"What did they used to call it? 'Stereo'?"
Thoughts on Disc 02 of "Justice League Unlimited"
(Once again, spoilers for JLU if anybody cares. Also, VERY mild spoilers for Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker that you'd find out in the opening scenes anyway.)
8. The Greatest Story Never Told: Blah-blah obligatory reference to that one Buffy episode where we follow Xander saving the school while in the background everybody else averts the Apocalypse. Actually, while it's true I was always curious about what uber-brave thing Giles had done in that episode (which Buffy only alludes to), I was DYING from wanting to know about the whole Batman-Superman-WonderWoman combination that resulted in a half-Batman, half-Superman body speaking in Diana's voice. I assume that was a result of the Bad Guy (Mordu, apparently) casting some sort of spell on them, and not something they did on purpose with some help from Zatanna or something -- but, on the other hand, I can't help but think that the "trinity" combined into one being would have made for a pretty powerful force against Mordu. So I would have loved to see that.
What we actually did see, though, was pretty awesome. My apologies now, Magrat -- I know the Atom is your JLU favorite, but mine is now hands-down Booster Gold. (Gawd, do I hope he comes back for more episodes.) This episode was laugh-out-loud funny on more than one occasion ("Maybe they need a vase."), although it also unbelievably made me tear up when I thought Skeets was a goner (-- given certain RL events that have been going on, however, maybe this was to be expected). And the scientist lady was really cool -- pretty without being a bombshell, she's given something to DO and a reason for being there other than Just To Have A Girl In This One. I really _enjoyed_ this episode -- and if it is Bruce Timm's fault that I have added both "Wonder Woman" AND now "Justice League Unlimited" to my new monthly comic book pull list, well, c'est la vie. :) This one'll be getting a lot of rewatches, I think. And Batman's not even in it that much! Although, well -- he still makes his presence known, bless him. ("CROWD. Control.")
9. Ultimatum: Another fine episode with some touches of Diana character insight that I appreciated. (I'm a sucker for any character who finds themselves working with teenagers, given my profession and all.) I did get the allusion to the Wonder Twins, which was fun. And once again -- it was another puzzle piece sliding into place as to where on earth the "Terry is basically Bruce's clone" plot twist is coming from. I enjoy the "they're actually clones" sci-fi trope, for whatever reason, and it was well-employed here. ALSO: my heart nearly seized up when Amanda Waller called Batman "Rich Boy." Even though of COURSE I've known she has to know who he is at some point. (How else could she go about eventually cloning him?) It was just, to have it confirmed like that ... well. Bruce basically took it better than I did. :D
10. Dark Heart: Just a great battle episode. But an intellectual enough battle that I wasn't looking at the DVD counter to see how many more minutes of punching we had to get through. Having Batman around no doubt helped on a number of levels -- not only in making it a fight about wits as much as strength as it was providing me with the best line in the history of the world ever. This one'll probably get a lot of rewatches, too.
11. Wake the Dead: HAWKGIRL! HAWKGIRL HAWKGIRL HAWKGIRL!! Who apparently used to beat Batman at chess all the time, which for some reason I found fascinating.
Hawkgirl is my favorite core JL member after Batman (well, okay, and after Superman too) (and to be fair, at this point Hawkgirl probably ties with Diana in the Second-Favorite Slot). I've been consistently loving how they've been handling Hawkgirl's character -- betrayal-and-redemption stories are probably my absolute favorite, and it's almost never a female character who gets to be at the focus of it, so I love it on multiple levels -- and this furthering of her redemption is no exception to my appreciation. I was relieved that they didn't bring back Grundy permanently, because that would have cheapened the truly magnificent "Terror Beyond" episode which is one of my favorites. However, only something as big as the momentary return of Grundy could have shaken Hawkgirl back into action, so it was brilliance to bring him back for as long as they did.
ALSO: I want to hate Vixen because I ship GL/Hawkgirl SO HARD ... but I can't. I'm fond of Vixen -- in a reverse effect this time, I'm fond of her from the comics, when she showed up in one of the Justice League retroactive books DC released this summer. She's COOL, and I can't help but like her, even if it means Another Annoying Love Triangle. ALTHOUGH GL BETTER WIND UP WITH HAWKGIRL. I know Bruce and Diana can never permanently work it out -- I would have known this even if I didn't have Batman Beyond in the future to confirm that Bruce never marries anybody; I simply Really Know This Version Of Bruce, and he is not the marrying type. (Not that this stops me from shipping the hell out of Bruce and Diana.) But GL and Hawkgirl? C'MON, PEOPLE. MAKE THIS WORK.
Also -- if Superman broke the tie on whether or not Hawkgirl could stay in the Justice League, it has to be that J'onn and Flash voted her to stay and Wonder Woman and Bats voted for her to leave. I'm still having to think about this, particularly as I'm currently reading the Justice League "Tower of Babel/Divided We Fall" graphic novel collection. The parallels in the ending of "Tower of Babel" and the finale of the first Justice League animated series are undeniable, right down to Supes casting the tie-breaking vote. It's ... something to think about, yeah.
(POSTSCRIPT THOUGHT: Oh, COLLEGE STUDENTS. Always accidentally raising undead zombies instead of doing your homework! You SCAMPS!)
12./13. The Once and Future Thing: Part One -- yes, very fun, Johan Hex is always vaguely amusing. I was so excited at the opening of the episode. (Bruce gets caught out explaining to GL why he and Diana can't work it out when Wonder Woman is standing right behind him! And now it's three of my favorites off to have this adventure! AND I KNOW WHAT'S COMING, YAY!)
Honestly, Part One is a blur in my mind because I knew What Was Coming in Part Two and so spent most of Part One waiting impatiently for the second half. Part One was a fine episode -- standing alone in some respects while also setting up the problem that would need to be solved in the follow-up episode -- but it wasn't what I was so excited to see. (Which is sort of a shame, because as much as I truly don't care about Westerns, having Bats and Wonder Woman and GL along for this ride was just fantastic.)
So, considering my anticipation for Part Two, I was surprised by how the latter episode hit me. A lot of it ruddy hurt.
It was wonderful seeing Terry again. Amazingly, heart-crunchingly wonderful. (I can't help but suspect that it would have been even more awesome if the excellent Beechen comic book series hadn't been supplying me with new Terry material for this past year -- not that I am complaining, mind you, merely observing -- but still. Seeing an animated Terry in a new adventure after close to a decade was not something to be missed.) I understood quickly that this episode was not ABOUT Terry, which was at once frustrating (hey, Terry's here! Hi Terry! Let's just follow him and hang out with him FOREVER in this show now, okay? Because Terry is AWESOME! ... oh, you mean the episode has to be about other stuff, too? Eh, FINE) and also probably for the best (crossover episodes, and that's essentially what this was, can be tricky. Shoehorning The Terry McGinnis Half-Hour Extravaganza into an episode of Justice League Unlimited would probably not have been a good thing). Terry was HERE, and I loved that, but the focus wasn't ON Terry, so it remained a good, solid episode.
Still, it was fun, being in "Neo-Gotham" again. Although I wish you could have seen my face as I tried to work out what was going on with the Joker's Return of the Joker gang and their sudden onslaught of superpowers -- not to mention Bonk being, y'know, not dead. I'd satisfied myself with deciding that, oh, okay, this episode must take place BEFORE the events of Return of the Joker, hence Bonk still being alive -- but that kinda failed to explain all the Jokerz superpowers. Finding out about the cracks in time or whatever that was causing all sorts of timelines to bang together thanks to Chronos's meddling satisfied me as to explain these Jokerz having superpowers, to be sure -- but I was spending that initial battle sounding like the Doctor: "Wot? ... WOT??, etc."
Speaking of talking to the television, when Future!Hawkman from the Justice League episode of Batman Beyond sees John Stewart and goes, "-- Dad?" I actually screamed. MY SHIPPER DREAM, COMING TRUE NOW THANK YOU.
And there were some delightfully playful moments -- Batman meeting Batman, our Batman surprised to find he'd lived this long, the two of them (in the Awesomest Moment of the episode) both snapping at Terry at the same time, prompting Terry to wryly wonder if "stereo" was the right old-fashioned term. (Any time Terry gets anachronistic, it melts my heart; I haven't the faintest idea why.) The whole thing really was a smashing, high-action, timey-wimey time of a two-parter, all 'round.
But oh, the HEARTBREAK ...
It took me till almost the end of the episode to figure out, first off, what was bothering me about the older Bruce Wayne's voice. To be sure, Conroy was pitching his voice differently to be Old!Bruce than how he'd pitched it in "Batman Beyond" to play the same character, and at first I wasn't sure I thought his new Old!Bruce voice was even working. And I wasn't sure why Conroy was doing it. Maybe he's trying to make sure to differentiate between Old!Bruce and Our Batman in this episode, I thought, before quickly deciding that didn't make any sense. There's that one episode of Justice League where Our Batman is having an argument with an alternate universe Batman, and Conroy didn't alter his voice any differently between the two characters. Which made sense, because there was no reason for those two characters to sound differently from each other. Thinking that Andrea Romano or Bruce Timm was suddenly concerned in THIS episode about the audience being able to vocally tell the Bruce Waynes apart did not make sense. Nor would it have completely explained it anyway, since Conroy's JL Batman voice is already a hair different from his BB Bruce Wayne voice. (The BB Bruce Wayne has a gruffer, gravelly voice than JL Batman, although it's worth noting that both of them have a _darker_ voice than B:TAS Batman.)
So, point is: Old!Bruce sounded different to me in "Once and Future Thing" than he had in Batman Beyond. Which in itself is no big thing, but I couldn't put my finger on why it left me feeling so uncomfortable. Something felt ... off about it. And then as we continued going along, I worked it out, and it was sort of a stomach slam: Bruce Wayne, for the first time, sounds old in this episode. And that ... was kind of rough.
See, when Batman Beyond first premiered -- or at least when I started watching it regularly -- it was like almost a decade since I'd seen an episode of Batman: The Animated Series. Oh, I'd still whip out Batman: Mask of the Phantasm to watch on occasion, but in many ways Batman had ... not exactly slipped off my radar (I was still buying Batman paperbacks at the second-hand bookstore and would go nuts a few years later for Batman Begins), but Batman had at least stopped being the primary focus of my Batman interest. (It was the Joker, not Batman himself, that kept me drawn into Gotham City during my B:TAS-less years.)
Then, Batman Beyond. And while I was always vaguely aware that the True Voice of Batman was still the True Voice of Batman (or, well, was still the True Voice of Bruce Wayne), my viewpoint character in BB was very much not Bruce Wayne, but Terry McGinnis. I loved Bruce to bits and I was always happy to see plenty of him in an episode (and I particularly loved his interactions with Terry, of course) -- but it was Terry I related to first and foremost in the show. Not Bruce.
But between The Dark Knight, my return to the Timmverse several years ago, and my comic book renaissance of last summer, Bruce Wayne's Batman has very much gone from being a classic character from my childhood to ingratiating himself into my heart alongside Jack Sparrow, Adrian Monk, and the Doctor.* Bruce IS a viewpoint character for me, now, in a way he wasn't when I was first watching Batman Beyond (despite my past childhood experience with B:TAS) -- and watching My Batman get old, tired, and ill-sounding is frickin' ROUGH. (And we haven't even gotten to "Epilogue" yet.)
And then, towards the end of "The Once and Future Thing" -- Terry gets shot. Twice. And electrocuted by the DeeDees. And ... killed. He's KILLED.
I knew it wasn't going to stick. I knew that we were in an alternate future that GL and Our Bats would have fixed by the end of the episode. I knew the writers were having some fun killing off Terry precisely because they DID know it wouldn't stick and so they could totally go there without having it be a permanent effect. And yet -- when Terry gets shot, and collapses, and Bruce is yelling, "TERRY!" at the monitor, and then Bruce just sags down and murmurs Terry's name again, and Terry is dead ... honestly, it was A Punch In The Gut for me. I can't even think of anything to compare it with -- I was going to say Jack Sparrow's death scene in DMC to try and explain the emotional impact that moment had on me, but it's a faulty comparison on a number of levels. What it's actually much closer to is Sirius Black's death scene in HP5 (book not film). The two deaths are entirely different in terms of Lasting Effect (Terry gets to come back, Sirius does not), but in terms of Gut Punch my reaction was much the same. Terry being killed happens so abruptly, and for some reason was so something I wasn't expecting, that even though I knew of COURSE it wasn't permanent it still sideswiped the hell outta me. I think it has something to do with just knowing that "Epilogue" is in my future, and what a frakkingly momentous experience that is going to be in my Story Life ... but more on that in another entry.
This episode, and the overall two-parter, was not about the Legacy of Batman but was rather about time travel. This is probably why it was such a solid two-parter and not just a bunch of self-congratulatory cross-overing that wore out its welcome as quickly as it did its plot. Instead we get a real _story_, with a real villain (who is quirky and kooky but oh-so-scary, precisely _because_ he seems so harmless until you understand the extent of the damage he's really done. Then he just becomes a flat-out creeper. By the way, I love the justice Batman worked out for Chronos. That's one surefire way to keep the guy under wraps, and it's poetically fitting to boot). This is a two-parter I'm really excited to go back to later, because now that I can settle back and actually watch it instead of just waiting impatiently for the Terry parts, I expect I'll enjoy it much more.
And yet, for not being a Batman Legacy exploration, a lot about "The Once and Future Thing" _hurt_ -- which was something I just hadn't expected going into it. I expect "Epilogue" to tug quite vigorously on my heartstrings, but having "The Once and Future Thing" turn out to be, in some ways, so gritty and grim was a surprise to me. And makes me seriously apprehensive (well, MORE apprehensive) about "Epilogue." But, y'know, in a good way. Mostly.
Onward to Disc Three! It should be interesting to see if I can get through "Epilogue" before these happen.
RANDOM JL THOUGHT: Have I mentioned that George Newbern is MY Superman? With my deepest, deepest apologies to Tim Daly, but ... it's just Newbern for me. I'm sorry. I kind of suspected this might be the case ever since that Christmas episode of JL, but it was "For the Man Who Has Everything" that completely convinced me. Newbern adds a layer of emotion to Superman that I feel like Daly often missed completely, and it really shines in an episode like "Man Who Has," where Newbern has to deliver that grieving speech to his "son" before leaving him behind. He pulled it off with a level of genuine emotion that I just am not convinced Daly could have pulled off. Newbern's Superman is capable of being angrier (yelling at Bruce to leave him the hell alone so that Supes can finish off Darkseid without interference), more sarcastic (I love his muttered comments in "Ultimatum" about the teen superhero squad), and just somehow more, well, _human_. Daly's been making me happy in the Timmverse animated films he's been in, but I really do think that Newbern's my guy. Sorry, Mr. Daly.
In other news, I have three mosquito bites that I picked up from my evening walks over the past two nights, and they are itching me like BILLYO. I have mostly managed to ignore my co-workers sharing cheerful thoughts with me about West Nile virus, but the one on my left elbow and the one on the right side of my neck are bothering me so much it's occasionally difficult to think straight. Or at least keep from fidgeting. (Not to mention SCRATCHING!)