for bare shoulders.

Batman struggles with the man-eating flytrap, and kicks out several teeth. Poison Ivy reveals herself and she and Batman talk about Harvey Dent, "Poor Harvey Dent, I hear he's not expected to live." She says sadly, and cries into her hands which quickly turns into evil, scary laughter. We can see she has a mini crossbow mounted on a gauntlet on her right hand. Ivy explains to Batman that Harvey had to pay for his crimes, Murder! She throws a bit of a tantrum getting a crazed look on her face, explaining that he plowed up a field of innocent wild flowers, with those awful bulldozers and other evil machinery. Honestly, she's a scary woman at this part, and just confirms my suspicions that all tree-huggers are evil people plotting to murder the rest of us (mostly) normal people.

She puts her poison lipstick on and tries to kiss Batman. Now, in the comics he would have head-butted her the face when she got close enough, but here he gets kissed and starts getting fuzzy vision. She taunts him with the antidote, and then he finally kicks her in the stomach, swings himself up to the sprinkler lines and frees himself from the tentacled flytrap, with a knife. He stands in front of Ivy with the flytrap behind him, and in her freaked out anger at his hurting her giant man-eating plant she makes the funniest sound I have ever heard and fires her (presumably poisoned) darts at him. He ducks and it rips a surprisingly large hole in her precious plant, which screams and thrashes in agony.

She continues to shoot darts at him, and when he tries to escape he accidentally pulls down a large light fixture, which lands in a pool of water; sparks fly everywhere, predictablly (but cool nonetheless) the plants catch fire, and we get a vision of Ivy in the place where all sociopathic greenies will go when they die.

Plants go up in flames all around, Ivy grabs the potted wild rose and tries to escape, but the fire flares up everywhere. Batman rescues her from being crushed by falling trees, and ends up on the edge of the pit from earlier. His vision is blurred, he's weak from the poison, but he's able to make out Ivy approaching him with her crossbow leveled at him, and murder on her face. "Enjoy extinction, Batman!" She screams at him, but he shakes his head, "I'm not going alone," and he holds the potted rose over the pit.

He offers to trade the weed for the bottle (his words), and she acquices to save her precious, almost extinct roses, and then he saves them both from the burning building. Batman takes the antidote to the hospital where it is given to Dent, who wakes up not really remembering what happened. Bruce tells him he's going to be fine, then talks to him about Pam. "I think she's wrong for you." is how he puts it, and we are shown the prison we saw back at the beginning of the episode, a fun sequence starting with the outside of the building, moving to the large front gate, down twisting staircases, to a barred cell where a redheaded woman sits on the bed mounted in the wall, rocking back and forth slowly, "...I'll grow back, we always grow back..."

Directed by our friend Boyd Kirkland, who directs several episodes of this series, a few I recognize - such as Perchance to Dream one of my favorite episodes, and many I don't. Recently we discussed him in Nothing to Fear, and once again I will mention that he directed the Batman & Mr Freeze: Sub-Zero movie

This is the first episode in the series that features Paul Dini as one of the writers. He becomes very closely associated with the show as time goes on, writing and producing for most of the Timm animated series though he left Warner Brothers in 2004 so he didn't work as much on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. Speaking of Mr Freeze, Paul Dini is one of the writers on the upcoming episode Heart of Ice which gave the character of Freeze new and more interesting life. He writes so many of these episodes I'm not going to bother mentioning any more here.

Poison Ivy is voiced by Diane Pershing, who appears to have voiced Poison Ivy in every appearance of that character that wasn't a live action film or tv series. She voiced her in episodes of Justice League, Static Shock, several video games, the web series Gotham Girls. She also has done a bunch of other stuff not worth mentioning, like the Smurfs (see, I shouldn't have mentioned it). I believe I mentioned in passing for On Leather Wings that Harvey Dent was voiced by Richard Moll, famous for his Night Court roll. He's done a ton of stuff, so we won't go into it here, check out IMDB.com if you're interested.

Renee Montoya did have a single line speaking part, so she gets a voice and a credit, played by Ingrid Oliu, whoever that she is. I'm not really sure why, but I really like Montoya. She's a great contrast to Bullock, with whom she is paired up often (can't wait till we get to episode 7, P.O.V.), she's a tough, honest cop, and she could kick me ten ways to Sunday.

I quite enjoyed this episode, I've seen the entire first disc now (two more episodes to blog about) and this is tied with On Leather Wings as the second best episode so far (yeah, it's only out of seven so far, but so what?). I didn't really mention it much, but there was a lot of focus on the wild rose, and several times the image of a rose appeared in the show (like the front door of The Rose Cafe where they had dinner), or there were quick scenes where we saw Pam caring for the wild rose, pruning it's leaves, or cutting one rose off it for the poison, talking to it. It made everything feel cohesive and related. I noticed some interesting details in a few places, like Ivy's cell walls have scratchings in them, we can tell she's not the first occupant of that particular room. Ivy herself was interesting, a lot of work was put in to making her sultry and attractive, and then when she would flip out over harm done to the plants she became frightening looking, excessive lines in her face, really she became ugly, and I found it fascinating.

I also liked the blurring and repeated vision effect they gave Batman when he was poisoned, the best example is when he was holding the roses over the pit trying to get Ivy to give him the antidote, the way Ivy went in and out of focus, and had her face swirling around the main image was fun. The style of the animation jumps out at me occasionally, just the way that it doesn't feel like a cartoon (and I enjoy cartoons, I've seen a lot), it feels like a movie, that just happens to be animated.

And the best indicators that I liked this episode a bunch are, I wrote too much about it, took too many screenshots, and I made 4 video clips from it (as opposed to The Last Laugh which got none). The software I have to capture video isn't quite difficult to use, but it's not terribly convenient necessarily either. While watching the episode I write down the start and end times of what clips I'd like to get, then in the capturing software I can capture that sequence. However, the times don't match up between the playback program and the capturing one. Sometimes it's off in one direction, sometimes in another, so I have to grab more than just the part I want, then open the clip in yet a third piece of software to trim the excess video off the beginning and end of the clip. All that to say that getting clips is time consuming and yet I really wanted to show those sections, so it was worth it.

Tune in Friday morning for Episode 6, The Underdwellers.

And remember kids: The Spice must flow. He who controls the Spice, controls the universe!

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Batman: TAS - Episode 3 - Nothing to Fear

Before we get into this episode I've posted a short addendum on the previous episode, Christmas with the Joker. It has a short video, go watch it, then come back for this episode.

Nothing To Fear tells the story of Scarecrow, aka Dr Jonathan Crane (you can never trust anyone named Jonathan), as he attempts to get revenge on Gotham University, and a Dr Long in particular.

We are told that there have been many incidents recently, robberies, vandalism, etc, at the University, and that people are concerned the students will leave and the University will be shut down. We are introduced to Dr Long, a bald old man with a heavy moustache. He's grouchy and crotchety and rude to Summer Gleason, the resident report of the show. His behaviour is understandable of course, I hate reporters and the press, bunch of lying bastards. But that's not the point. The point is he's a jerk and we're not supposed to like him, and Summer Gleason is a pretty woman and we probably are supposed to like him.

Anyway, Dr Long and Summer are at a benefit for the University trying to raise money, so naturally Bruce Wayne is present. Bruce is introduced to Dr Long, who's a short tempered old man, who grumps "Your father and I attended the University together, he had big plans for you." Bruce takes it as a compliment and mentions how successful Wayne Enterprises is, but Dr Long isn't impressed. "When your father was alive 'Wayne' was a name that commanded great respect. Now all it stands for is a self-centered, jet-setting playboy. It's lucky your father didn't live to see what you've done to his name. He'd have died of shame." Now, I've convinced a lot of people I'm a nice guy, but I really want to punch this old man in the face. Bruce looks a little sheepish but gets over it as soon as the Dr Long leaves the elevator, even showing a little smirk.

Moving along, because we don't want to be here all night, Scarecrow attacks, blasting a hole in the roof and breaking into the University's vault, which looks just like a bank vault. There is only one guard on duty there, and he's quite out-matched, being a rather scrawny guy, kinda like me or Evil Cousin Rish. Scarecrow of course brought backup in the form of two hulk mobsters. The guard pulls his gun on them and we are introduced to Scarecrow's trademarked Fear Toxin gas which he sprays on the guard. He coughs and suddenly starts yelling about spiders, "Get them off of me!"

Scarecrow explains to his lackies that his gas made the guard experience his worst fear. Scarecrow exposits that the robbery isn't about money but revenge and tells his lacky to grab what they can and burn the rest. Batman arrives (wearing a gas mask, how'd he know about that?) and during a tussle Scarecrow pulls a dart gun and shoots Bats in the back of the neck. Crane and his boys escape after setting the vault on fire, leaving Batman overwhelmed by the Fear Toxin, and we see what it is that Batman fears.

In the flames Batman sees an apparition of his father, Thomas Wayne, and he hears his voice say "Bruce, you have failed me. You have disgraced the family name. Then the sprinklers come on and put out the fires and the vision is gone. The police bust in then as Batman crawls coughing out of the vault. The guard is explaining what happened and how Batman stopped Scarecrow when Bullock arrives, not impressed by the absence of the Scarecrow. I really like Harvey Bullock, but he's much more of a jerk in these earlier episodes than in the later ones, where he's more usually just a slob who doesn't like Bats, but isn't quite so antagonistic. Gordon arrives and Bullock complains about Batman trying to take evidence, a piece of Scarecrow's costume, but when he turns around to talk to Batman again he's gone.

Okay, gotta move this along faster. There's a scene where Dr Crane explains to his lackies how he was a leading professor of psychology, and from a child he'd been fascinated by fear and its effects on people. In a flashback we see a scrawny kid with a big head and red hair chasing girls with snakes and laughing. He says that when he got a job with the University and began further experimenting with fear, locking people in rooms with rats or snakes or in the dark. The University was not pleased by it, and Dr Long called him a lunatic and fired him. So now he's doing what any well adjusted, mature adult would do, and is trying to shut the University down.

At the Bat Cave Bruce instructs the computer to analyse the piece of cloth he obtained from Scarecrow. He continues to hallucinate about his parents and how he has failed them. Bruce picks up a picture he has of his parents next to the Bat Computer and hears his father's voice again saying that he has failed them. On the screen next to him Summer Gleason reporting the news repeats over and over that Batman Failed, FAILED! FAILED! to catch Scarecrow. He's upset and shaking, and then we get a nice little moment between Alfred and Bruce.

It's a little boring to me sometimes, touchy-feely moments like these, probably because my heart shriveled up and turned to stone long ago, but it's still nice that the movies and the animated series let us see that Alfred and Bruce have a very close relationship. Bruce tells Alfred about the visions he's having, but Alfred dismisses them saying, "I know he'd be proud of you, sir, because I'm so proud of you."

The University holds another fundraiser which is spoiled by Scarecrow and his goons, he gasses the entire crowd, so when Batman (predictably) shows up he is attacked by the crowd who has gone nuts and freaks out over the giant bat in their presence. Now, from what I've read Batman is always willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish his goal (except kill anybody), so I don't think he would have hesitated much before taking a swing at the people attacking him. Although, perhaps I'm wrong and he cares more about innocents than I think he does, and he wouldn't want to harm them. I think back to Batman Begins, he doesn't fight the crowd then really does he? But he escapes in a similar manner here, using his grappling hook to get about and away from the crowd.

Scarecrow has escaped the building with Dr Long in custody, and is flying away in a zeppelin. Batman, of course, is able to bet aboard the zeppelin and defeat the goons, who seem extra less intelligent than the lackies usually are. We get a nice shot of Batman disarming one with a batarang, and it seems slightly graphic. In my memory the batarangs always hit the guns in the cartoon, in contrast to the comics where they tend to become embedded in the arm or hand of the gun wielder, and here we get the latter. Perhaps they softened it up in the subsequent episodes, or perhaps my memory isn't as clear as I think it is.

Anyway, in the ensuing fights the zeppelin controls are destroyed, the passenger area is started on fire, and the blimp bumps into two different buildings. Batman and one of the goons are knocked off the zeppelin and, in what seemed an uncharacteristic move, Batman doesn't catch the goon who falls what was obviously over 30 stories and bounces off an awning to safety. Scarecrow is confident that the Fear Toxin will defeat Batman, and as he tries to climb to safety back aboard the blimp the demons of his past again assault him.

In this final confrontation of his fears, his father appears to him again, large and unpleasant looking with evil glowing red eyes (rather like Evil Cousin Rish), and as he tells Bruce that he's a disgrace he morphs into an evil skeleton. But Bruce faces and defeats his fears, and utters a very quotable line.

After defeating his inner fears defeating the Scarecrow is a trivial matter, simply regain entrance to the blimp, beat up the last goon (who gets Fear Toxin-ed and sees prison bars closing in on him and jumps out of the zeppelin, again landing safely in a tree), rescue Dr Long before the zeppelin makes a head-long collision into one of Gotham's giant skyscrapers and bursts into fiery death (Scarecrow escaped on a glider), get the data analysis from the scrap of Scarecrow's mask he had, which leads him to a company called Crane Chemicals, slap Crane around a little bit, and expose him to his own Toxin. Crane sees terrifying visions of monstrous bat-creatures chasing him, and he is defeated by his own medicine.

In the penultimate scene Detective Bullock again making his case to Commissioner Gordon that Batman is a menace to them, he's withholding evidence, hindering the Scarecrow investigation, helped Scarecrow escape, "I'd bet my badge he and Scarecrow are in cohoots!" "Your badge, eh?" Says Gordon, pointing to the ceiling fan, from which Scarecrow is hanging with a note pinned to his chest from Batman. "About that badge..." he quips.

The final scene shows Bruce laying flowers at his parents grave, paying his respects, as he often does in the show, particularly if something or someone reminds him of his parents.

As I write this I wonder if David Goyer and Christopher Nolan (story and screenplay, Batman Begins) were fans of this episode, or if this episode is based at all on a particular comic that they might be fans of. There were a couple of interesting similarities, such as Batman becoming a hideous monster in Crane's eyes and exposing a crowd to the toxin to have them fight Batman, that make me think they probably have a similar inspiration.

Nothing to Fear was written by Henry T. Gilroy and Sean Catherine Derek. Gilroy appears to have also worked on one episode of Justice League Unlimited, and is also co-wrote the new Clone Wars CGI Movie and worked as a writer and story editor for season one of the show. I haven't seen the new Clone Wars stuff at all, so I can't really comment of it that's a good thing or not. But I thought it was interesting. GalacticBinder.com has an interview with Gilroy that I haven't read, but might be good reading.

Sean Catherine Derek worked on several episode of Batman: TAS, as well as possibly interesting things like Mortal Kombat: the Animated Series, Spider-Man: the Animated Series, and some not so interesting things, such as The SMurfs and Captain Planet (I pity her). It appears she's also a writer on an upcoming Mortal Kombat movie.

Boyd Kirkland directed this episode, and he's got a nice long list of work I should mention. He was a producer and writer on X-Men: Evolution (and animated series), as well as directing quite a number of Batman: TAS Episodes. He worked on the feature length animated film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (according to Dragonlance Movie Site (another animated film he worked on) he co-directed Mask of the Phantasm), and co-wrote, directed, and produced Batman & MR Freeze: Sub-Zero, the second feature length film from this series. I've never heard of him before tonight, but I really like him now. He's worked in animation for 30 years, also having been involved in Spiderman and GI Joe animated shows in the '80s.

And now I realize I haven't really talked about my feelings for this episode. It was mostly good. It didn't feel as bland to me as Christmas with the Joker, but I didn't find myself as intrigued with it as I did On Leather Wings, but I wonder how much of that is my unfamilarity with Man-Bat, versus feeling more or less familiar with Scarecrow. I think it was a good introduction to Scarecrow and his fascination with fear and its effects. In the scene where he gassed a large crowd, while he was making his getaway he paused and looked around with an interested look on his face. I could tell that he wanted to see how people were reacting, he wanted to enjoy their terror. Scarecrow's design gets better in the final incarnation of the show (where he looks more like a corpse than a cartoony scarecrow), but the shape of his eyes and mouth, and his low-ish voice helped keep him from being completely un-scary.

We also are show a bit of Bruce's character, what's he afraid of. It's not spiders, or death, or physical harm (as we saw with other people who were Fear Toxin-ed), but he's afraid of not making his parents proud, of not living up to the vow he made to clean Gotham of its crime.

So, yes, it was a good, enjoyable episode. And that's probably enough about this particular episode. Coming up next, another Joker episode that fell kinda flat for me, and Poison Ivy's first appearance in the series. Tune in Tuesday morning.

Remember kids, There's Nothing to Fear, only Fear Itself.

Episode Listing