[9.3/10] I’ve seen “Epilogue” before. I remember it well, having caught it almost by chance, long after I’d stopped regularly watching DCAU shows. It hit me hard then, seeing the statements it made about who Bruce Wayne is and was, and who Terry McGinnis is and could be. But it hit me harder now, both because in the midst of a grand DCAU rewatch, it’s built on so much that’s come before, and because I’m a little older now, more apt to think about legacy and choice and what our actions say about us more than words are capable of.
Even knowing its big reveal, this one pierced me. It’s the perfect capstone to one of the best seasons of any superhero show, bar none, and to the lingering threads of Batman Beyond that were never fully tied off until now.
With that parting shot, the stewards of the DCAU (Bruce Timm and Dwayne McDuffie) impart two important thoughts about the original Batman and his successor. They posit that for all of Bruce Wayne’s gruffness, for all the people who’ve turned away from him, for all of his inability to express genuine affection the longer he fought this war, he’s someone who cares about his fellow man more than he has the words to say.
We see both sides of that here. We see him protesting that all he cares about is Gotham and The Mission:tm:. We see him refusing to dispel Terry’s misapprehension that Bruce messed with his genetics. We see him declare that being Batman is not a curse, and not even just an honor, but a necessity. We see him not give Terry an ounce of empathy or sympathy in their blow-up. And we see Terry refusing to help a sick old man take his pills, fed-up and disillusioned with what that man stands for.
But we also see the best side of Bruce, in a flashback to him and various other Leaguers fighting the Royal Flush gang. Sent to kill Ace (the Joker-brainwashed psychic girl, not the bat-hound), Batman relents instead. He sits with this terminal ill little girl. He holds her hand and tells her he’s story. He’s still a man of few words, not able to summon any comforting oratory. And yet, given the chance to kill, even with so many lives in the balance, he trusts that there’s enough good in Ace to toss aside his lethal weapon and provide solace to a dying little girl.
Ace is a good device here, not just because she’s believable as both a threat and a sympathetic figure, but also because she can read Batman’s mind. She can tell us what he feels, what he would and wouldn’t do, in a way that the man himself rarely does.
So can Amanda Waller. Make no mistake, this episode is full of exposition, emotional and otherwise, and Waller does a lot of it. There’s plenty of moments where she and Terry announce the themes of the episode or speak in those writerly, info-conveying ways that real people never do. At the same time, though, she’s also the perfect ambassador for Batman. As this season in particular has shown, she’s someone who shares his ethos, shares his wit, and has seen his value and personhood over the years.
There’s an openness to her here that’s warm and even a little startling after how hard-nosed she is in the “present day” of Justice League. That openness makes her able to explicate Batman to his no-longer-young ward and successor, with a perspective that comes from years of watching the Batman, that slowly turned to respect and understanding. She tries to impart that understanding to Terry, to absolve his mentor of the crimes Terry suspects him of, and to drop a bombshell.
That bombshell is, of course, that Terry shares half of Bruce’s genetic material and, more to the point, that Amanda Waller engineered the whole thing when she saw Bruce slowing down, driven by a perceived need for a Batman. As angry as Terry is here, he realizes that Bruce didn’t commit these transgressions, even if he wouldn’t refute them. He tries to reject every excuse Waller gives, but the thing that set off his frustration and disillusionment wasn’t Bruce’s fault.
It was Waller’s and pure rotten chance’s fault. This episode is full of fun little nods for longtime DCAU fans. We see a last (I think?) appearance from Terry’s rogues gallery and the future Justice League. We get the first on-screen mention of the phrase “Batman Beyond.” And most of all, we get the only post-Mask of the Phantasm appearance of Andrea Beaumont, sent to be the assassin to add the dose of tragedy to make Terry into a Dark Knight, only to relent, much as Batman did, when she can’t bring herself to violate his principles in his name.
There’s power there, both because her refusal to kill Terry’s parents vindicates and illustrates the moral principle and care for others that Batman exemplifies even if he can’t verbalize it, but because she represents Bruce’s last real exit ramp. He was ready to give up all of this for her, and yet there they both were, still donning capes and cowls, or retreating to dark caves, neither one of them able to free themselves from this life.
But Terry can. That’s the other major theme of “Epilogue.” Terry believes that he is cursed, that he’s bound by legacy. Already having long felt the sense that he could not escape his mentor’s shadow, the notion that he’s actually some kind of clone of Bruce Wayne is too much for him to bear. We’ve already seen several times where he bristles at not being his own man, growing tired of what’s expected of him in terms of living up to Bruce’s impossible standards.
Amanda Waller, who’s turned religious over the years (or allways was I suppose), assures Terry that he has free will. Genetics is not destiny, she tells him. He’s still free to make his own choices, no matter what mantle he’s carrying, and more importantly, able to avoid some of Bruce’s mistakes.
That comes through in the interludes with Dana. There, we see Terry wavering in his ability to make time for a life apart from the job, much as Bruce did. We see him winding down the same path that Bruce did with Andrea and Barbara and Selina. But freed from the expectation that he can never escape that path, he plans to propose to his longtime girlfriend, willing to make a commitment, and a life, that Bruce never had time for. We’ve seen Terry vindicated as an equally valid and worthy Batman before, but this is a mighty fine way to show that in some ways, Terry can surpass his mentor, if only in the kind of life he allows himself to have.
Liberated from the notion that he was forced to become Batman rather than chose it, and from the idea that Bruce’s sad lonely life is all that awaits him if he continues, Terry makes his peace with the old man. Waller says some of the most powerful words in this whole universe to him -- “You’re not Bruce’s clone; you’re his son.” The Western canon is full of non-cloned offspring grappling with their daddy issues. Terry is no exception there, but there’s something freeing in that, with the notion that he had as much agency as any child does when trying to emerge out from under their parents’ legacies and make something of their own.
What follows is a heartening reaffirmation of who Terry and Bruce are. We see Bruce show his affection the only way he knows how -- professing not to care but making Terry soup and telling him he needs to eat something before he stalks out into the night, with a fatherly air. We see Terry opening the old man’s pill bottle for him and giving him his medication, like a child looking after an ailing parent, mirroring his prior willful neglect.
And most of all, we see Terry as Batman, leaping through the night and earning the same sort of bewildered reaction from air-patrolling policeman than Bruce once did. The cycle continues. The legacy lives on. But it’s a legacy that Terry has reconciled with, that he’s chosen rather than had forced upon him, in the hopes that he can carry on that love for your fellow man, and your family, that his father always felt but could never say.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-10-16T01:34:24Z
[9.3/10] I’ve seen “Epilogue” before. I remember it well, having caught it almost by chance, long after I’d stopped regularly watching DCAU shows. It hit me hard then, seeing the statements it made about who Bruce Wayne is and was, and who Terry McGinnis is and could be. But it hit me harder now, both because in the midst of a grand DCAU rewatch, it’s built on so much that’s come before, and because I’m a little older now, more apt to think about legacy and choice and what our actions say about us more than words are capable of.
Even knowing its big reveal, this one pierced me. It’s the perfect capstone to one of the best seasons of any superhero show, bar none, and to the lingering threads of Batman Beyond that were never fully tied off until now.
With that parting shot, the stewards of the DCAU (Bruce Timm and Dwayne McDuffie) impart two important thoughts about the original Batman and his successor. They posit that for all of Bruce Wayne’s gruffness, for all the people who’ve turned away from him, for all of his inability to express genuine affection the longer he fought this war, he’s someone who cares about his fellow man more than he has the words to say.
We see both sides of that here. We see him protesting that all he cares about is Gotham and The Mission:tm:. We see him refusing to dispel Terry’s misapprehension that Bruce messed with his genetics. We see him declare that being Batman is not a curse, and not even just an honor, but a necessity. We see him not give Terry an ounce of empathy or sympathy in their blow-up. And we see Terry refusing to help a sick old man take his pills, fed-up and disillusioned with what that man stands for.
But we also see the best side of Bruce, in a flashback to him and various other Leaguers fighting the Royal Flush gang. Sent to kill Ace (the Joker-brainwashed psychic girl, not the bat-hound), Batman relents instead. He sits with this terminal ill little girl. He holds her hand and tells her he’s story. He’s still a man of few words, not able to summon any comforting oratory. And yet, given the chance to kill, even with so many lives in the balance, he trusts that there’s enough good in Ace to toss aside his lethal weapon and provide solace to a dying little girl.
Ace is a good device here, not just because she’s believable as both a threat and a sympathetic figure, but also because she can read Batman’s mind. She can tell us what he feels, what he would and wouldn’t do, in a way that the man himself rarely does.
So can Amanda Waller. Make no mistake, this episode is full of exposition, emotional and otherwise, and Waller does a lot of it. There’s plenty of moments where she and Terry announce the themes of the episode or speak in those writerly, info-conveying ways that real people never do. At the same time, though, she’s also the perfect ambassador for Batman. As this season in particular has shown, she’s someone who shares his ethos, shares his wit, and has seen his value and personhood over the years.
There’s an openness to her here that’s warm and even a little startling after how hard-nosed she is in the “present day” of Justice League. That openness makes her able to explicate Batman to his no-longer-young ward and successor, with a perspective that comes from years of watching the Batman, that slowly turned to respect and understanding. She tries to impart that understanding to Terry, to absolve his mentor of the crimes Terry suspects him of, and to drop a bombshell.
That bombshell is, of course, that Terry shares half of Bruce’s genetic material and, more to the point, that Amanda Waller engineered the whole thing when she saw Bruce slowing down, driven by a perceived need for a Batman. As angry as Terry is here, he realizes that Bruce didn’t commit these transgressions, even if he wouldn’t refute them. He tries to reject every excuse Waller gives, but the thing that set off his frustration and disillusionment wasn’t Bruce’s fault.
It was Waller’s and pure rotten chance’s fault. This episode is full of fun little nods for longtime DCAU fans. We see a last (I think?) appearance from Terry’s rogues gallery and the future Justice League. We get the first on-screen mention of the phrase “Batman Beyond.” And most of all, we get the only post-Mask of the Phantasm appearance of Andrea Beaumont, sent to be the assassin to add the dose of tragedy to make Terry into a Dark Knight, only to relent, much as Batman did, when she can’t bring herself to violate his principles in his name.
There’s power there, both because her refusal to kill Terry’s parents vindicates and illustrates the moral principle and care for others that Batman exemplifies even if he can’t verbalize it, but because she represents Bruce’s last real exit ramp. He was ready to give up all of this for her, and yet there they both were, still donning capes and cowls, or retreating to dark caves, neither one of them able to free themselves from this life.
But Terry can. That’s the other major theme of “Epilogue.” Terry believes that he is cursed, that he’s bound by legacy. Already having long felt the sense that he could not escape his mentor’s shadow, the notion that he’s actually some kind of clone of Bruce Wayne is too much for him to bear. We’ve already seen several times where he bristles at not being his own man, growing tired of what’s expected of him in terms of living up to Bruce’s impossible standards.
Amanda Waller, who’s turned religious over the years (or allways was I suppose), assures Terry that he has free will. Genetics is not destiny, she tells him. He’s still free to make his own choices, no matter what mantle he’s carrying, and more importantly, able to avoid some of Bruce’s mistakes.
That comes through in the interludes with Dana. There, we see Terry wavering in his ability to make time for a life apart from the job, much as Bruce did. We see him winding down the same path that Bruce did with Andrea and Barbara and Selina. But freed from the expectation that he can never escape that path, he plans to propose to his longtime girlfriend, willing to make a commitment, and a life, that Bruce never had time for. We’ve seen Terry vindicated as an equally valid and worthy Batman before, but this is a mighty fine way to show that in some ways, Terry can surpass his mentor, if only in the kind of life he allows himself to have.
Liberated from the notion that he was forced to become Batman rather than chose it, and from the idea that Bruce’s sad lonely life is all that awaits him if he continues, Terry makes his peace with the old man. Waller says some of the most powerful words in this whole universe to him -- “You’re not Bruce’s clone; you’re his son.” The Western canon is full of non-cloned offspring grappling with their daddy issues. Terry is no exception there, but there’s something freeing in that, with the notion that he had as much agency as any child does when trying to emerge out from under their parents’ legacies and make something of their own.
What follows is a heartening reaffirmation of who Terry and Bruce are. We see Bruce show his affection the only way he knows how -- professing not to care but making Terry soup and telling him he needs to eat something before he stalks out into the night, with a fatherly air. We see Terry opening the old man’s pill bottle for him and giving him his medication, like a child looking after an ailing parent, mirroring his prior willful neglect.
And most of all, we see Terry as Batman, leaping through the night and earning the same sort of bewildered reaction from air-patrolling policeman than Bruce once did. The cycle continues. The legacy lives on. But it’s a legacy that Terry has reconciled with, that he’s chosen rather than had forced upon him, in the hopes that he can carry on that love for your fellow man, and your family, that his father always felt but could never say.