HURRICANE SWORD (1969)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

One online review compared this South Korean swordplay flick-- supposedly one of the first of its kind from that nation-- to a Zatoichi imitation called "Crimson Bat," in that the main character is a blind swordswoman. However, I've seen a couple of the "Bat" films, and SWORD is better, at least as good as an average-level ZATOICHI film.

For convenience I'll use the names applied to the characters from the English dub, since I haven't found Korean credits online. Elaine (Sa Mi-Ja) is the young blind heroine whose sword-skills are not very well explained. At some point in her younger years, Elaine's father died somehow, possibly as the result of Elaine's mother running off with another man. Elaine is raised by her Uncle Louie, but when she reaches young womanhood, Louie is slain by gangsters for some past offence.

The backstory is related after a "media res" opening, in which another older man is being chased by sword-wielding thugs. The thugs come across Elaine and give her some lip, so she kills them all. Only afterward does she find that the thugs' quarry was an old fellow she eventually calls Uncle Hong, whom she clearly substitutes for the real relative she lost.

However, Hong has some problems into which Elaine is soon drawn. Twenty years ago Hong, a single father, left his infant daughter Su Ann with another family for raising. Unfortunately, once Su Ann was older-- about the same age as Elaine-- the family sold Su Ann to a brothel run by a madame named (I think) Fa Something. Hong found out and wants to liberate the daughter he's never known.

Elaine tries to help by gathering enough money to buy Su Ann's contract. The blind heroine does so by betting on a cockfight administered by Mistress Fa, and seeing through Fa's fixing the fight. Elaine gets lots of money but her action angers Fa, who sends men (and one woman, armed with a bladed mace) to kill Elaine. Hong tries to free Su Anne on his own but things don't work out well for either of them.

In the grand tradition of Victorian melodrama, it's revealed that Fa is the bad mother who left Elaine behind, but the mistress deeply regrets her deed upon seeing her grown child. This fortunate coincidence works out because Fa's current lover is also the man who both stole Fa from her family and had Uncle Louie killed. Elaine manages to gain vengeance for all of her injuries, though total tragedy is averted. Fa is wounded but not killed, and the film ends with the suggestion that Poor Elaine may still have a chance at some sort of family.

The battles are pure sword-play with no hand-to-hand fighting at all, and I found them adequate if unremarkable, while Sa Mi-Ja did a good job charting her character's emotional tumult. Compared to the many piecemeal chopsockies I've encountered, SWORD is refreshingly linear in its melodramatic basics.

LASERHAWK (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Though LASERHAWK is strictly Z-movie fodder, I'm surprised it possesses even minor coherence after reading about all the production problems here. It's at least a slight improvement on 1993's TIME RUNNER, a movie credited to the same writer and possessed of a much bigger role for Mark Hamill.

A short prologue establishes the hoary formula from which the script takes its cues. Bad aliens (called "spiders from Mars" by one sarcastic character) intend to use Earth as a food-source whenever they eventually get around to invading. Some good aliens foresee this catastrophe. Rather than taking a leaf from the Lensman series, where the good aliens breed a race of Terran heroes, the good aliens secrete a ship on Earth-- the titular Laserhawk-- and somehow "seed" super-piloting skills into the genes of humanity, though in 1997 only two teenagers in a Midwestern town manifest these skills. The bad aliens begin covertly infringing upon Earth, abducting a busload of teenagers for a start.

Boy teenager Zach (Jason James Richter) fakes a Close Encounter in order to impress a girl at school (a small role for Aimee Castle of BIG WOLF ON CAMPUS "fame.") Zach's humiliated when his hoax is exposed by military intelligence, but he's really torqued when girl teenager Cara (Melissa Galianos) accuses him of ripping off a published comic book. Zach is indignant because he took all the imagery for his hoax from recurrent dreams. Cara shows him the comic, and both of them are sufficiently intrigued to seek out the comic's author, the amusingly named "M.K. Ultra." Mister Ultra is flummoxed that anyone would claim to have dreamed of the stuff he wrote about, because he got it all from a mental patient named Sheridan (Mark Hamill). And this line of inquiry eventually leads Zach and Cara to learn that they've been infused with the super-piloting powers so that they can counter the bad aliens with the Laserhawk ship.

If one can get past the sloppy backstory, LASERHAWK at least moves around from point A to point B with some alacrity, and the young leads have a decent rapport. Most of the FX are concentrated at the climax, and none of the aliens are clearly seen, which is also to be expected in low budget SF. Despite the script's putative familiarity with comic books, at one point one of the teens says something about Zach making himself into a combination of "X Man and Captain Kirk Jr." 

I've seen many worse films than LASERHAWK. But in the final analysis, it's just another one of those terrible 1990s turkeys to which Mark Hamill lent his name.

LUPIN III: GREEN VS. RED (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

GREEN VS. RED has one good joke toward the opening, when we see a few dozen Lupin impersonators gathered together. Instead of the impostors all looking exactly like Lupin does in other iterations of this OVA series, each one emulates one of the many "animation models" used in various Lupin projects since the anime franchise was launched in the 1970s. 

This visual in-joke was created to celebrate the impending 40th anniversary of Lupin's manga debut in 1967, just as the title refers to variations in the Lupin cartoons, as to whether the master thief dominantly wears a red jacket or a green one. GREEN takes the metafictional joke a bit further in that by the end of the OVA, one isn't quite sure which Lupin is the real one, or even if the question means anything.

The only sure thing is that one of the Lupin impersonators, Yasuo, doesn't look at all like any of the "on-model" imitators. Yet he nurtures some quixotic desire to become the new Lupin III. Can Yasuo tap into the archetype of Lupin? Even the great thief's best buds-- Goemon, Jigen and Fujiko-- won't take a position, but are content to watch things play out. But there's no real plot, just a lot of posturing and running around, with Inspector Zenigata in his "serious mode" getting more screen time than the Lupin Gang.

This OVA registers as a "bizarre crime" thanks to all the Lupin-doubles, while a lesser crime involving some diamond-theft barely can hold the same stage. There's far less combative action here than in the usual Lupin tales, but since there is at least the promise of a duel between "Green Lupin" and "Red Lupin," I'll include this entry in the combative mode even if there isn't a big payoff. 

SPIDER-MAN (1967-70)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Most of the 52 episodes of the first SPIDER-MAN animated cartoon are pretty dire from every standpoint, and the only ones that justify even fair mythicity appear in the first season, consisting of 38 stories about about fifteen minutes each and two stories of about thirty. So by giving the show an overall "fair" rating, am I just indulging in nostalgia?

I began collecting superhero comics in early 1966 and even though the Spider-Man title had debuted four years previous, I was fortunate enough to have become well-schooled in wall-crawler continuity by the time the first season of SPIDER-MAN hit the air-waves in September 1967. By that time, even as a 12-year-old, I knew that the main thing that distinguished Spidey's comic from its competition was its soap-operatic format, which utilized a greater variety of supporting characters than even the other Marvel titles. 

Some podcast reviewers have faulted the first season of the TV cartoon-- all produced by Canadian studio Grantray-Lawrence-- for having simplified Peter Parker's life to its bare essentials. Some new menace appeared in New York. Peter Parker either encountered the menace directly or found out about it when reporting to his photographer's job at J. Jonah Jameson's newspaper. The only other regularly seen support-character was Jameson's secretary Betty Brant, and sometimes Jameson or Betty would get involved during Spidey's attempts to defeat the villain of the story. 

Both as a kid and in adulthod, I never faulted the studio for this strategy. While there had been a handful of TV-toons that continued from episode to episode, principally ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE, the dominant model for animated shows was to make each story self-contained, so that the episodes could be rerun in any order. There was no real way to counter that trend in 1967, and even when the second and third seasons brought in a few extra characters, that studio followed the same basic procedure.

The key comic-book myth that '67 SPIDEY got right was the reversal of the Clark Kent-Perry White working relationship from the SUPERMAN mythos. Unlike Clark Kent, Peter Parker had to work for a pinheaded newspaper publisher who also hated Peter's superhero identity, no matter how many noble deeds Spider-Man performed. The cartoon's Jameson lacked the psychological tone of the comics-original, but the publisher's overweening egotism in the cartoon equaled that of the comic book, and was just as funny. And though Betty Brant was no Lois Lane, and didn't know Peter Parker's double ID, she and Peter were often in the position of laughing up their sleeves at the older man's clownishness. The standout episode for Jameson is "Farewell Performance," in which Spider-Man uses reverse psychology to trick Jameson into championing a cause, just because the publisher thinks Spider-Man's opposed to said cause. A couple of the direct adaptations of comics-stories spotlight Jameson's role in suborning public menaces like The Scorpion and the Spider-Slayer, to say nothing of the publisher becoming the unwitting pawn of the Green Goblin in "The Witching Hour."

Speaking of super-foes, the first season does a good job, given its very limited animation, in adapting several of the super-foes who had dominated the comic book in the years since the feature began. A few of the stories were directly adapted from comic-stories, but they were done with much more panache than Grantray-Lawrence had managed with their earlier "Marvel Superheroes" line of cartoons (the less said about those, the better). In addition to the Goblin and the Scorpion, the writers used many other major villains: Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Vulture, The Rhino, the Lizard, Electro and Mysterio. Two or three "originals" are essentially reworked versions of comics-malcontents, and even though none of the totally original villains are outstanding, they're at least adequate formula-foes. The best of these might be the two-time-appearing Fifth Avenue Phantom, a hooded chap with a creepy voice and a penchant for "the uncanny valley." (That is, he brings unliving things to life, like lady robots in one story and solidified shadows in the other tale.) But given that the action was only intermittently impressive-- and sometimes compromised by slapstick-- Grantray-Lawrence's biggest accomplishment was nailing Stan Lee's rollicking sense of humor. As far as I know, '67 SPIDEY is still the only TV cartoon to do so. (Quick example. Green Goblin begins committing robberies with a magic wand. Before ripping off the contents of a jewelry-store, Goblin parks his bat-glider at a nearby parking-meter and puts a coin into the meter, Once he finishes robbing the store, he also uses the wand to make the meter cough up all its money, and then flies away with double the loot.) I also have a minor liking for a giant robot (since he had neither name nor rationale, I named him The Living Furnace). The robot went around picking up automobiles with its magnet-arms and consuming the cars in its furnace-mouth.

Unfortunately, Grantray-Lawrence went broke, and the contract for the next two seasons went to New York studio Krantz, but with even tinier animation budgets than the first season received. Upon taking charge of the series, famed animation director Ralph Bakshi largely turned his back on the "hero fights villains" idiom of the first season and began emphasizing wacky otherworldy sci-fi scenarios for the web-spinner. Possibly this was done to overcome the aforementioned budget-limitations. Possibly he wanted to take advantage of some of the talents working for Krantz Studios, like fantasy-writer Lin Carter and comics-artist Gray Morrow. Unfortunately, all of these wild flights of fancy were extremely mediocre. The least groan-worthy is probably "The Evil Sorcerer." In prehistory, two magicians battle, which conflict includes them making two dragons fight each other, a scene that could've been fun with good animation. Evil sorcerer Kotep gets changed into a stone statue. Thousands of years later, a renegade archaeologist brings Kotep back to life, and he dominates New York until Spidey, with the help of one of his short-lived girlfriends, turns the tables.

I must admit that the Krantz seasons do ratchet up Peter Parker's love life a bit, even though he usually strikes out even more than he did in the comics. Betty Brant is barely a romantic interest in Season One, but she gets completely sidelined in Two or Three for various short-term females. The one from "Sorcerer" is one of many stick-figures who admires Spidey but shows contempt toward Parker for his alleged cowardice. But at least Peter Parker is a little more interested in the opposite sex. Indeed, in an episode called "The Big Brainwasher," Peter has a one-shot encounter with major comics-character Mary Jane Watson. In the one sexy line in the whole show, Mary tells Peter to come watch her do a go-go dance at a club, because she likes watching him watching her dance.

The last seasons do have a couple of relatively mundane shows, but they're mostly boring, even the first non-comics adaptation of Spider-Man's origin story. The few new villains introduced are badly designed losers such as "Doctor Cool," "The Sidewinder," and "The Scarf," and the last two seasons make no use of the previously named members of Spidey's "rogues' gallery," except for taking Season One episodes and re-cutting them to present alleged "new episodes." One comics-villain, The Kingpin, makes two appearances, and though the first one, "King Pinned" is unremarkable, "The Big Brainwasher" did a tolerable job adapting a recent Kingpin storyline from Marvel. "Brainwasher" is probably the only half-watchable show of the Krantz years. 

In the final analysis, the only real accomplishment of the Krantz years was that they made enough extra episodes that for many years the show could be syndicated in many markets. Had those extra episodes never been made, then the one good Grantray-Lawrence season could never have been seen in those markets, and so the studio's accomplishments would have been as forgotten as, say, DePatie-Freleng's SUPER PRESIDENT. And subsequent generations would have been denied the pleasure, at the very least, of hearing the jazzy theme song, still the best of Spider-tunes.

ECHO (2024)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I didn't see all of HAWKEYE, the Disney streaming series wherein the MCU version of Marvel character Echo debuted. But this wasn't strictly necessary, in that (1) Echo was a side character, and (2) the five-part ECHO series recapitulates the essentials of her HAWKEYE arc, The character of Echo (she has a "regular name" but I'll omit it for sake of clarity) follows a few aspects of her debut comic-book arc. If I had not read the 2011 sequence PARTS OF THE HOLE, I would not have known how much of the Hawkeye arc was derived from the comics-story. In the latter, The Kingpin befriends Echo's father, kills him, and then frames Daredevil for the crime, so that the super-athletic Echo-- who regards Kingpin as a surrogate daddy-- goes after the Man Without Fear. After assorted fight-scenes Echo finds out the truth and takes an Oedipal vengeance upon her bad dad, shooting him in both eyes.

It's just as well I did not attempt to follow what happened to the comic book version of Kingpin after Echo's vengeance, since I strongly suspect that the ECHO series went its own way from then on. One divergent direction was that the ECHO show, like 2022's MS. MARVEL, was meant to celebrate a marginalized culture within America, that of an Amerindian tribe. (Echo is of the Cheyenne tribe in the comics but in the live-action show she becomes Choctaw for whatever reasons.) ECHO proves considerably better at the representation task than the 2022 program, for all the scenes with the supporting Choctaw characters are pretty good. It's just a shame that, as with so, so many MCU serials, the show-runners had no idea as to how to craft a compelling protagonist.

As I noted in my PARTS review, Comics-Echo is no great prize. The ease with which Kingpin tricks his surrogate daughter into believing Daredevil is her father's murderer does not reflect well on Echo's brain power. However, she's still got a basic heroic persona. TV-Echo is absurdly over-complicated in that respect.

Daredevil isn't in the HAWKEYE series. In the TV show, Kingpin sets up Echo's father to get killed by the Avenging Archer, rather than bringing about the father's death through Kingpin's own agency. At the end of HAWKEYE, TV-Echo shoots Kingpin, but only in one eye. The first episode of ECHO recapitulates this history. It's implied also that Kingpin was responsible for the death of Echo's mother when Echo was a small girl, and that this somehow caused Echo's dad to flee the reservation to work for Kingpin in New York. In that bailiwick, separated from neighbors and family members, Echo "echoes" the Kingpin's ethics, becoming hard and ruthless as she works for one of the crime-lord's gangs. In that first episode, she has a big fight with Daredevil when the latter raids one of Kingpin's businesses, but the Man Without Fear has no direct effect on the course of Echo's story. Five months after shooting Kingpin and going on the run, Echo returns to her rez-home in Oklahoma.

However, the first three episodes dispelled any sympathy I might have had for MCU-Echo. Not only does Echo nurture fantasies of taking Kingpin's place as a gangland "queenpin," she immediately expects the members of her family to join her in fighting Kingpin's forces. Her uncle Henry, brother to Echo's late dad, attempts to dissuade her, but she endangers the people in her orbit with her bull-headed agenda. She's particularly unsympathetic in that she won't even make contact with her cousin Bonnie, though Bonnie repeatedly tried to keep in contact with Echo in her absence.

The writers finally have Echo re-discover a little of her humanity after she almost gets Bonnie and Henry killed. But the heroine suffers so little remorse that she almost seems like another incarnation of the MCU's favorite trope, "the conscienceless girl-boss." Also, Echo belatedly discovers that she's inherited a vague mystic healing-power from both her mother and an ancient cultus of female shamans, so she has to confer with her estranged grandmother to find out what's going on. Echo's selfishness isn't validated as much as that of Wanda Maximoff in WANDAVISION, but the Choctaw female's eleventh-hour conversion to heroism is still unconvincing. She makes contact with ancient Amerindian spirituality and more or less gets Kingpin out of her life without following the path of vengeance-- which had to be the MCU's path too, since they had future plans for the villain.

In the comics Echo's name came from her ability to emulate other fighting-styles, an attribute dropped by the MCU adaptation. In the TV version, the fourth episode finally rationalizes her superhero name by stating that she "echoes" the deeper cultural matrix of her people. While this wasn't wildly original, it could have worked, because all the Native American support-characters are well cast and decently written. But Alaqua Cox's one-note performance as Echo defeats the trope. The actress performs her fight-scenes well, so her casting wasn't a total loss. Too bad, for given that the original story isn't anything special, the MCU for once had a chance to be "better than the book."

SMALLVILLE 2:20 : "WITNESS" (2003)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

"Witness" is another weak story that I tend to term a "bridge episode." Not that much happens in the main plot, but various subplots are either terminated or initiated on the side. 

One old subplot stems from eight episodes back, when "Insurgence" boldly revealed that Lionel Luthor had, for reasons unknown, accrued a large stock of kryptonite, somehow molded into bricks. This means that Lionel also returns to Smallville from wherever he'd been after having his phony blindness revealed. 

For some reason, Lionel was sending a shipment of kryptonite somewhere by truck. Clark witnesses the truck being waylaid by three teens wearing face-masks, so the virtuous high-schooler intervenes. To Clark's surprise, the teens all possess super-strength, and they knock the hero for a loop. What we have here is a twist on the somewhat-abandoned "freak of the week" pattern from the show's first season, except that in the earlier episodes, the freaks usually got accidentally irradiated. The leader of the teen thieves, one Eric Marsh, apparently learned about kryptonite's mutative properties through chemistry experiments, after which he and his cohorts began using kryptonite-fumes as steroids, so that they could become high-priced jocks. The sloppy script doesn't explain how Marsh could possibly have learned about Lionel's krypto-cache, and none of the thieves are given more than cursory motivation. 

I think the writer's main goal was just to pit Clark against foes with similar powers, shortly after the revelations of his alien heritage and his speculations that other Kryptonians might have survived. Thus "Witness" is like SUPERMAN II writ small. After some complications, in which Clark worries that his foes may menace both his parents and Chloe, the hero defeats the baddies in a power-clash, and implicitly they lose their powers when deprived of their drug of choice. Do any of the defeated criminals rat on Clark as a super-powered anomaly? Nope, they're too busy disappearing from continuity, since Marsh and his cronies are never seen again.

However, the high-school heist artists weren't responsible either for having trashed Chloe's newspaper HQ or for menacing the Kents. Without looking ahead, I suspect these deeds will somehow be laid at Lionel's door. It's certainly no coincidence that the second thing he does after coming back to Smallville-- the first thing being to loosely accuse Lex of committing the heist-- is to approach Chloe Sullivan. He seems unusually interested in granting largesse to a student newspaper, and even knows that Chloe interned at the Daily Planet in Metropolis, a concern in which Lionel has some unspecified business interest.

Clark and Lana continue to be friendly but make no more romantic noises. Yet Chloe is annoyed by their growing closeness and she picks a quarrel with Clark. Since this plot-thread is not resolved by episode's end, I assume it gets some development down the road. The exact opposite obtains with regard to the ongoing subplot about Lana connecting with her birth-father Henry Small. It's clear some producer axed the subplot, since after some minor tumult regarding Small's current wife, both characters vanish from the show without further elaboration. However much kryptonite the thieves have in their possession when Clark defeats them, Clark with Pete's help gets hold of the deadly mineral and buries it. Lex is confined to a minor threat, in that he wants to know more about the hijacked cargo but is unsuccessful in learning anything. It would have been nice to get an update on how much Lex knows about the alien substance at this point. I have only the vaguest memory that the show finally does explain what's going on with Lionel's researches, but I'm trying not to check ahead.

GOTHAM: SEASON THREE (2016-17)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

In my review of Season 2, I wrote that "the injection of super-villains forced the writers to use the violence more carefully." However, Season Three shows a marked tendency to revert to the extremes of Season One, in which Gotham becomes a danse macabre, and citizens start dropping like flies in response to the new Big Bad-- or at least, the villain who dominates the first half of the third season.

Despite the unleashing of various "monsters" from Arkham Asylum, there wasn't nearly as much incidental death as in Season One's gangland wars. As if to make up for the underwhelming menace of  the Arkham monsters, the first half of Three introduces GOTHAM's version of the Mad Hatter (Benedict Samuel). Like the eighties comics-version, this one trades more in mind-games. However, in keeping with his connection to Lewis Carroll's motifs of madness, this Hatter's weapon of choice is an insidious virus that unleashes the Hyde in every workaday Jekyll. He reaches out to Jim Gordon-- who at season's opening has resigned from the GCPD to become a bounty hunter. The Hatter wants Gordon to find his sister, predictably named Alice, but soon Gordon finds that the demented fellow is filled with a love not quite brotherly. Alice dies, Hatter blames Gordon, Hatter unleashes the virus-- in small increments at first, affecting only particular individuals. One of those so affected is Gordon's former GCPD boss Captain Barnes, who eventually becomes a full-fledged original-to-TV super-foe, The Executioner.

Though Samuel provides a flamboyant madman, good in small doses, he ends up seeming like an objective correlate for the producers' desire to ratchet up multiple deaths and traumas. Parallel to this development, Bruce discovers that Hugo Strange created a clone of him, sometimes known as "Five," and he's a good enough doppelganger to fool both Bruce's butler and his sorta-kinda girlfriend Selina. Gordon's former flame Lee becomes engaged to another man, who just happens to be related to gang-boss Carmine Falcone. With the help of Riddler, Penguin successfully runs for mayor of Gotham, a promising idea that never really gels. But that development leads to a new plotline, in which Penguin forms a man-crush on Riddler. This results in a protracted feud between the two villains, making for some of the season's best acting as Robin Lord Taylor and Cory Michael Smith exchange verbal barbs and insidious death-plots.

The most interesting Bat-myth to be articulated in Season Three is somewhat derived from Christopher Nolan's BATMAN BEGINS. Nolan, no respecter of the Batmythos, decided that he would attribute the hero's rise to an improbable association with a band of vigilantes, "the League of Shadows," led by the mysterious Ra's Al Ghul. The second half of GOTHAM THREE is fittingly entitled "Hero's Rise," and stems from the attempt of the Court of Owls to suborn young Bruce Wayne. The gambit fails but the Court puts Bruce in the hands of the League. The logic that Nolan bollixed is better executed here; Young Bruce as yet has no clear idea as to what he wants to do to make his parents' deaths meaningful. But the League, commanded by a briefly seen Ra's Al Ghul, utilize brainwashing techniques with an aim toward making Young Bruce become an avatar of their lust for destruction. Toward the close of the season the writers even manage to take the League's desire to annihilate Gotham-- also seen in BEGINS-- and dovetail it with the Mad Hatter's viral menace.

There are a lot of minor plot-threads too, of course. The worst is probably one in which Lee Tompkins, tormented by her desire for loose cannon Gordon, willingly exposes herself to the virus so that she can, like her old rival Barbara Kean, take a walk on the Hyde Side. The Court of Owls story is wrapped up too quickly, and even though Michael Chiklis is entertaining, his character of Barnes is a dead weight. Selina connects with two aspects of her Cat-persona, taking a big fall like the BATMAN RETURNS version and getting hold of her signature weapon, a whip (though NOT a cat-o-nine-tails). The murders of Gotham citizens gets wearying after a while, but it's still fun to see the show's versions of Firefly, Mister Freeze, Poison Ivy (who has some fun scenes vexing Penguin), and the always insidious Hugo Strange. The psuedo-Joker returns, but only for a few episodes, though he does have the honor of being the first Bat-villain to get beat up by Bruce Wayne. Oh, and Alfred almost dies, but he gets better.

My recollection is that the next two seasons maintain this same overheated level of storytelling. The arc with the most mythic resonance is surely the one involving Young Bruce's brainwashing, but the actual episodes don't sustain mythic concrescence. Still, it's a good step, since the brainwashing fails in its original purpose, but still serves to set the hero on his pre-destined path.