The origins of the Suicide Squad go all the way back to 1959, as a feature in The Brave and Bold by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru featuring Colonel Rick Flag and a team of adventurers dealing with bizarre phenomena and monstrous opponents. In 1987, as part of the Legends miniseries, John Ostrander, Len Wein, and John Byrne revived the Suicide Squad as a government covert ops team made up primarily of incarcerated super-villains working off their sentences.

The Suicide Squad spinoff comic by Ostrander and Luke McDonnell was one of the best comic books of the late 1980s, and the team has been part of the DC universe on and off since. And in 2016, they made it part of their nascent DC Extended Universe in movies.

The reintroduction of the Suicide Squad three decades ago gave us arguably the most important and impressive non-powered character in the DC universe (if not all of mainstream comics): Amanda Waller. A tough-as-nails government operative, she’s also a plus-sized black woman, something almost never seen in any kind of fiction, much less superhero comics.

Waller is the head of Task Force X, which is deals with threats to the U.S. on missions that might be dangerous. Hence the use of super-villains: they’re expendable. Each is equipped with a bomb that will detonate if they get too far from Colonel Flag (or whoever’s in charge of the mission). The villains are given a chance to reduce their sentences—each mission that they survive shortens their time—and actually serve their country.

Versions of the Squad and Task Force X have appeared in DC’s TV adaptations in the past, including the animated Justice League Unlimited (with Waller, voiced by CCH Pounder, a recurring role in the series), and the live-action Smallville (Waller played by Pam Grier) and Arrow (Waller played by Cynthia Addai-Robinson). While the roster of the Squad has varied wildly, Flag, Deadshot, and Captain Boomerang—stalwarts of the comics version of the Squad—are in most of the adaptations as well. Waller also appeared in 2011’s Green Lantern, played by Angela Bassett.

Having the Squad in Arrow was specifically done as a trial balloon to see if audiences would respond to a movie. At that, they were very successful—in particular, Nick Tarabay was an excellent Captain Boomerang—and so a Squad movie was greenlit, bringing in Viola Davis to play Waller (Octavia Spencer and Oprah Winfrey were also considered), and Jay Kinnaman to play Flag after Tom Hardy had to drop out.

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Both Boomerang and Deadshot were givens to be part of the roster for the film. Both D-list villains associated with, respectively, the Flash and Batman prior to 1987, Ostrander developed both characters brilliantly in the Suicide Squad comic book. Boomerang became the embittered comic relief, and also one character who remained unrepentantly evil and self-serving no matter what. Deadshot, though, became a much more complex character, given a background and a brutal past history. Jai Courntey was cast as Boomerang, with Will Smith (last seen in this rewatch in the Men in Black trilogy) playing Deadshot.

The rest of the team included Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnoye-Agbaje, last seen in this rewatch in Thor: The Dark World), Katana (Karen Fukuhara), Slipknot (Adam Beach), and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie).

The Enchantress was a mystical antihero/villain type from the 1960s—a split personality, she was both June Moone and another personality/persona, the Enchantress, who was not always on the side of the angels. El Diablo started as an Old West vigilante in All-Star Western in 1970, and there have been two different modern versions, one a costumed hero, the other—the one this version is based on—a villain. Killer Croc is a longtime Batman villain, born with a rare genetic condition that gives him a reptilian appearance as well as great strength. Katana was a founding member of the Outsiders, and has also been part of the Birds of Prey and the Justice League. Slipknot was a minor Firestorm villain from the 1980s who, like Enchantress, has become much more prominent since appearing in the Suicide Squad comic.

And then there’s Harley Quinn, who was never actually associated with the Squad until this movie, though she’s part of the comics version now. Originally created for Batman: The Animated Series as Joker’s moll/sidekick, the character—voiced by Arleen Sorkin—became a massive hit, and quickly was brought into the comics continuity. Formerly a therapist named Harleen Quinzel, she became obsessed with the Joker while treating him and went over to the metaphorical dark side.

Her past with the Joker is used in this movie, with Jared Leto playing the Clown Prince of Crime. Ben Affleck also reprises his role as Batman in a small role capturing both Quinn and Deadshot. The intent was to set up Leto to be the Joker in an Affleck-led movie called The Batman, but what with Joaquin Phoenix now playing the title role in the upcoming Joker and Affleck no longer attached to The Batman, who the hell knows.

Besides Affleck, there’s also a cameo by Ezra Miller as the Flash capturing Boomerang. David Harbour plays Dexter Tolliver, Ike Barinholtz plays Griggs, Scott Eastwood plays GQ Edwards, and Alain Chanoine plays Incubus, Enchantress’s brother.

The film was a box-office success, but a critical flop. A sort-of sequel, The Suicide Squad, is being written and directed by Guardians of the Galaxy‘s James Gunn for 2021 release, with only Robbie and Courtney so far confirmed to be reprising their roles. Robbie is also starring in a spinoff, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), due for early 2020 release.

“Behold the voice of God”

Suicide Squad
Written and directed by David Ayer
Produced by Charles Roven and Richard Suckle
Original release date: August 5, 2016

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

Amanda Waller meets with two government officials to pitch Task Force X. While Superman was a good guy, he’s dead now, and the next Superman might not be so nice. The government needs controllable assets to bring to bear against the next threat. Waller already has five prisoners in the Belle Reve black site in mind: Deadshot, an assassin-for-hire, who is stopped by Batman (Waller got an anonymous tip to him identifying Deadshot as Floyd Lawton, and Batman stops him when he’s visiting his daughter); Harley Quinn, the Joker’s lover/sidekick, also captured by Batman; Captain Boomerang, a thief captured by the Flash; El Diablo, a super-powered gangbanger who turned himself in after he accidentally killed his wife and children; Killer Croc, a mutant who was driven out of Gotham by Batman and eventually captured; and Slipknot, another assassin, whose background is never provided because he’s going to be killed early on.

Waller also has in her custody June Moone, an archaeologist who was possessed by an ancient sorceress, the Enchantress. Former Special Forces Colonel Rick Flag works for Waller, and he has fallen in love with Moone, and Waller says she can control Enchantress two ways: (1) through Flag, who will protect Moone with his life, and (2) she has Enchantress’s heart in a box and will destroy it if she acts up.

The prisoners themselves will be outfitted with nano-bombs that Flag and Waller control—and if anything happens to Flag, all the bombs will go off. Supporting Flag is a team of SEALs and Special Forces personnel as well as a Japanese swordswoman named Katana, whose sword absorbs the souls of those it kills.

Griggs—the asshole in charge of Belle Reve, who regularly torments both Quinn and Deadshot—is also an inveterate gambler, and Joker uses that as leverage to get him to sneak a cell phone to Quinn and get information about the nanobombs.

Enchantress manages to sneak out on Flag and resurrect her brother, the Incubus, who possesses a businessman in Midway City, and then absorbs several other people’s life forces (a cop, a transit worker, a doctor) to give himself corporeal form and power. He starts to take over Midway, prompting an evacuation of the city and the government to activate Task Force X.

While the Task Force is gathered, Flag and Enchantress go to Midway, but Enchantress then reveals her duplicity, and abandons Flag to join her brother—and Incubus manages to reinforce Enchantress’s power so that Waller can’t harm her heart. Flag is forced to abandon the mission and leaves behind the bomb that was going to be used to blow up the bad guy. This will probably be important later.

The Task Force X recruits are implanted with their nanobombs and sent on their first mission: to retrieve Waller, who is covering up her own involvement in this disaster (she goes so far as to kill the other people in the safehouse with her). En route, they encounter people who’ve been turned into demon cannon fodder by the Incubus and the Enchantress. Boomerang convinces Slipknot that the nanobombs are a con, and Slipknot believes him, resulting in Flag detonating his bomb and killing him.

Joker has gone to the company the nanobombs come from and blackmailed the chief scientist into giving away the method for deactivating them. He then hijacks the extraction helicopter that’s supposed to take the Suicide Squad out of Midway and deactivates Quinn’s bomb. She goes off with her Puddin’. Waller offers to reunite Deadshot with his daughter if he kills Quinn, but he misses—Deadshot has explicitly said he doesn’t kill women or children, and he and the rest of the Squad have bonded over their mutually shitty situation.

Waller sends the Army in to blow up Joker’s helicopter, and it crashes to the ground, though Quinn survives. We never see Joker’s body, though.

Enchantress learns that Waller is in town and takes her hostage, complete with the box containing Enchantress’s heart. Waller’s files are left behind after she’s captured, and the Squad learn the truth about who they’re facing. Quinn rejoins them, and they all decide to go for a drink, as they’re fed up with being lied to. Flag joins them in the bar, smashes the tablet that controls their bombs, and says he’s going after Enchantress. The Squad decides to go along, since they’re no longer being forced. (In Deadshot’s case, Flag was carrying out the letters that Deadshot’s daughter was writing to him every day—yes, he was carrying all those letters with him on a mission for no reason the script can be bothered to explain—and Deadshot says he’ll help Flag but only so his daughter can know that her father isn’t a complete piece of shit.)

Killer Croc and a team of SEALs go into the now-flooded tunnels to retrieve the bomb, while the rest of them confront Enchantress and Incubus. El Diablo—who has finally embraced using his powers again—distracts Incubus long enough for Croc and the gang to set up the bomb. El Diablo and the SEAL team sacrifice themselves to destroy him.

That just leaves Enchantress. The team can’t really fight her on their own, but then Quinn says that she’s willing to join her. However, it’s just a ruse to get close enough to cut out her heart. Flag gives Croc a package of C4 which he throws at Enchantress, and which Deadshot detonates with a perfect shot. Flag threatens to crush Enchantress’s heart if she doesn’t bring Moone back; Enchantress refuses, thinking Flag too weak to do it. Flag then proves her wrong and crushes the heart—which, it turns out, frees Moone.

The Squad isn’t thrilled at the notion of going back to prison, but Waller does say their sentences are reduced, and she also gives most of them perks: Deadshot can visit his daughter, Quinn gets an espresso maker, and Croc gets a television. (Boomerang doesn’t get any perks because he mouths off to Waller.)

And then there’s a breakout—Joker shows up to get Quinn out of prison.

Finally, Waller meets with Bruce Wayne, who promises to protect Waller in exchange for her files (which includes dossiers on Enchantress, Flash, and Aquaman). He also says that she should shut down Task Force X, or he and his friends will do it for her. Almost like he’s forming a team or something…

“Normal is a setting on the dryer”

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

This movie starts out so promisingly and then goes so totally off the rails, and it’s frustrating.

The setup is perfect, and very well done, if a bit drawn out. The government responding to the death of Superman in Dawn of Justice with a government-controlled team of metahumans makes perfect sense. And the team as assembled is well suited to a covert ops team, with powerhouses in El Diablo, Enchantress, and Killer Croc plus the street savvy and murderous skills of Deadshot, Quinn, Boomerang, and Slipknot.

And then they piss it all away on a save-the-world-from-the CGI-monster plot that has been the go-to of far too many films in this rewatch.

The Suicide Squad is a covert ops team. In case we’ve forgotten that, Waller says as much when she’s pitching the notion to the Joint Chiefs. A movie starring them should feel like a Mission: Impossible movie or The Dirty Dozen.

Instead, David Ayer gives us a plot that would not be out of place as the plot of a Justice League or Avengers movie: heroes band together to save the world from a massive threat.

That isn’t what the Squad is all about, though. They don’t save the world from big-ass threats, they protect the country from subtle threats. They work in the shadows, not in big fights in train stations.

They’re also criminals who are only in it for themselves. Seeing them come together in the bar and decide to ante up and be heroes anyhow doesn’t feel earned in the least. The camaraderie among the team members is utterly unconvincing as well. It’s a good thing Deadshot said he didn’t kill women and children, because it’s the only reason I believe he didn’t kill Quinn when Waller ordered him to. I have a much easier time believing that Quinn would actually join Enchantress in helping take over the world than I would that she’d kill her to protect the rest of the team. El Diablo calls them his family before he sacrifices himself, and I just don’t see it.

The movie suffers from lukewarm antagonists. Cara Delivingne and Alain Chanoine are nowhere as the mystical villains, and Jared Leto’s Joker is—okay? I guess? I dunno, he’s got his moments, and he feels right for the part, but he’s underwhelming. He doesn’t dominate the action the way Cesar Romero, Mark Hamill, Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger did.

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

Worse, though, is Jay Kinnaman, who is completely DOA as Flag. Robert Kanigher’s version of Flag from the original Suicide Squad was an un-nuanced stiff, but John Ostrander made him a tormented soldier with trust issues and a deadly mix of a death wish with a fear of death. Kinnaman is pretty much Kanigher’s incredibly boring Flag, and I really wish Tom Hardy had stuck with the role, because he could’ve given us Ostrander’s much more interesting one.

Will Smith is frustrating here, because Smith can act, but most of the time he’s just called upon to play The Will Smith Character, which costs us getting to see Deadshot, instead getting Assassin Will Smith. Mind you, The Will Smith Character is always fun and entertaining and gets most of the best lines, which Smith delivers with strong emotions and impeccable timing, but I really wanted to see Deadshot.

Viola Davis is the best live-action Waller we’ve gotten so far, though the script makes her frustratingly ineffective—the whole plot happens because she wasn’t able to keep Enchantress in check, and she’s captured and rendered helpless, needing to be rescued by her team, and in the end she’s asking Bruce Wayne for help. Still, she nails the character’s steel and resolve perfectly, and I hope they bring her back for The Suicide Squad, as the Squad without a strong Waller is pointless.

Jay Hernandez (currently being all charming in the new Magnum P.I. series) gives El Diablo heart, and you feel for him when he sacrifices himself. Jai Courtney doesn’t elevate Boomerang beyond “asshole,” but the script doesn’t help matters. (As I said above, Nick Tarabay was way more effective on Arrow in the same role.) Adewale Akinnoye-Agbaje is clearly having fun as Croc, and Karen Fukuhara is quietly effective as Katana.

But the star of this movie is Margot Robbie, who simply nails it, perfectly channeling Arleen Sorkin’s Brooklyn attitude as Quinn. She takes over the movie, absolutely nailing Quinn’s psychosis, her fatal attraction to “Mr. J,” her warped sense of humor, and her weird sense of loyalty. It’s hardly surprising that, three years later, conventions are still filled with cosplayers in “Daddy’s Li’l Monster” t-shirts and short-shorts carrying baseball bats…

Let’s hope that James Gunn, who pretty much did Suicide Squad in Space with the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, can get it right next time.

After this, we turn the clock back a century to World War I, as the world is introduced to Wonder Woman.

Keith R.A. DeCandido compiled a collection of quotes by and about Batman for the Insight Editions Tiny Book Batman: Quotes from Gotham City, which will be out in July. Also coming in July is his Alien novel Isolation, based in part on the 2014 videogame of the same name.

The notion of superheroes teaming up is almost as old as superheroes, as the Justice Society of America, which initially put Doctor Fate, Hour-Man, the Spectre, Hawkman, and the Golden Age versions of Green Lantern, the Flash, the Atom, and the Sandman together in the third issue of All-Star Comics, was created by Gardner Fox in 1940.

The JSA feature ended with the last issue of All-Star Comics in 1951, but when Fox and Julius Schwartz revived the National Periodical Publications (what DC was called then) superhero lineup in the late 1950s, they eventually brought most of them together in the Justice League of America, which debuted in The Brave and the Bold #28 in 1960, and featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Martian Manhunter, and the new versions of the Flash and Green Lantern. They’ve been the flagship DC team ever since.

Much like Marvel’s Avengers (who have a movie of their own out today), created three years after the JLA (which was shortened to the Justice League after the book was rebooted following 1986’s Legends miniseries), the League has always been the book that features most of DC’s heavy hitters. While they haven’t been consistent members of the team, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have always been the heart of the team to some extent.

DC’s animated adaptations have had versions of the Justice League going back to 1973 with the debut of Super Friends (which went through several variant titles over the course of thirteen years, finally ending in 1986 with the title, The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians). Currently, Justice League Action is running on Cartoon Network, and in the early 2000s, Bruce Timm produced two animated series (Justice League and Justice League Unlimited) that spun off from the seminal Batman and Superman animated series of the 1990s, and was one of the best versions of the JL ever created in any medium.

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Two prior attempts to do a live-action version crashed and burned. The TV one in 1997 only got as far as a dreadful pilot, which we suffered through previously in this rewatch. George Miller was putting together a feature film in the mid-2000s, having gone so far as to cast D.J. Cotrona (Superman), Armie Hammer (Batman), Megan Gale (Wonder Woman), Common (Green Lantern), Adam Brody (the Flash), Teresa Palmer (Talia al-Ghul), and Jay Baruchel (Maxwell Lord). But the 2007 writers strike messed things up, and the whole thing fell apart.

With the launching of DC’s own version of a cinematic universe with 2013’s Man of Steel, the groundwork for a JL movie was laid in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, starting with that movie’s subtitle, continuing with Wonder Woman’s supporting role in the movie, and cameos by Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Cyborg’s Dad.

Chris Terrio, who did the final draft of Dawn of Justice, was hired to write the script, working at least in part off drafts by David S. Goyer and Will Beall, neither of whom were credited. Zack Snyder was brought back to direct, and Snyder also hired Joss Whedon to bring some of his Avengers magic to some rewrites of the script.

Tragedy struck in the spring of 2017 when Snyder’s daughter Autumn took her own life. Snyder stepped down from directing the film, and Warner Bros. brought Whedon in to finish the film and do two months’ worth of reshoots.

Back from Dawn of Justice are Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Diane Lane as Martha Kent, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Pennyworth, Jason Momoa as Aquaman, Ray Fisher as Cyborg, Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor, and Joe Morton as Silas Stone. Back from Suicide Squad are Ben Affleck as Batman and Ezra Miller as the Flash. Back from Wonder Woman are Gal Gadot as WW, Connie Nielsen as Hippolyta, a computer-generated David Thewlis as Ares in a flashback, and an uncredited Robin Wright as Antiope in that same flashback. Introduced in this film are J.K. Simmons as Commissioner James Gordon, Ciarán Hinds as Steppenwolf, Amber Heard as Mera, Billy Crudup as Henry Allen, Holt McCallany as a burglar, Marc McClure (who played Jimmy Olsen in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies) as a police officer, and Joe Manganiello as Deathstroke.

Momoa and Heard will next appear in Aquaman. Gadot, Nielsen, and Wright are said to be returning in Wonder Woman 1984, and allegedly a Flash movie with Miller is still in development. While the still-scheduled The Batman was originally to have Affleck, Irons, and Simmons, it’s unknown what’s actually happening with that movie at this point, except that Affleck will not be returning as Batman. While a sequel to this film is always a possibility (it was originally conceived as a two-part tale, and both the mention of Darkseid and the post-credits tag with Luthor and Deathstroke are specifically designed to set up future JL films), it isn’t on any schedule right now. The film had a massive budget, so it needed to do Avengers numbers to make any actual money for the studio. Instead, its entire worldwide box office barely matched that of just Avengers’s domestic total, and it had the worst box office of any of the DCEU films extant.

“What are your superpowers again?” “I’m rich…”

Justice League
Written by Chris Terrio & Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon
Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon (uncredited)
Produced by Charles Roven and Deborah Snyder and Jon Berg and Geoff Johns
Original release date: November 17, 2017

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

We open with cell phone video of two kids interviewing Superman for their podcast. Then we cut to Superman being mourned following his death in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

In Metropolis, crime is on the rise, and Lois Lane has been writing puff pieces for the Daily Planet at her own request.

In Smallville, the bank has foreclosed on the Kent house.

In Gotham City, Batman stops a burglar and dangles him off a roof, in the hopes of attracting a parademon, which feeds on fear. Sure enough, one shows, but once Batman captures it in a net, it disintegrates.

In Paris, Wonder Woman stops terrorists from blowing up a bank.

In Themyscira, an alien artifact called a Mother Box that the Amazons are guarding has activated. A creature called Steppenwolf shows up, accompanied by more parademons, and takes the Mother Box, killing many Amazons along the way.

Hippolyta sends a warning to Wonder Woman, who goes to Gotham City to tell Batman that it’s time for them to gather heroes. She tells him the story of Steppenwolf, who used the Mother Boxes to try to terraform Earth centuries ago. An alliance of Atlanteans, Amazons, Greek gods, and “the tribes of man,” as she calls them (led, seemingly, by King Arthur) joined forces to defeat Steppenwolf, driving him off-planet. The three Mother Boxes were separated, one entrusted to Atlantis, one to humanity, and one to the Amazons.

The images of those three boxes is all over Luthor’s files that Batman stole in Dawn of Justice, and he also saw it left as an impression on the wall against which the parademon was leaning when it self-immolated. Batman and Wonder Woman agree to recruit the other three metahumans they found in Luthor’s files, with Batman travelling north to Iceland to find Arthur Curry, known as the Aquaman, who helps a small Icelandic town during the winter (the image of the three boxes is also in a mural in that town), and then to Central City to recruit Barry Allen, a speedster. Wonder Woman, meanwhile, tracks down Victor Stone, who was in a horrible accident that killed his mother and almost killed him, but his father Silas, the head of S.T.A.R. Labs, uses alien technology to make him a cyborg.

That alien tech is the Mother Box that was kept with humanity. While Stone doesn’t agree to join, he does agree to try to use the new tech that’s part of him to track down Steppenwolf.

Batman is half successful: Aquaman tells him to screw off (making fun of his costume choice, referring to Gotham City as a shithole, and swimming away), but the Flash joins unhesitatingly. He doesn’t have friends, and his father is in jail for killing his wife, but Flash thinks his dad is innocent.

Steppenwolf attacks an Atlantean outpost. Aquaman tries to stop him, aided by an Atlantean princess named Mera. Mera claims to know Aquaman’s mother, about whom Aquaman knows only that she abandoned him and his father when Aquaman was a baby. Mera insists that she had no choice, and that she would be the one defending Atlantis now. Mera urges Aquaman to go after Steppenwolf now, which he reluctantly agrees to. (On the one hand, you wonder why she didn’t ask the rightful king of Atlantis to do this. On the other hand, when we meet him in Aquaman, he’s a total dick, so yeah. We’ll deal with that next week.)

Steppenwolf kidnaps people from S.T.A.R. Labs, including Silas, to learn where the Mother Box is.

The Bat-signal shines in the sky, and Batman, Wonder Woman, and Flash show up on the roof of GCPD headquarters—as does Stone, who wants to find his Dad. They have a pattern to the appearances of the parademons, and they track it to a tunnel under Gotham Harbor. The four of them fight the parademons and Steppenwolf, and mostly get their asses kicked. However, thanks to Flash’s super-speed, the S.T.A.R. Labs hostages are rescued.

Steppenwolf knocks a hole in the wall that will flood the tunnel, but Aquaman shows up just in time to save them from that, now armed with a trident. (It’s actually got five prongs—a quindent?)

They return to the Batcave. Stone has the third Mother Box, revealing that Silas used it to save Stone’s life. He thinks he can trace Steppenwolf using his own implants. Batman also thinks they can use Mother Box and the Kryptonian ship that’s still in Metropolis to resurrect Superman. Wonder Woman thinks he’s crazy—the last time that ship was used to resurrect Zod, we got Doomsday—but Stone runs the numbers, and thinks they can do it. They dig up Clark Kent’s grave, and then bring the body to the Kryptonian ship where Flash provides a spark and the Mother Box provides the energy, and Superman is brought back to life.

At first, he’s disoriented and starts beating up the various heroes (at one point throwing Batman’s “do you bleed?” line from Dawn of Justice back at him), but then Alfred arrives with Lane. He flies her to Smallville, and she helps bring him back to himself.

Back in Metropolis, though, Steppenwolf attacks, taking the Mother Box, which the heroes just left lying around like idiots while fighting Superman. He now has all three.

Stone traces Steppenwolf to a town way off the grid in Russia. There’s no sign of Superman, so they go without him. Aquaman is not sanguine about their chances, but goes anyhow.

Steppenwolf is starting his massive terraforming with the Mother Boxes. The heroes arrive, with Batman drawing the parademons away so the others can attack. This is suicide, and Wonder Woman leads Stone and Aquaman and Flash to save his ass, and then they attack Steppenwolf, except for Stone, who tries to stop the Mother Boxes.

Superman shows up in the nick of time and punches Steppenwolf very very hard. He helps Stone separate the Mother Boxes, which renders them dormant. Flash saves a family from being killed, while Superman saves an entire building full of people. Superman then uses his super-breath to freeze Steppenwolf’s axe, which then shatters on impact from Wonder Woman’s sword. Steppenwolf suddenly feels fear, which draws the parademons to attack him and they all go away in a boom tube because the movie’s over now.

Batman, Alfred, and Wonder Woman check out a huge mansion that they can convert into their headquarters. In addition, Bruce Wayne buys the bank that foreclosed on the Kent house and has them un-foreclose it, so Martha can move back in. Wonder Woman decides to be more public in her heroism, while Flash has gotten a job at a crime lab. Flash also challenges Superman to a race.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor has escaped from prison, and is now on a yacht, where he has recruited the first member of his version of the Injustice Gang: Deathstroke the Terminator.

“Please, we have families!” “Why does everyone keep telling me that?”

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

 Ye flipping gods, what a mess this film is…

You would be hard-pressed to find two filmmakers who are less alike than Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder, so asking the former to reshoot and rewrite the latter is a notion fraught with peril, rather akin to asking Terry Pratchett to partially rewrite George R.R. Martin.

And you can so totally see the seams. One minute, it’s a dark, dank, deconstructionist film from someone who finds no joy in superheroes, the next it’s a quip-filled superhero story that takes quite a bit of joy in being about superheroes. Having them both in the same movie makes for an unsettling and peculiar viewing experience, because we get two distinct, incompatible tones.

This movie has craptons of problems, but the biggest one is its very foundation, which is the notion that Superman’s death has caused strife and chaos and misery, seen in a montage at the top of the film (under a rather good cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” by Sigrid), and it is utterly unconvincing. Every single moment of Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice was given over to the notion that Superman was dangerous that Superman was not to be trusted, and that Superman wasn’t even much of a hero. And even if he did lots of heroic things in the eighteen months between those two movies, it was only eighteen friggin months. A year and a half is not enough time for Superman to have become so incredibly symbolically important to humanity that his death would be so devastating that it would be enough to wake up the Mother Boxes and have them summon Steppenwolf to take another shot at conquering.

Just like in Dawn of Justice, the filmmakers are counting on Superman’s pop-culture footprint to do the storytelling work that they themselves have failed to do, and I, at least, did not buy it for a nanosecond. The Superman Henry Cavill played in the last two movies was no kind of symbol of hope, no matter how many times he told us what the S on his chest meant.

Now in this movie, he actually plays Superman. This is the first time I’ve recognized Cavill as the character we’ve been reading in comics and seeing in past films and various animated releases for eight decades. Even if they had to CGI out his mustache for Mission: Impossible: Fallout for the two months of reshoots…

Indeed, the acting in this film is top-notch, which is one of the reasons why it’s still fairly watchable. Ben Affleck doubles down on his older Batman, one who is slowing with age and taking longer to heal. At one point Wonder Woman tells him he can’t do this forever, and Batman’s response is, “I can barely do it now.” I’m really sorry that Affleck is no longer set to play the title role in The Batman, because I’m genuinely interested in this version of Batman who is fighting the one foe he can’t defeat: the aging process. (I freely admit that my being a martial artist who just turned fifty years old is a reason why this version of the character resonates with me particularly.) Jeremy Irons is still perfection itself as an Alfred who takes no shit and gives no fucks.

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

Gal Gadot remains radiant and charismatic—but also reluctant to go back into the spotlight. Steve Trevor’s death in Wonder Woman has her gun-shy, willing only to work in the shadows and alone, not wishing to be responsible for others’ lives. But she comes around eventually, as she’s by far the most qualified to lead this motley group. Batman brought them together, and Superman’s the inspiration, but Wonder Woman’s the field leader and tactician they need.

Ray Fisher is okay as Cyborg—he’s a little too flat, though his deadpan works nicely. (He has one of the best lines in the movie when he announces to Batman, “I had Mother Box run some calculations while you were being an asshole.”) I also do like his “boo-yah” at the end, a nice call back to the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon. And nobody ever went wrong casting Joe Morton in anything, and having him play someone who is responsible for screwy things with advanced technology is particularly amusing, given that he played the creator of SkyNet back in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

I have been a fan of Jason Momoa’s since he was on Stargate Atlantis as Ronon Dex, and he’s a delightful Aquaman. This is someone who is having fun playing a superhero who as a character is also having fun being a superhero. And I simply adore Ezra Miller’s interpretation of the Flash as someone with severe anxiety and probably on the autism spectrum, and who just generally has extreme difficulty interacting with people.

Ciarán Hinds does the best he can as Steppenwolf, but that character is a terrible choice for the League’s first bad guy. I mean, fine, you want to set up Darkseid and Apokalips, do that, but why would you start with this garbanzo? Hinds at least gives him a menacing voice—the moment where he tells Wonder Woman that his ax is still wet with the blood of her sisters is beautifully delivered.

Having said that, those sisters are mostly wasted, as are pretty much all the supporting roles. Amy Adams, Connie Nielsen, Diane Lane, Amber Heard, Joe Manganiello, Jesse Eisenberg, Billy Crudup, J.K. Simmons—most of them only feel like they’re here because they’re supposed to be in other related movies, not because they’re important to this one. Heard, Adams, and Nielsen at least serve some plot purpose (technically so does Simmons, but it’s a dumb one, with Gordon providing information the dark knight detective should’ve been able to work out on his own).

Also the Amazons have gone from wearing practical armor in Wonder Woman to wearing midriff-baring nonsense in Justice League. Gawrsh.

Plus, all the sunlight seems to have disappeared from Themyscira, but that’s not surprising, because it’s disappeared from everywhere else, too. Whedon may have directed chunks of this film, but it still looks like a Snyder-directed miasma-fest. I remember when the first trailer for this movie was released, a friend commented that she liked it, and was very much looking forward to the color version. As usual, Snyder’s world only has blacks, grays, and browns in it, and even though most of the players are wearing uniforms with color, those colors are muted. (I’m amazed Wonder Woman was wearing the red-white-and-blue outfit from her titular film rather than the sepia-toned monstrosity she wore in Dawn of Justice.)

The plot is a meandering mess, people do things because it’s what the plot calls for, and the tonal path the movie takes is being driven by a drunk driver. There are some good lines, some good characterizations, and good interactions among the characters, but the actual plot is a mess, and the movie can’t make up its mind as to whether or not it wants to be fun. And if something isn’t sure if it’s fun or not, it’s almost always not fun. Although I did like seeing Superman and Flash have one of their trademark races around the world in the mid-credits scene…

Next week, we see what Arthur Curry does next in Aquaman.

Keith R.A. DeCandido did not actually plan for this rewatch to happen the same day as the release of Avengers: Endgame, but is amused by the serendipity. He will be at Awesome Con this weekend in Washington, D.C. Look for him at Bard’s Tower, Booth 1311, alongside fellow authors Kevin J. Anderson, Charles E. Gannon, Quincy Allen, D.J. Butler, and Ronnie Virdi, among others, where he’ll be selling and signing his books.

Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the standalone Caped Crusader film that he took over from Ben Affleck, is moving forward by casting its Bruce Wayne. According to Variety, Twilight star Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play the billionaire-turned-vigilante-thanks-to-trauma-and-bats.

Reeves, whose directing credits include Cloverfield, Let Me In, and War for the Planet of the Apes, will write and direct The Batman. He took over the project from Affleck in 2017, around the release of Justice League, at which point he and Affleck began discussing whether the actor would return for the solo film. When he decided not to, that freed up Reeves to cast someone new; Variety reports that he is currently still polishing the script during the casting process. The outlet also notes that Pattinson, 33, would be the second-youngest Batman, after 31-year-old Christian Bale in 2005’s Batman Begins.

Pattinson, who most recently starred in Claire Denis’ science fiction film High Life, is working with none other than Christopher Nolan on an action blockbuster whose details are under wraps. That project includes Elizabeth Debicki (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) and will be released by Warner Bros. in July 2020.

While the talks are reportedly close to a conclusion, Deadline reports that Tolkien star Nicholas Hoult is also on the shortlist to play Batman.

The Batman is currently set for a June 25, 2021 release date.

Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As a superhero-obsessed eleven-year-old, I had a head start on the Batmania that swept the country when director Tim Burton’s Batman hit theaters in June of 1989, almost 30 years ago. I already read the junior novelization, I bought the Toy Biz action figures, and I wore way too much tie-in clothing (including a pair of boxer shorts my dad dubbed “Buttmans”).

To me, Batmania was a naturally occurring phenomenon. After all, Batman was the best: of course everyone wants to see him in a movie! And although I had read enough fan letters and newspaper editorials to know that some people were dubious about Michael Keaton in the title role, Beetlejuice was the greatest movie ten-year-old me had ever seen, so why shouldn’t he be the star?

Because first-run movies were too expensive for my family, I didn’t see Batman until it was released on VHS in November. Clad in Batman footie pajamas and swinging my toy crusader by his plastic retractable utility belt, I shrieked with glee when my hero dangled a crook off a ledge and growled, “I’m Batman.” It was exactly what I imagined when I read the comics, exactly what I saw when I animated the panels in my mind, and now everyone else could see it, too.

But after that opening bit, Batman mostly disappears… and instead, the movie focuses on reporters and gangsters and their girlfriends?And it’s kinda more about the Joker? And when Batman does show up, he kills a bunch of people in an explosion? And his muscles aren’t even real?

By the time we get that awesome final shot of the Bat-Signal glowing against a dark and stormy sky, eleven-year-old me had to face the facts: this was not my Batman.

Batman made over $251 million at the box office that year, breaking records at the time, so obviously a lot of people disagreed with me. For them, Keaton was Batman and he always killed people and had plastic muscles, while Jack Nicholson was always the Joker and was always more interesting than Batman.

Screenshot: 20th Century Fox

Other people did agree with me that Keaton wasn’t Batman—but they said Adam West was the real Batman, and I hated him! They wanted a Batman who wasn’t serious, the guy who danced the Batusi and made giant “pow” effects when he punched people. The Batman of 1989 wasn’t their Batman because they loved the Batman of 1968, but neither of those were my Batman because that wasn’t the Batman I loved from the comics.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen people complain about various incarnations of Batman in a similar way. The Michael Keaton Batman is the real Batman, because Val Kilmer and George Clooney were too silly. Kevin Conroy of Batman: The Animated Series is the real Batman, because Christian Bale’s angry voice doesn’t scare anybody. The version in the animated series is too cartoony to be the real Batman; Ben Affleck is too old and bored to be the real Batman; Tom King is too pretentious to write a good Batman; and on and on it goes.

These types of complaints aren’t unique to portrayals of Batman alone, of course. When Christopher Nolan cast Heath Ledger, the pretty boy from Cassanova and 10 Things I Hate About You, message boards across the web exploded. “Mark Hamill is the only Joker,” they declared, or asked with anger, “Why does this teen idol think he can compete with Nicholson?”

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Pictures

As strange as it seems in hindsight to question a casting choice that’s pretty universally praised now, these complaints do make sense. As argued in Roland Barthes’s landmark essay “The Death of the Author,” any written work requires a certain amount of co-creation on the part of the reader, who performs an act of writing while reading to fill in the gaps inherent in every work. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud applied that idea to the literal gaps in a comic book: the gutters between panels. Readers pull from revisions of their own experiences and beliefs and expectations to finish the work started by authors.

We readers invent for ourselves what happens between any explicit information provided by authors, so its no surprise that we feel a certain degree of ownership in these characters. Authors may give characters words and actions, but readers give them a voice and emotions.

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But here’s the rub: because each reader fills those gaps with material from their own experiences, beliefs, and desires, then each individual reader will necessarily have a different take than any other reader. Keaton wasn’t my Batman, but my Batman wasn’t anyone else’s Batman, either. It wasn’t really even director Tim Burton’s Batman, as he had to make compromises with producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber and didn’t truly get to realize his vision of the character until the sequel, Batman Returns.

So if everyone has their own personal version of characters, how can we talk about them together? More directly, how can we celebrate them when they jump to new media?

Before I answer that, I need to point out the obvious: we know that we can celebrate them together, even when translated through different lenses of popular culture, because we do it all the time. Nerd culture, especially comic book culture, currently rules the popular landscape in a way that surpasses even the Batmania of 1989. My parents, who once patiently and lovingly endured me reciting for them the plots of ’90s comic crossovers, now ask with genuine concern if Drax and Ant-Man make it through Infinity War and Endgame unharmed. As my wife and children sit down to dinner, we watch the CW superhero shows together and discuss the adventures of heretofore unknowns like XS and Wild Dog.

But none of that would be possible if I insisted that XS was the granddaughter of Barry Allen or that Drax was a Hulk knockoff with a tiny purple cape, like they are in the comics I grew up reading. To share these characters with people who haven’t been reading about them since the ’80s, I can’t insist that they’re mine. I need to remember another lesson I learned as a child: it’s good to share.

Screenshot: Warner Bros. Television

Granted, sometimes sharing isn’t so fun, especially if I don’t like what other people do with characters I love. To me, Batman’s refusal to kill is just as central to the character as his pointy ears, but neither Tim Burton nor Zack Snyder shared that conviction when they made blockbuster movies about him. I strongly prefer the haunted, noble Mon-El from the Legion of Super-Heroes comics to the self-centered bro who showed up in the CW Supergirl show. And I find Thanos’s comic book infatuation with the personification of death a far more plausible motivation for wiping out half the universe than I do the movie version’s concern for sustainable resources.

But when I read Infinity Gauntlet #1 in 1991 and watched Thanos snap away half of all the galaxy’s life, I sat alone in my room and despaired. I tried to tell my sports-loving brother and my long-suffering parents about what I had just read, but they didn’t care. I was a homeschooled kid in the days before the internet, and so I experienced this amazing, soul-shattering moment all by myself. Sure, no one contradicted my favorite version of the story—but nobody enjoyed it with me, either.

Now, everyone knows about the Thanos snap. They all have their own experiences of horror when Hulk smashes into Doctor Strange’s sanctum to warn of Thanos’s arrival or profound sadness when Spider-man disintegrates. Who cares if those reactions differ from the ones I had when I saw Silver Surfer crash through Strange’s ceiling, or of Spider-man discovering that his wife Mary Jane had died, as it was in the comics of my youth? Now, I can share that experience with everyone.

That’s especially true of revisions to characters that makes them real for different audiences. As a straight white American male, I see myself in a plethora of heroes, from Superman to D-Man. But by making Ms. Marvel Pakistani-American, Spider-man Afro-Latinx, and Dreamer a trans woman, writers have opened the tent of nerdom to people who have finally been properly included, inviting more and more people to celebrate and to create and to imagine together, further enriching the genre.

For this to happen, the characters and the stories have to change. I can’t clutch my favorite versions of Guy Gardner or Multiple Man because those versions don’t belong to anyone else, not even to the people who wrote the comics that made me love the characters in the first place. And worse, I can’t share them with anyone else because my version can only ever be mine. That’s a lonely place, believe me.

I write this the weekend after Warner Bros. announced that Robert Pattinson may play Batman in the upcoming Matt Reeves-directed film. Unsurprisingly but sadly, people are complaining, launching a petition to get the “sparkly vampire movies” guy removed from the film. “That’s not my Batman,” they insist.

And, again, I get it. He probably won’t be my Batman either, just like Michael Keaton wasn’t my Batman way back in 1989. But no Batman is my Batman, nor will it either be their Batman. But…if we can get over that, if we can accept that any act of collective storytelling involves a bit of disappointment balanced out by a lot of communal world-building, then we can see how much fun it is to enjoy these characters together.

In 1989, eleven-year-old me didn’t want a Batman who kills and has plastic muscles. And I still don’t. But eleven-year-old me learned that it’s way better for lots of people to see that Batman is cool, a character we can all be excited about in different ways—and far less lonely than insisting that my version is the right one.

Joe George‘s writing has appeared at Think Christian, FilmInquiry, and is collected at joewriteswords.com. He hosts the web series Renewed Mind Movie Talk and tweets nonsense from @jageorgeii.

I want to be fully onboard with Pennyworth because it is, in the parlance of our times, batshit. Sometimes the erratic, overstuffed plot works beautifully, as when young Alfred Pennyworth earns his pay with some troublesome night club ruffians. Other times, as when young Alfred Pennyworth attempts to romance a Posh Girl, things are a bit bumpier. But even then, there are dirigibles floating over London? There are shadowy conspiracies afoot? There is a chance meeting with a certain gentleman named Wayne?

Overall, if you like Gotham, you like British spy stories, you like terrifying female villains, you just really like the Batman mythos a whole lot? You’ll find a lot to love in Pennyworth, and so much insanity that even the stuff that doesn’t quite work goes down like a skillfully-shaken martini.

The idea of not just giving Alfred a backstory, but fleshing it out in the way the show is doing, kind of works? And if you’re going to bother giving this character a backstory it makes sense to do it in a way that matched Gotham’s own batshittery. And this makes sense because Pennyworth’s creator is Gotham showrunner Bruno Heller.

The pilot opens with a striking scene of a foxhunt set to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black.” This is a breathtakingly efficient set up. Here is old Britain with its barbaric upper-class pastimes and disdain for the common folk; here is the most “dangerous” of the British Invasion rock bands, with one of their darkest hits. And in between them is the character of Alfred Pennyworth—his lower-class accent a conscious riff on Michael Caine’s from the Nolan Batman trilogy, his sharp suits a nod to style, his devotion to the Queen as old-school British as you could get, his devoted friendships—with Dave Boy, a (crazy) Scottish Army buddy (Ryan Fletcher) and Bazza, a (measured) Caribbean Army buddy (Hainsley Lloyd Bennett)—an indication of his progressive beliefs. The whole thing unfolds in a slightly-alterna-England, where dirigibles hover in the air beside St. Paul’s iconic dome, and hangings are broadcast on TV to deter crime.

Like I said, there’s a lot to like here.

Some of the action setpieces work beautifully, especially one in the nightclub where Alfred is a bouncer. The club itself is fun, since it seems to host burlesque and drag performances, all for a posh crowd who know to look the other way when a fight breaks out. Young Alfred is fresh from the British Army, where he was seemingly doing some very covert missions on orders from some very high authorities. He wants to start a new, quieter life by founding a security company, and wooing one of the dancers at the club.

Naturally this all goes awry when a shadowy conspiracy targets a guest at the club, and he gets pulled in to help.

The show nails a particularly fun ’60s London vibe. While Britain’s music and fashion are ruling Western pop culture, Alfred Pennyworth is a much lower-rent former soldier. His father’s a butler, his mum is a put-upon housewife. They have a small house on a nondescript street, and Alfred’s dad is only too quick to mock his son for trying to get above his station. The sets and locations are grungy—until we’re suddenly catapulted into an upper-class estate or a sleek mid-century apartment. The contrast between the world of the “haves” and the “don’t-even-think-about-havings” is jarring, and adds a little depth to the show.

Screenshot: Epix

The show’s villains are a fun mix: a coldly efficient older gentleman with a suitcase full of scalpels and dental tools, a chilling posh zealot who wants Britain to relive its racist, empirical past; and the best one, a terrifying lady named Bet Sykes in a platinum ’60s Dusty Springfield wig, who insists on calling her victims “duck” and “lamb”—which makes everything so much worse. As played by the singer Paloma Faith, who swan dives all the way into to her Singing ’60s role, I believed every second of her time on screen, and reader, I was scared to death of her. Another point in the show’s favor is that she seems to be the frontrunner to be a recurring villain, which will be a lot more fun and interesting that focusing on individual upper-class twits and shadowy battle between the right (Raven Society) and left (No-Name League)—two secret societies who agree that Britain has gone pear-shaped.

Jack Bannon starts off by doing a bloody fantastic Michael Caine impression as young Alfred Pennyworth. I admit I was giggling at him for a solid few minutes, but as the plot unspooled it felt more and more natural. Meeting Alfred’s parents helped, since they’re clearly at a particular spot on the class spectrum, and Pennyworth the Elder is clearly furious with his son for trying to “rise above his station.” We also learn that Alfred is a former SAS officer, which begins to make some other stuff clear—he’s gained a particular set of skills that have made him ideal for spy work, but that also means that he’ll have to jump class, or at least be able to fake a bunch of different classes, if he’s going to move through society and blend in. He also brings some gravitas to the role, particularly in a scene where he faces off with one of the older villains.

Screenshot: Epix

But I’d be an irresponsible pop culture critic indeed if I didn’t point out that the only queer character is not only a villain, but a really deeply crazy villain, whose craziness we’re meant to laugh at. And also a woman gets smacked around a whole bunch—and yes, sometimes, she fights back. But if I live the rest of my life without ever seeing another terrified girl whimpering as she’s tied to a chair I will die slightly happier than if I have to see it again. There is also some British Class Stuff that is handled clumsily. And I was not as impressed as I was meant to be by the action and hand-to-hand combat—after the third season of Daredevil and the third John Wick, I’m pretty hard to impress when it comes to action sequences.

The relationship between Alfred and Esmé, a dancer at the club, is also bumpy. Emma Corrin is great in the role (particularly a scene where she gives Alfred an impromptu acting lesson) it’s just that there are some painfully on the nose “we’re from different worlds, you and I” conversations between them—conversations that have already been had in every single British drama in every medium ever. This territory has been covered, with a lot more nuance than this show has time to give it, plus it forces the audience to be emotionally invested in a romance that’s all of 15 minutes old. Stronger is any scene where Alfred flirts with other people, and stronger yet is the scene where it’s implied that his feelings for the Queen might be more than ordinary British patriotism.

And then, well, let’s get to Wayne Enterprises-sized elephant in the room. Ben Aldridge is fantastic as Thomas Wayne, and has a perfect spark with Alfred. The idea of building the friendship between the two of them is the one reason I would ever want to re-litigate the events of Crime Alley. I’ve seen Batman’s origin story so many times at this point, but seeing Alfred’s shift from “friend/bodyguard/butler” to “grieving adoptive parent” might add some new depth to the story, especially to see how it builds on the zippy crime show the Pennyworth creators are giving us.

Screenshot: Epix

Pennyworth premieres July 28th on Epix.

Leah Schnelbach maybe just wants the Bet Sykes show? Also: more dirigibles! Come speak to her via the Bat-signal of Twitter!

These ambitious cross-over events are completely out of control! Last month, news broke that Brandon Routh would be resurrecting his 2006 Clark Kent from Superman Returns in the CW’s massive Arrowverse cross-over, Crisis on Infinite Earths. This week, Crisis on Infinite Earths has added a new (or rather, old) Bruce Wayne, to be played by none other than Kevin Conroy himself.

The acclaimed voice actor has played Batman in too many animated DC works to count (seriously, if you take a trip to his IMDb page, you’ll get about 20 in before realizing you’re in for a Sisyphean task and dropping from exhaustion), starting with his iconic turn in 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series. This, however, is the first time he’ll be portraying Bruce Wayne in live-action.

According to AV Club, Conroy will be playing a future version of the Caped Crusader. No other info about his or other specific plotlines have been released so far, so it’s not clear which characters he’ll be interacting with. The title of the crossover series, though, plus the fact that we’re getting two Supermans/Supermen from different time periods—or perhaps timelines—strongly suggests that certain characters will be meeting their future/past counterparts. (Plus, as io9 reports, we’re also getting a cameo by Burt Ward, who famously played Robin on the Batman TV show back in the ’60s, although it’s unknown if he’ll be resurrecting his role.)

As previously reported, Crisis on Infinite Earths will span all five Arrowverse series (Arrow, Batwoman, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl). AV Club also reports that the network has now confirmed characters from Black Lightning will be making an appearance as well, making this the first time the show has crossed over into the rest of the Arrowverse.

The five-episode cross-over event will air in December 2019 and conclude in January 2020.

The final trailer for Todd Phillips’ Joker is here, and it shows a much darker side of Joaquin Phoenix’s Clown Prince of Crime than seen in previous clips.

While previous teasers and trailers posed the Joker as a downtrodden and misunderstood underdog, the new footage tracks his descent into villainhood. Starting with a clip of him talking down to his social worker, it then jumps to him seeing Robert De Niro’s character make fun of his stand-up routine on TV, which sparks a long, downward spiral that includes greasepaint, clown-masked flash mobs on the subway, a rebranding of his stand-up persona as The Joker, and a lot of unhinged laughs.

Here’s the film’s official synopsis, according to Dread Central:

Joker centers around the iconic arch-nemesis and is an original, standalone story not seen before on the big screen. The exploration of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a man disregarded by society, is not only a gritty character study but also a broader cautionary tale.

Joker arrives in theaters October 4.

Going to school is a fraught time for children. Social circles change constantly on top of academic expectations, and there is always the possibility that a bully will focus in on you.

After one girl in Florida came home with signs that she was being attacked, her mother brought in a particularly useful guardian: Batman.

As reported by 10News WTSP and Bleeding Cool, the girl’s mother Erica noticed some drastic changes in her daughter’s behavior: she had come home with a black eye and was reluctant to return to daycare. Even though Erica had reported the behavior to the daycare, it didn’t seem to stop things, and she posted about her frustration on social media.

Those posts attracted the attention of Jack, a cosplayer known as The Batman of Spring Hill. On his Facebook page, he explained that he reached out to the family to ask if he could walk her to daycare. “Hopefully this will help her overcome the fear knowing who has her back.”

Erica agreed, telling Tor.com that her daughter was already a big fan of The Batman of Spring Hill: they’d seen him the year before, “and has been a fan since.”

“When she first saw Batman walking toward her, she was shocked. Her mouth was completely opened, and she didn’t want to get out of the car at first. I had never seen her so shy. It was priceless.”

Erica and Jack agreed, and he walked her to school, assisted by a new addition to the daughter’s wardrobe: a Supergirl costume.

The visit seems to have helped: Erica noted that her daughter “hasn’t stopped talking about Batman and she definitely got some fans at daycare this week.”

While many think of costuming and cosplay as an activity reserved for conventions, parties, or Halloween, some cosplayers use superheroes as a means of bringing awareness or social support to those in need. Groups like the 501st and Rebel Legions (of which I’m personally a member) from Star Wars have a long history of raising money for charities or visiting children in hospitals, while other cosplayers have stepped up in other ways.

During one notable incident in 2010, Chicago writer Carrie Goldman wrote that children at her daughter’s school were making fun of her for bringing a Star Wars water bottle to school.

“The first grade boys are teasing me at lunch because I have a Star Wars water bottle. They say it’s only for boys. Every day they make fun of me for drinking out of it. I want them to stop, so I’ll just bring a pink water bottle.”

When members of the 501st learned that she wanted to be a stormtrooper for Halloween, they chipped in to build a proper, child-sized set of armor. While Katie might have outgrown that suit of armor, it’s since been passed along to other girls who found themselves in similar situations.

Other cosplayers have provided help in other ways: in 2013, a five-year-old cancer patient named wanted to be Batman. The Make-A-Wish foundation helped make that happen, enlisting the services of a former game developer and the entire city of San Francisco, who turned out to cheer Miles on as he saved the city. (He’s now cancer-free).

In many ways, cosplay can become a powerful tool for people looking to overcome fear in all of its forms, whether it’s from a deadly illness or from bullies in the classroom. Superheroes are the embodiment of bravery and courage, and while they’re fictional characters, a cosplayer can bring them to life right when they’re most needed. Jack’s trip to school wasn’t the only thing he did that day: he visited a boy named JoJo, who had been involved in a hit-and-run accident.

Erica noted that the day was a special one. “I think it’s thrilling and exciting, especially with children,” she said. “She will never forget this day and she gets to share this story for as long as the dream lives in her imagination.”

The Robert Pattinson Batman movie (hereafter referred to as Battinson) may have found its villain and Commissioner Gordon! That makes it sound like Commissioner Gordon will be the villain, but we assure you this is very much not the case. Instead, according to Variety, Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) is being eyed for the role of Gotham’s most overworked civil servant, while Jonah Hill (Maniac) is in talks to play an as-yet-undisclosed villain.

Variety reports from unnamed sources that producers actually wanted Hill for Battinson long before Batman was cast, but they put these negotiations on hold until Pattinson filled the Caped Crusader’s tactical leather boots.

As previously reported, Battinson will be directed by Matt Reeves. The director is best known for Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War of the Planet of the Apes, as well as his executive producer roles on the Cloverfield sequels and Felicity.

There’s no official word on production, other roles, or a release date, but Variety reports (from unnamed sources) that filming could begin late this year.

Joker garnered a lot of positive buzz after its first showing at the Venice Film Festival, where it won their Golden Lion Award. The early premiere gave the film plenty of time to bask in this glory without a wide audience, which is an odd situation for a superhero movie in this day and age. Typically, these projects care more about fandom’s reaction than anything, but Joker was very clear about projecting a different image: It was Art, not something the masses were meant to group in with dreaded popular entertainment.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked. But Joker doesn’t display the intention needed to pull it off.

[Some spoilers for Joker below.]

The film focuses on Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a rent-a-clown living in poverty with mental illness, a sick mother, and a childhood head injury that causes him to laugh at moments that society would deem “inappropriate”. As he learns more about his own past and tries to assert himself in a world that ignores him, he becomes an improbable and unintended figurehead in the brewing upheaval between the elite and lower classes of his city. Set in 1981 Gotham (which is very clearly just New York, as it often is) and re-rendered in certain screenings to appear as though it was shot in 70mm film, the movie makes no bones about its influences, primarily Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, as well as a hodgepodge of 70s auteur films. But while the look of the movie is frequently stunning, Joker makes a mistake that many nostalgic films suffer from—the belief that aping a lauded visual style and a few narrative cues somehow compensates for a lack of clarity in storytelling.

Joker, for all that it tries to pack in themes on isolation, mental illness, societal unrest, domestic abuse, class division, and the effects of generational violence, doesn’t seem to have any idea what it’s about. It is a very sad film where terrible things happen to people who deserve better, there’s a basic progression of events, but if you were to ask what sort of messages or ideas the film intended to impart—even a half-assed, deliberately vague “all life is chaos, there’s no meaning”—you’d be hard-pressed to find it. Ambiguity, be it moral or otherwise, can serve stories well in many cases, as Scorsese’s body of work has proven again and again. But that ambiguity still requires that someone framing the story have an opinion about what’s on screen, which Joker fails to communicate at every turn. Is the titular character meant to impart our own failings to us? To make us feel bad for the people who society fails? To make us less surprised at the violence we encounter every day by attempting to explain how the world can radicalize the suffering and downtrodden? These are all (trite) possibilities, yet Joker is reticent to elicit emotions from its audience, to engage them with its point of view.

Phoenix’s performance as Fleck, while haunting, seems to have no purpose beyond watching him act. Director Todd Phillips made mention of wanting to do a “character study” film on a comic book villain before taking on the project, but character studies are not the sum of whole narratives. Character studies are for cinema verité, for student short films, for actors looking to beef up their audition reels with more material. Building a whole film around a character study can only give you a performance, and no matter how skilled that performance is, it cannot be a substitute for everything else a fully realized story deserves. Many of the narrative beats are lifted wholesale by screenwriters Phillips and Scott Silver from Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, but with no intention toward altering or reconsidering the statements of their predecessors. Setting the film in 1981 further shackles Joker to those specters of the past, making the time period choice an affectation rather than meaningful decision.

But the real question is, why bother letting directors and writers create these odes to films of a bygone era when they have nothing to add to the conversation—thereby suggesting that odes themselves constitute High Art? Some have praised Joker for existing firmly outside the superhero studio mill that we’re now subjected to several times a year, but replicating films of the past is hardly an innovative improvement on that model, and pretending that the superhero genre has little to offer artistically is plain lazy. At least James Manigold’s Logan, while closely following the narrative of Western classic Shane, cared about placing the events of that film into an X-Men narrative. Joker doesn’t care to consider the potential of the superhero (or supervillain) narrative, and its realism comes off hollow as a result. The irony of this choice is that for all the film wants to eschew these tropes, it commits the greatest cardinal sin of all: showing the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne on film, something that only the Adam West Batman and Batman: The Animated Series have somehow been smart enough to avoid among countless iterations of the Caped Crusader.

There are occasional moments of accidental brilliance in Joker that give us glimpses of the film that might have been. At one point the Joker dances on an outdoor staircase in full regalia while Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” plays in the background, hinting at an alternate reality where this film took its pedigree less seriously, one where the Joker was—Batman forbid—permitted to have some fun. Occasionally, Phoenix reaches deep down and harnesses his own charisma, giving Fleck the ability to channel that glimmer of megalomania that makes the character both exciting and terrifying. But those moments vanish too quickly, and we’re left with more perspectiveless commentary on societal decay, mob violence, and the desperation of those living in poverty. Despite any seeming attempts to consider the plight of lower classes, Joker frequently paints these rioting mobs with as little nuance as figures in a board game: One sign during Gotham’s protests literally says “Kill the Rich”, which reads as though some studio exec saw a sign on set with the current popular slogan “Eat the Rich” and said, Nah, you know, it’s not clear to me. How would they eat us? Is it literal, I can’t tell. Maybe just simplify the message there.

The fact that the film cannot decide how to depict the denizens of Gotham is a large part of what keeps the whole exercise directionless. Fleck is frequently abused by his fellow citizens, but they come from all walks of life—aggravated parents, punk kid gangs, wealthy finance bros, Thomas Wayne himself. There’s a class war narrative built into Joker, but it’s missing any sympathetic undertones needed to offer perspective. Are we meant to care about the people rioting against the elites of Gotham? Should we be frightened of them? Should we feel the way Arthur Fleck feels in their presence? If your entire narrative centers around visible violent class warfare, some strong opinions are required on the subject. The fact that there are none makes it seem as though everyone responsible in making Joker wanted to shock their audience, but not risk offending them. Which is pretty much the opposite of the point of that entire 70s auteur film movement that Joker is desperate to inhabit.

The film insists frequently that the Joker doesn’t see himself or his actions as a political statement. He is asked more than once and always demurs, yet his clarifying act in the film follows a tirade in which he acknowledges that he is what comes of society’s neglect and abuse. It’s unclear if the movie thinks that the Joker doesn’t know that his statement is political, or the film itself doesn’t understand it’s own political nature, which makes the poor handling of Gotham City’s unrest and riots even more baffling. In the sharpest of ironies, Joker’s determination to build on Scorsese’s milieu while neglecting pop culture markers means the film ignores the sources that might have been the most helpful to it—V For Vendetta had no trouble building on this exact premise, but its politics were clear, deftly executed, and far more moving than anything Joker is willing to hand its viewers.

But what’s perhaps more disturbing is the fact that Joker ignores the most important lesson of the character’s wooly origins. While the film takes some clear inspiration from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, it refuses to take the moral with it—the Joker’s insistence that Batman is just “one bad day” away from being as awful as him is met with rejection in that story. Instead this film seems to posit “But what if your whole life was one bad day?” as some bizarre justification for treading deeper into the Joker’s psyche. As though that question is unique. But it’s not, really. It’s a thought exercise that anyone could do in their head with very little prompting. Riffing on Scorsese’s greatest hits doesn’t make the thought exercise more poignant. It just gives another filmmaker a poor excuse to cue up Cream’s “White Room” when bad things happen.

Emily Asher-Perrin begs you to not even get them started on the far worse use of “Send in the Clowns”. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

Remember when Batman was fun to watch? Certainly, the figure goes through eras where he’s more dour than usual, but with the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, it seems that the character has been on a decidedly grim bent on screen. Still, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who’s getting tired of sad, angry, existential Bat-plots. So how do we make Batman fun again?

It turns out, you just hand Ruby Rose a Batsuit and let her take care of everything.

[Some spoilers for Batwoman, episode one.]

The first episode of The CW’s Batwoman is kind of a big deal for being the first superhero show to headline a visibly queer hero. (Constantine could have had that honor, but the Matt Ryan version didn’t canonize his bisexuality until he was dropped into CW Berlanti-verse of DC heroes.) Fans of the comics know Kate Kane’s story well: Cousin to Bruce Wayne, kicked out of the military for being gay and refusing to hide it, donning a Batsuit with long red hair attached to the cowl to make it harder to suss out her identity, Kate has a different set of traumas than her cousin, but plenty of reasons to want to fight crime by night as a vigilante.

While first episodes (and even first seasons) can make it difficult to glean the quality of an entire show, Batwoman’s premiere does one thing unaccountably well—it’s solid, dependable fun. Even with the sad backstory (Kate lost her sister and mother in car accident when their sedan goes over a bridge), the heartache born of institutional homophobia (her relationship with fellow cadet Sophie Moore is torn asunder when they’re caught, and Sophie signs a statement denying homosexuality to stay in the military), and the daddy issues (she has one overprotective father in the form of Jacob Kane), Kate is allowed to explore, mess up, and find her place with the type of cavalier glee typically only reserved for male superheroes. It even throws in some choice Bat-tropes, like the Chosen By A Swarm of Bats moment, and the Broodingly Overlooking the City moment.

The show pits the vigilante justice of Batman and other superheroes against Jacob Kane and Catherine Hamilton-Kane’s private security firm, The Crows. Kate’s father and step mother have worked hard since Batman’s disappearance three years ago to make their company the new answer to the hole left by Batman’s absence, despite Gotham’s City’s seeming hope that Bats will return to them. The presence of The Crows not only makes perfect sense for what Gotham would be willing to do in order to maintain order, but also means that we have two problematic means of protecting the public that both rely on capitalist influence—either the Wayne family fortune, or private security that offer their services for a price. Whether the show will chose to tackle this issue remains to be seen, but it’s a fascinating set up nonetheless.

Then there’s Alice, leader of the Wonderland Gang and newcomer to terrorizing Gotham, who is quickly revealed to be someone quite relevant to Kate and her past. The lack of secrecy around many of the twists in the first episode makes it clear that mystery isn’t really the vibe that Batwoman is going for just yet. To start, the show seems keen on building relationships and enjoying the new dynamics it has created; Kate’s former girlfriend Sophie, the first to be imperiled on the show, already seems to be starry-eyed over Batwoman, and what’s better, she’s married. So this may be the first time that we’ve seen the love interest in a superhero plot pine for a hero of the same gender while being married to someone of the opposite gender. (We also don’t yet know if Sophie is bisexual, or if she decided it was better to appear straight for her career, and either decision leads to some very interesting options down the line, storytelling-wise.)

There’s also the tense relationship between Kate and her dad, which clearly needs some tuning. He’s quick to tell her that she is all he has left as a reason for refusing to let her join The Crows, despite having a wife and a stepdaughter, is all I’m saying. The idea that Kate might be choosing the Batwoman mantle for her own reasons, but also partly to keep her father from worrying about all she’s planning to do, is one of the smarter choices the story makes in altering her narrative from the traditional Bat-origin. There’s a lot of fun Batverse mythology thrown into the first episode as well, though how anyone could neglect to guess that Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same person when they’ve both been missing for the exact same period of time if goofy enough to be comical.

That’s not to say there aren’t missteps. There’s some glaringly odd racial stereotyping with Kate’s unnamed mentor at the start of the episode, and it’s aggravating that nearly every CW hero outside of Black Lightning centers on a white person who often has one or more people of color serving as support/sidekicks—in this case, Kate has Luke Fox (son of Lucius Fox) and her step-sister, Mary Hamilton—though both Mary and Luke are wonderful characters in their own right from what we’ve seen so far. It’s also unclear whether or not the show will follow the comics by making Kate a Jewish woman; outside of Magneto (and that lovely glass-breaking moment in Into the Spiderverse) there’s little onscreen Jewish representation in the superhero genre. But the show is only just beginning, so they’ve only just started to build their world and its characters. There’s a lot of space to grow.

Altogether, Batwoman hits all the notes it needs for a first adventure. Getting the chance to follow Kate’s first steps into a vigilante career is bound to be exciting, but more importantly, it takes a mythos that has been veering toward severity for too long, and gives it a chance to enjoy itself a little more.

Emily Asher-Perrin also really loved how not-slick Kate was when she forgot to unlock the door as she walked away from her super-fly rescue. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

When Todd Phillips’ Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it received a rapturous reception, winning the Golden Lion for Best Film. Now that it’s out in the U.S., the reviews have been a bit more mixed. The story of Some Bad Days in the life of Arthur Fleck, who might be mentally ill, and maybe becomes the Joker, is compelling, but not always coherent. I found myself rooting for Arthur at times, but I also found myself thinking of a very different superhero-adjacent story—one that also featured a mentally ill protagonist.

I’m speaking, of course, of The Tick.

Join me below for a spoilery discussion of Joker, The Tick, and the importance of therapy.

Todd Phillips’ Joker presents a very particular fantasy of misery porn turning into a revenge narrative. Arthur Fleck is down on his luck. He has a crappy job. He’s jumped twice in what seems to be about a two-day period, and gets fired from his job in between the attacks. While he appears to get away with murder, his already shaky life falls apart: he learns his mother has been lying to him and spends a few days thinking he’s the son of Thomas Wayne, only to be told that this is not true; he learns that he was abused as a child but has repressed the memories; he loses his access to state-sponsored therapy and medication; his mother has a stroke; he’s publicly humiliated by his hero, a talk show host named Murray Franklin.

Now this kind of abuse isn’t that far afield from other citizens of the superheroic world. Bruce Wayne loses his parents in a random act of violence that defines his adult life, and over the course of his stories he’s lost partners, surrogate children, and, often, any hope of a stable or happy life.

But one specific detail plays out in the background of this narrative: the film makes it clear that Fleck has been diagnosed with a medical condition, that he uses several medications to control it, and that he’s going to therapy each week. Early on in the film he hands a woman a card explaining that he has a neurological condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably whenever he feels stress. We see this uncontrollable laughter impact his life, as it gets him in trouble at work, undercuts his attempt at stand-up comedy, and leads directly to attack #2 when a bunch of finance bros decide to punish him for being a freak. However, the film only feints toward explaining his conditions, with a script that is purposely light on specifics. The neurological condition is never named, and while it’s apparent that Fleck lives with depression, we never learn if this is manic-depression (as it would been called in 1981), schizophrenia, or a panic disorder of some type. Similarly, it’s unclear whether his extreme skinniness is due to an eating disorder or a marker of poverty—the film draws his mental and physical health in broad strokes.

We go with Fleck to two therapy sessions. In the first, his therapist sits patiently through one of his laughing episodes, then asks if it helps that he comes in to talk. She asks if he’s been keeping up his journal, looks through it, and comments on a few of the jokes he’s written—ignoring the pictures of naked women he’s pasted into it. He asks her to up his meds, and she replies that he’s already on seven medications. He says that he just wants to stop feeling bad, but we don’t see her response to this.

From what we can see she’s doing her job well? She gives him space, checks in with him, and overlooks things that might seem off-putting. She doesn’t judge. The next time we see a session, she tells him she has bad news, but rather than allowing her to continue, he rants that she doesn’t actually listen to him, that she, like everyone else in Gotham, ignores him. Given that she opened their previous session by asking him if he found therapy helpful, this seems off base, but she doesn’t take offense, just lets him talk again. Then she breaks the news that their funding has been cut, and they won’t be meeting anymore. He asks, “Where am I supposed to get my medication?”—clearly prioritizing that over the sessions. She replies by telling him that the city doesn’t give a shit about people like him, or her. She very definitively throws her lot in with Arthur. She’s on his side, whether he can see that or not.

Later we see close ups of the bottles of meds, to see that he only has a few pills left. It’s after the meds run out that he learns the truth of his parentage, and starts acting more, like, well, like The Joker. He kills aggressively rather than defensively, and seems to take genuine joy in killing. He has a longstanding hallucination that seems to grow much stronger as the film goes on, before finally breaking in the final scenes.

Screenshot: DC Films

Because of the revelation that his mother (probably) lied to him about his parentage, we have no idea how much to trust her. Since Fleck claims that she’s the one who first told him he had mental health issues, we have to doubt those, too. We never know exactly why he did a stint in Arkham. Was he violent? Did she have him committed for an illness he didn’t even have? Are his meds actually destabilizing his brain chemistry, rather than helping it? When Fleck finally accuses his mother of inventing his illness, she’s in no condition to dispute, and we no longer know what to believe. He then claims that he feels better since he went off his meds.

This is where the film breaks into a few different threads of possibility:

On the one hand, what we have is her word against the word of several very powerful men, and a medical report that was possible funded by those very powerful men. It’s entirely possible that she’s telling the truth about Arthur being Thomas’ son, and that everything from then on is Thomas crushing her so he doesn’t tarnish his rep.

On the other hand: She’s delusional, convinces herself she’s in a relationship with Thomas, adopts Arthur to try to force him to marry her, and then gaslights Arthur for his entire life, and his medications cause him to hallucinate and exhibit other symptoms of mental illness.

On the other other hand: She’s delusional, but Arthur does actually have neurological conditions, which are exacerbated by the abuse that her boyfriend inflicts on them. The meds and therapy are helping, and when they’re cut off his hallucinations worsen, his impulse control pretty much evaporates, and he tips over into full-blown mania and starts what will end up being a career as, and I cannot stress this enough, THE JOKER. Whatever waffling there is about his health in the first half of the film, we watch him gleefully kills multiple people in the second half.

I’m going with the third one, because as is revealed toward the end of the film, Arthur has spent several weeks experiencing the exact same delusion that his mom had. Where she became convinced that she and Thomas Wayne were in love, he becomes so obsessed with his neighbor that he hallucinates an entire relationship with her. He only realizes it hasn’t been real after he shows up in her apartment and she clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, and he seems to think back through their history together and realize her presence was a figment of his imagination.

Rather than dealing with what this revelation would do to him, the film cuts to him back in his own apartment. He might have killed her—for my money he probably killed her—but the audience isn’t shown her body, or her daughter’s, because presumably (god, hopefully) this would destroy the audience’s identification with him. It would force us to consider him in a harsher light, which would make it difficult to keep our sympathies through the final section of the film, when the script frames him as an avenging antihero. Given the spotlight on Murray Franklin’s show, Fleck ditches his stand-up routine to give an improbably eloquent speech lambasting society’s mistreatment of the mentally ill. He accuses Thomas Wayne and the rich directly, saying that they would step right over men like him, even if they were dying in the street, because they don’t care—echoing the earlier words of his therapist. Fleck ends with a call to arms: “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fuckin’ deserve!” This speech leads to an all-out riot in Gotham, as the poor rise up against the rich, and take Fleck as their leader.

Screenshot: DC Films

But after he’s murdered Murray Franklin and is stuck back in Arkham, we see him with a new therapist, who is also a Black woman. She is sympathetic. She certainly would have read his file, yet she’s sympathetic to him. She’s also meeting him in a room alone, with no guards of any kind. The film cuts to Arthur in the hallway alone, trailing bloody footprints, every sign pointing to him having murdered his new therapist.

In Joker we have a portrait of a mentally ill man who loses his support network, falls through society’s cracks, and becomes a gleeful murderer as opposed to a victim. The film frames his emotional distress as being the fault of one woman who fails to nurture him: His mother. This distress is then exacerbated by the lack of care exhibited by two different female therapists—two Black women who have chosen to go into social service professions—and the female neighbor (also a Black woman) with whom he hallucinates a relationship. We never know anything about the neighbor aside from her status as a single mom, who seems to have a warm and loving relationship with her daughter. This neighbor “fails” Fleck by not actually being the person he hallucinated. Confronted with Fleck in her apartment, she tries to get him to leave by mentioning her daughter—protecting her child from a bad man in a way that Fleck’s own mother could not.

We’re asked to empathize with him as he is kicked and beaten and abandoned by the government and lied to by his mother. The film very, very clearly frames his mania and at least two murders as triumphant revenge fantasies. These scenes are incredibly compelling, and I thought the strongest parts of the movie were when he truly became the Joker we’re all accustomed to, clad in a striking, off-kilter suit and committing acts of grotesquerie. From the moment he kills his mother, up until the point where he starts speechifying on Murray Franklin’s show, I was riveted, and I think there was a lot of fascinating stuff in this film.

BUT.

There was another superhero story that told a tale of an openly, mentally ill hero, one with a real diagnosis on real meds. We were also asked to identify with him as he struggled. He was also named Arthur.

He was Arthur Everest, the hero of the latest version of The Tick.

The 2016 reboot of The Tick took the whimsical and goofy comics world Ben Edlund first created thirty years ago, and crashed into the much-grittier superhero world of today. The Terror, formerly a joke of a character, is reimagined as a true supervillain who really enjoys torturing and killing people. There’s an anti-hero Punisher parody who turns out to be a sexual abuse survivor. The Tick himself is an amnesiac who has an existential breakdown mid-way through Season One. All the updated characters were commited to emotional realism, but no one was brought more to Earth, and made more real, than Arthur.

Arthur has PTSD; when he was a little boy he watched helplessly as The Terror murdered his favorite superhero team, the Flag Five. But the Terror only murdered them after the FF crashed their plane right on top of Arthur’s father. And of course the cherry on top of this trauma was that after Arthur’s father and heroes were all dead or dying, The Terror walked right up to Arthur and stole his ice cream sundae.

Screenshot: Amazon

This is, in the parlance of comics, One Bad Day.

But when we meet Adult Arthur, he’s a normal, non-superpowered person, and one of the few people who believes The Terror is still alive. In the time-honored tradition of fictional amateur detectives, he surveils a warehouse and gets in over his head—but then meets The Tick, and learns that he’s been right all along. He and The Tick form a partnership and work together to bring The Terror down.

But in the background of this slightly skewed heroic arc, we learn that Arthur also has some rather severe mental illnesses, and is still, understandably, dealing with the PTSD of his Bad Day. He’s gone through therapy, and he’s on two medications: Amisulpride (an anti-psychotic used to manage schizophrenia) and Celecoxib (a multi-use drug that can be prescribed as an anti-inflammatory for people with arthritis, but can also be used to treat depression and bipolar disorder).

But as he realizes he’s been right all these years, his success goes to his head. He becomes increasingly frustrated with his support group, and dramatically throws his medications in a trashcan at one point.

And on the one hand, we’re supposed to empathize with him. His conspiracy theory turns out to be right! the Terror is still alive! His overprotective sister should back off! His mom is too pushy! He probably doesn’t even need those meds!

Well…no.

No, his sister is checking in because she sees all the warning signs that he’s spiraling. His mom is calling about dinner because she wants both of her kids to come home on a regular basis, because she loves them and she wants to hear about their lives. And when Arthur has a scare, thinking the Tick has been a hallucination (because, as his sister points out, he’s dealt with hallucinations in the past) he has to confront the fact that he needs his support network.

Happily, The Tick isn’t a hallucination. But this startles Arthur into understanding that, no matter how strong he’s become, he shouldn’t try to go it alone. He isn’t going to be “cured” because he was right about The Terror. There is no “cure” for trauma. He may not need to keep taking medications (it’s implied in the second season that he’s stopped using them) but he does still need to check in with his support network, to make sure he has a firm grasp on reality, especially in a world overrun with superheroes and villains and somewhat sentient robots and terrifying government agencies. As his sister reminds him, there’s a drill he’s supposed to repeat: “Normal is what normal does: takes meds, returns calls, dresses appropriately for the weather.” In the world of The Tick, normal also includes donning a super suit and doing battle with evil—but you still have to return those calls.

Over both seasons, the show makes a point of introducing us to Arthur’s support system. When he goes to his stepfather’s birthday party, his stepdad reassures him, and invites him to open up about his mental “choppy surf.” His mother, meanwhile, has taken the extra step of inviting two of his therapists to the party. These therapists aren’t just blips in Arthur’s life—they are part of an extended network of people who have used their expertise to help him, and because of that Arthur’s mom has welcomed them into the family’s private sphere. These people are all working together toward the common goal of keeping Arthur healthy and stable, which in turn is what allows him to team up with The Tick and become a hero.

Screenshot: Amazon

Now, compare that with Joker. The film gives us a really beautiful, to my mind, line about living with mental illness: “The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don’t.” But from behind the scenes there are comments like this one from Todd Phillips in the LA Times:

“Me and Scott and Joaquin, we never talked about what he has — I never wanted to say, ‘He’s a narcissist and this and that,’” Phillips said. “I didn’t want Joaquin as an actor to start researching that kind of thing. We just said, ‘He’s off.’ I don’t even know that he’s mentally ill. He’s just left-footed with the world.”

Those italics are mine, by the way. Screen Rant posits that Arthur Fleck’s incongruous laughter is caused by Pseudobulbar Affect, a condition that tends to set in after a person suffers a head injury. Once Arthur begins researching his mother, he learns that he was battered about the head by one of her boyfriends, so this could check out, but the film exaggerates the condition far beyond how it actually plays out for people. It also cherry-picks the condition by focusing on Arthur’s laughter, when he’d probably cry uncontrollably as well—but obviously it’s way cooler for the Joker to laugh when he doesn’t mean to, it’s just so much freakier than a man who can’t stop sobbing, right? The other option is that Arthur’s exhibiting the Emotional Disregulation that can result from bipolar, borderline personality disorder, PTSD—any of which could also fit Arthur’s behavior.

We also don’t get a good look at Arthur’s medications. We’re just told he’s on seven of them, which his therapist says in a tone of disbelief. As well she should. Joker is set in 1981, in “Gotham” in an alt-USA. New York is never mentioned, but Joker evokes 1970s New York so strongly it’s easy to assume that Gotham is operating pretty much like that city did in that decade. Now in 1981 (especially considering that he’s a dirt-poor patient who relies on Gotham’s public mental health system) Arthur would almost certainly be on “first generation” antipsychotics—medications which were developed in the 1950s. “Second-generation” medication didn’t start to roll out until the ’80s, so I think it’s safe to assume that Arthur, who has already been hospitalized, is not allowed to have a gun, and is very much In The System, would have a set regiment of those older meds.

Now a cocktail of seven different drugs from that first generation? Obviously they wouldn’t all be antipsychotics, but they’re still going to be quite strong, and have heavy side effects. Yet Arthur is able to get up each day and go to work, care for his mom, and work on his stand-up act with seemingly no hiccups. And again, if the film was trying to hint toward Arthur being somewhat superhuman, it would have been quite easy for someone to comment on how unusual his dosage was. The film does edge toward him being slightly supernatural, as he’s beaten up and hit by cars multiple times only to shake off his injuries, and later seems to have an eerie ability to evade the police even after committing multiple murders—but the movie doesn’t commit to that in the way that the Nolan/Ledger Joker commits to being, well, a chaos demon. Joker doesn’t want to commit to him having an identifiable diagnosis, or seven researchable prescriptions, so the illnesses can remain as Screen Rant says, “convenient plot devices.” It can continue to use his mental health as a nebulous stand-in for social ills.

And I understand why a filmmaker would want to keep this nebulous, to avoid getting bogged down in diagnoses and prescription cocktails—but when you want to use a mentally ill character as a symbol, without actually defining how he’s mentally ill, when you want to blame all of his problems on his equally mentally ill mother, when you cast one Black female therapist as a villain, and another as a punchline/victim, and then cast another Black woman as the object of stalking/probably murder—I don’t think you should then also get to have him stand up and have an extended soapbox scene lamenting the abuse of mentally ill people. I don’t think you should give your marginalized hero a rousing speech while you’re also vilifying the very people who are trying to act as a support network—people who are also marginalized. If you want us to cheer when he fights back against finance bros and rich, bullying talk show hosts, you don’t also get to make us laugh at the murder of a most likely poorly paid Black social worker. And given how much conversation this particular movie has kicked up, I thought it was only fair that I jump in and point out a superhero show that took its mentally ill character seriously, and allowed him to become a hero instead of a villain.

Leah Schnelbach would maybe participate in a social uprising if Arthur Everest was the leader. Arthur Fleck, less so. Come dance down the steps with them on Twitter!

As the song goes, “Everybody Loves A Clown”… Well, everybody except the Batman. And all the Robins. And the GCPD. And Gotham City. But the clown keeps coming back, regardless of who wants him hanging around. He always will. The Joker is now starring in his own origin film, so audiences can have another glimpse at the Clown Prince of Crime. His legacy is nearly as old as Batman’s cape and cowl.

Questions surrounding the character’s enduring popularity have raged for decades, but his appeal perhaps isn’t so hard to reconcile when we note what separates him from other DC villains—namely, in a universe where all the bad guys build their personas on schticks, the Joker is a cipher. The clown getup stays the same, but who he is entirely depends on what the story requires.

Is there a reason why the Joker lends himself to a more flexible character interpretation than other villains? The most obvious answer is simple enough: That’s what happens when you’ve been around for the better part of a century. There’s no possible way to remain the same over that length of time, especially with a constant turnover of writers and actors bringing the character to life.

From his first comics appearance in 1940, the Joker was little more than a creative serial killer in costume, offing victims with a venom that gave them his perpetual grin. Once comics began issuing more kid-friendly content, the Joker’s character was tempered by a certain level of playfulness, but even that wasn’t enough to appease the Comics Code Authority, which emerged in the 1954 due to public panic over “the kids” and how popular entertainment was affecting them. With those rules set down, the Joker was forbidden from committing murder at all, and started to fade into the background—only to be resurrected by his very first live-action portrayal from Cesar Romero in 1966’s Batman television series.

The swing of the Joker’s character from homicidal terror to goofy prankster to personification of chaos has always been a part of the character’s history, a needle that shifts position based on what seems popular at the time, and how readers (and viewers) respond to his antics. It’s arguable that the darker runs at the start of the Modern Era in comics tipped the scales permanently in favor of the Joker’s more malicious doings—The Dark Knight Returns, “A Death in the Family”, and The Killing Joke all had major bearing on the Joker’s more cemented position within the Batman canon—but other options have been explored. Batman: The Animated Series cast Mark Hamill in the role of the Joker, and the show did an excellent job of balancing a myriad of qualities the character was known for, allowing for menace and abuse alongside a more robust sense of humor and the occasional slapstick gambit. The character managed to fall somewhere in the middle in Jack Nicholson’s turn as well, equal parts gangster and sad clown, and a bit more mythic in his construction as the person who “made” Batman by virtue of killing Bruce Wayne’s parents.

Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker hinged on bringing the more chaotic tendencies of the character front and center. In addition to considering himself Batman’s equal opposite, The Dark Knight’s Joker thrived on sowing discord amongst seemingly “good” people, whether it was encouraging Harvey Dent on his road to becoming Two-Face, or trying to get two ferries of Gotham citizens to blow each other up out of fear. He also deliberately kept his own origins a secret, always telling different stories around his prominent facial scars. In terms of genuine horror, Ledger’s version keyed into one of the most terrifying aspects of the Gotham’s Harlequin of Hate—his unpredictability. The fact that he managed to project a sheen of likability despite the horrors he perpetuated made his take one of the most compelling iterations of both the character, and any superhero villain to date. Then there was the erratic and bullying turn by Jared Leto in Suicide Squad, followed shortly by Joaquin Phoenix, who is currently occupying the role by bringing all the dour realism to the Joker that modern audiences seem hungry for of late.

Then again, the “long arc, many iterations” answer might be too simple. After all, Batman has been around even longer than the Joker, and while the tones and trappings of his stories may change, the core of his character remains—a rich boy orphaned by violence who grows up and chooses to defend the city he loves, donning a bat costume to frighten criminals. For the most part, Batman’s rules and style guide stay intact: Kid sidekick, no-kill rule, detective and noir underpinnings, fake playboy status to keep people off his alter ego’s track. There are some vacillations, as not everyone enjoys the kid sidekicks and others prefer to show Bruce Wayne as a more active boss and leader in his family company, but Batman is Batman. Tone doesn’t really change the fundamental core of the character unless alternate universes are in play.

The Joker, on the other hand, adjusts to the needs of the narrative without ever realizing that he’s done it. Need a criminal? The Joker’s your guy. Need a mastermind behind all the awfulness in your city? He can manage that, too. Need a nightmare to haunt your every waking moment? He’s happy to help. Need an agent of random chance to push the plot into high gear, someone to scare the other villains, an idea for Batman or the audience to push back against? The Joker can (and has) done all these things. It’s easier to observe on screen, as rotating actors make the differences even more prominent, but he’s done the same through comics history as well. The Joker exists to facilitate narrative, and on some level, he’s abundantly aware of this—the character always displays a near-meta understanding of his relationships to old Batsy, and to Gotham City.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

So maybe this is inherent to the character in some way? It’s a fair assumption… after all, clowns deal in chaos. The concept of the clown is couched in absurdity, taking a magnifying glass to the mundane and making a spectacle of it. It’s one thing that every iteration of the Joker has in common, in fact—whether it’s Cesar Romero orchestrating his prison break from a baseball diamond, Jack Nicholson defacing an art gallery, or Heath Ledger burning a giant pile of money, spectacle is the name of the game. The Joker deals in it, a currency made of shock and awe. Clowns are entertainers, which means that Gotham’s greatest criminal is a least partly in it for the applause, for the adoring eyes of an audience. And as the old saying goes “the hero gets the girl, but the heavy gets the notice.” That’s certainly proven true over the decades, or the Joker wouldn’t be the prize baddie for nearly every Batman story arc regardless of medium.

Or maybe it’s a bit more sinister than that. Maybe after all this time we, as readers and viewers, maybe we want this malleability to remain consistent in the character. Most of the villains in the Rogue’s Gallery are interesting in their own rights, but there’s something appealing about a figure who can be remodeled based on how we would prefer to be frightened. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be staring down the opening weekend of Joker, which has already made so much money that a sequel could be well on the way. We’re engaged by the Joker because we enjoy when we can’t predict what he’ll do, how he’ll be written or performed—in a genre that can easily get riddled with clichés when it’s not careful, that’s a welcome respite from the same old super-charged punch-outs.

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

What does this say about a character whose tenure has spanned eight decades and counting, whose core nature is practically impossible to pin down? It’s clear that no matter the reason, the Joker’s flexibility has been his saving grace. Heroes come with rules, and so do most villains—they are created with purpose, pathos, codes and origins that inform how they behave and what they can do. The Joker engenders no such strict adherence and the reason is built into the veneer: A clown only needs to paint on a different face to change their character. In effect, the Joker is literally built to fit whatever story you’d prefer to tell (and even stories you’d prefer people didn’t tell). That’s the reason why everyone wants to try their hand in his creation. He can be anything you need him to be, and that makes him a formidable piece of the superhero toolkit, rather like the queen on a chessboard; he can move anywhere, however he chooses.

Is that a good thing? It can get grating seeing the same figures trotted out over and over again, no matter how effectively they are reimagined. Given our current bent toward reboots and sequels to nearly every franchise under the sun, this repetition will eventually get old, no matter how surprising or new the depictions seem. But it can be fascinating to examine what allows certain characters to withstand change and reinvention. In this case, the adage somehow remains true: Everybody does love a clown.

Or perhaps everyone is scared witless of them.

Emily Asher-Perrin prefers the Mark Hamill version, though. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

The Robert Pattinson Batman movie (aka Battinson) appears to have found its Catwoman! Deadline has reported that Zoë Kravitz will take on the role of Selina Kyle, and that the deal is “official.”

This will actually be the second time she picks up the villain/occasional Batman ally’s signature whip, albeit the first time in live-action. In 2017, Kravitz lent her voice to animated-minifigure!Catwoman in The LEGO Batman Movie. 

While the news has yet to be officially confirmed (depending on your definition of “officially”), director Matt Reeves did tweet a GIF of Kravitz saying “hello” when the news broke.

pic.twitter.com/Bi9bY5FhWb

— Matt Reeves (@mattreevesLA) October 14, 2019

Previously, it was reported that Westworld’s Jeffrey Wright and Maniac’s Jonah Hill were being tapped to play Commissioner Gordon and an as-yet-undisclosed villain, respectively. Now, Deadline reports that Wright will be playing Gordon, while Hill is still “in talks” for his role.

The Batman is due to be released on June 25, 2021, according to Deadline.

“Zoë Kravitz – DSC_0633” by Mingle Media TV is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What’s green, speaks in riddles, and is considered one of Gotham’s quirkiest villains?

We have no idea, but hey look! Paul Dano will be playing Riddler in the long-in-production bat-flick, The Batman, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The new superhero detective movie is meant to include a large cast of villains and Gothamites, according to filmmaker Matt Reeves, with Riddler simply the latest one to be added. (Zoë Kravitz was also revealed as Catwoman this week.)

Dano’s Riddler will be named Edward Nashton, who in the comics later changes his last name to Nygma when he adopts his beguiling trivia-app-esque persona. Corey Michael Smith was the most recent actor to play a version of Ed Nygma on Fox’s Gotham series, and of course who could forget this guy:

Screenshot: Warner Bros.

Further rumors speculated that Jonah Hill was being courted for a role as The Penguin, although Hill reportedly dropped out earlier this week.

If The Batman is really going to go all “sinister six” on the character then may we suggest the addition of Clayface? We hear that Clayface is in town!

The Batman is currently set to debut in June 2021.

Robert Pattinson may be our incumbent Batman, but Warner Bros. reportedly has another Bruce Wayne in mind for yet another variation on the franchise? According to We Got This Covered, unnamed sources told the outlet that the studio wants to bring back Michael Keaton as Older Bruce Wayne for a live-action adaptation of the animated series Batman Beyond. 

And honestly? We’re super into this idea.

Keaton, of course, iconically donned the bat-suit for Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). This was the first time Batman had ever been seen on the big screen (well, sorta) and the two films managed to go dark and gritty while still preserving all of the fun and camp. They’re also arguably the harbinger of current superhero cinema in how they demonstrated that these serialized stories could be adapted for the big screen in a realistic, satisfying, and high-spectacle manner.

And it’s not like Keaton isn’t still fun to watch in superhero flicks, as Spider-Man: Homecoming and Birdman can attest. If anything, he’s gotten even better at playing:

• An unquestioned mentor.
• Menacing.
• MENACING.

And it doesn’t take much to imagine that the world of the Tim Burton Batman movies grew into the cyberpunk world of Batman Beyond, mainly because both of those worlds are all industrial aesthetic all the time, with charming interludes.

Batman Beyond 2.0 #16; art by Eric Wight

Honestly there’s probably nothing to this rumor aside from We Got This Covered pitching it out there and seeing if it sticks. But that doesn’t matter. We love thinking about it!

(Also that means Michelle Pfeiffer could cameo as an older Selina Kyle. See? This idea just keeps on giving!)

We are, for the most part, creatures of habit. It’s not an absolute—even the most circumspect of us will occasionally feel the urge to break out of our norms, to seek the novel and, occasionally, the risky. But, face it: in the end we seek security, stability, a return to the familiar, an assurance that the universe is just so, has always been that way, will always be.

One striking example: episodic TV. Whether you binge an entire series or kick it old school and opt for a weekly fix, there is something eminently reassuring in being able to return to the same cast of characters and the same familiar, well-established scenario. Even if the setting is dystopic and the people inhabiting it are right bastards (hellooooooo, Succession!), just the fact that you know pretty much what you’re in for from chapter to chapter instills a warm, comforting glow in your otherwise stressed-out psyche. Audiences like that. Showrunners, studios, whole networks and streaming services like that. They count on it.

Well, maybe not showrunners so much. For any number of reasons—a desire to spread their production wings…an impulse to deepen and challenge their characters…maybe just sheer boredom—the creative forces behind established TV series have regularly sought to break away from the dependable, throwing their viewers out of their comfort zones and compelling them to look at the perhaps-too-familiar in a new light. It can be a risk, but when the effort is successful, it can leave loyal fans a little stunned, a bit giddy, and, ideally, re-energized in their appreciation of the tale being told. Sometimes, the outcome can be proclaimed a TV classic.

Below, in no particular order, is a set of episodes that dared to veer off the beaten path, and in doing so left their mark not just on their viewers, but on our notion of what a TV show is capable of.

(NOTE: Of necessity, the following discussions will be rife with spoilers. We’ll try to do it in a way that won’t seriously affect your appreciation of the episodes if you haven’t seen them, but have a care, me bucko…ye have been warned.)

The Dick Van Dyke Show—“It May Look Like a Walnut” (1963, S2:E20)

If I Love Lucy was the prototypical sitcom for the 1950s—what with its setting in a small, walk-up apartment building and its husband-wife dynamic that often seemed to morph into parent-child—The Dick Van Dyke Show was a paragon of the New Normal, Sixties-style. Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) was comfortably middle-class, happily living in a suburban ranch home and employed as head writer of a successful variety show. His wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) may have been satisfied to keep house and raise their young son, but she was also bracingly independent, and could rock a pair of capri pants like nobody’s business. Most hearteningly, the relationship between the two evoked a true partnership, anticipating the push toward gender equality that would soon be coming to the fore in society in general.

And that marriage-between-equals dynamic is where “It May Look Like a Walnut” starts, with Rob mercilessly teasing his wife over her reaction to the late-night horror film he’s watching on TV, while she counters by decrying the inanity of a scenario that sees an alien emissary from the planet Twylo—a man with a striking resemblance to comedian Danny Thomas, save for the four eyes (two front and two back)—disseminating booby-trapped walnuts around the world in order to mutate earthlings into Twlyo-ites, all to stop humanity’s push into space. Oh, and the mutants also lose their thumbs. Gotta hand it to series creator and writer Carl Reiner: It’s at least as credible as anything that happens in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

It seems less silly the morning after, when Rob wakes to find walnuts cropping up in the most implausible places, as well as his wife, son, and co-workers acting very oddly, and his TV show casting as its next guest star Danny Thomas, who just so happens to notice the stain on Rob’s tie while facing away from him. Plus, Rob’s having a helluva lot of trouble lighting a cigarette without any thumbs.

“It May Look Like a Walnut” tips its hand early that this is all a dream sequence, yet the accretion of goofy, sci-fi (term deliberately used) details into Rob Petrie’s otherwise normal, Camelot-era world—capped off by the sight of Moore sexily surfing out of a closet on a wave of walnuts—took an audience expecting reassuring sitcom hijinks and gave them something more akin to the show’s network-mate, The Twilight Zone. (As if it wasn’t obvious enough, Rob himself makes reference to a “Twylo zone”— guess they couldn’t get Rod Serling in to do a spit-take.) “It May Look Like a Walnut” wasn’t the only time The Dick Van Dyke Show would dip a toe into the genre pool, but for pure, satirical dedication, it was one of the series’ better deviations.

Doctor Who—“Blink” (2007 – S3:E10)

It’s no secret that the Doctor’s companions are viewer surrogates, bringing a much-needed human perspective to the alien time-traveler’s adventures. They’re also wish-fulfillment surrogates—after all, who hasn’t toyed with the fantasy that one day the Doctor might single them out, whisking them away from their humdrum, conventional pursuits (don’t kid yourself, your pursuits are humdrum and conventional) and taking them on the adventure of a lifetime?

“Blink” finds a way to literalize that desire. Taking the viewpoint of a never-before-seen character, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), the episode starts with the woman being dropped into a tantalizing mystery —an abandoned house where strange, gothic statues seem to move on their own—and then has her stumble upon a set of DVD Easter eggs where the Doctor (David Tennant) gazes through the screen and speaks directly to her.

Conceived as way to allow Tennant and his then-current companion Freema Agyeman to focus their energies on subsequent, more-demanding episodes of the series, “Blink” successfully synthesizes the feel of what it would be like to have your own life suddenly subsumed by something more incredible and magical. Sally and her own version of a companion, Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson), take point in the adventure, while the Doctor and Martha Jones remain largely relegated to the background (or maybe to the side—at the end we see them trotting off to some other, never-explored, confrontation). Scripted by Steven Moffat, the episode introduced one of the series’ most intriguing adversaries: the Weeping Angels, statue-like creatures who can only move when not seen and whose “kills” are more poignantly conceptual than literal—they whisk their victims into the past so that they die before any of their loved ones and acquaintances are even born. But more than that, it gave its watchers a more direct in-road into the Whovian universe, no TARDIS required. Like Sally Sparrow engaging in banter with a video-bound Gallifreyan, viewers of “Blink” felt the potential for the strange to reach past their screens and touch their own lives.

Star Trek—“The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967, S1:E28)

“A Wagon Train to the stars…” is what Gene Roddenberry promised the execs at NBC (even though he had something more profound in mind). And in its first season, that’s what Star Trek delivered: action, adventure, strange creatures, and a bevy of females for perpetual horndog Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) to bed. It was all good fun, in that conventional, zero-sum TV way: Whatever the challenges, the viewer could rest assured that it’d all turn out okay by the end, and in the final fadeout, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would be back on the bridge, sharing a good-natured chuckle (at least in the case of the two humans) over the narrow scrape from which they had just extricated themselves.

From the get-go, “City on the Edge of Forever” signaled that it was not going to follow the established template. Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) undergoes an involuntary case of drug-induced psychosis, and flees through a time portal into a past where he somehow succeeds in erasing Starfleet—and the starship Enterprise—from existence. Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) follow, and discover, in depression-era America, the missionary Edith Keeler, an idealist positing a future in which humanity has grown beyond war, greed, and hate, and has thus managed to harness unimagined energies to reach the stars—in other words, Keeler is Gene Roddenberry recast in guest star Joan Collins’ body. Kirk, of course, is smitten, but Spock discovers a grim consequence: If allowed to go unchecked, Keeler’s contagious idealism will delay America’s entry into World War II, thus ceding victory to Germany. For history to be righted, Keeler must die.

And in Harlan Ellison’s brilliant script (liberally rewritten—to Ellison’s eternal ire—by Roddenberry and company, but still respecting the author’s intent) there will be no clever, last-act save. There will be no corbomite bluff, no computer that Kirk can coax into self-immolation. There will just be Kirk doing what he must—as McCoy stares aghast and Spock learns firsthand the steep price humans pay for their emotions—followed by a grim return to a restored future. And, instead of a jocular, back-slapping wrap-up, there would be a disquieting reunion with the landing party, punctuated only by the captain uttering a mild (but for the time shocking) profanity.

“City on the Edge of Forever” won a WGA award for Ellison’s original script, and a Hugo for the episode itself. Beyond that, in a television landscape where all problems were supposed to be tied up in a neat bow by the end of an hour, it dared to capture the complexities of true drama, and showed that science fiction television could reach beyond the ray guns and rubber monsters, touching on something deeper, and more disturbing.

Batman: The Animated Series—“Read My Lips” (1993, S1:E59)

The producers of Batman: The Animated Series worked hard to get concessions from their network’s Standards and Practices department so the ostensibly kid-oriented program could depict the Bat kicking crime’s ass the way any good Dark Knight should. There were a few absolutes, though: among them, go light on the threatening with guns (to the extent that at one point the animators were forced to put a clown’s face on the muzzle of the Joker’s weapon), and, fer chrissakes NO KILLING.

Then came, “Read My Lips.”

In one of the more bizarre episodes of the series (scripted by Joe R. Lansdale), the Caped Crusader sets out to discover the mastermind behind a series of successful robberies. What he discovers is that the gang is taking orders from Scarface, a dummy under the control of a meek (and nameless) Ventriloquist. A paranoid dummy, it should be noted, brilliant but convinced that someone in his gang is repeatedly ratting him out to the Bat.

And it’s only when Batman has been captured and manages to sow chaos among the criminals by convincing Scarface that his own operator is the snitch, that you realize director Boyd Kirkland has been doing something insidious all along: Even though only one gang member cops to believing that Scarface is a real person, everyone, including Batman, acts like he is. Kirkland changes the puppet’s expressions depending on its moods, and when the Ventriloquist moves the dummy, the limbs are animated in a way that makes it appear they’re operating under their own volition. A subtle imparting of humanity, but with a devious intent: When a machine gun accidentally goes off and destroys the puppet, the image of bullets ripping through Scarface’s body—graphically animated and held for long, agonizing seconds— becomes one of the most disconcertingly violent moments imaginable, not just on a kid’s show, but on television in general. And just as you’re telling yourself, “Okay, calm down, it’s just wood, fabric, and stuffing…and just drawings of them, at that,” the episode imparts its coup de grâce: a fade-out that has the now-incarcerated Ventriloquist viciously taking a wound-forming knife to the raw pine head of Scarface Mk. II. Many adults had already figured out that Batman: The Animated Series was more than your stock kiddy cartoon. It took “Read My Lips” to teach them that mere ink on cels still had the capacity to truly unsettle.

The X-Files—“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (1996, S3:E20)

In its first season, The X-Files reveled in its ability to take the kind of outlandish urban myths found in the pages of the Weekly World News, and, if not treat them with actual gravitas, then at least imbue these stories with enough tongue-in-cheek verve to let people whose IQs didn’t equal their waistband size feel less guilty about enjoying them. As the show’s popularity spread, though, it became clear that creator Chris Carter felt that he had to take all those Unsolved Mysteries and actually make them mean something. By the third season, the show had hit its storytelling stride, but the delight in the wackiness of the myths that were the show’s original raison d’etre had been somewhat pushed aside.

“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” written and directed respectively by series stalwarts Darin Morgan and Rob Bowman, sought to put a pin to the series’ ballooning sense of gravity. Built around that most basic of urban myths—the abduction of two earthlings by alien “grays”—the episode has Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) being interviewed by an illustrious fiction author (a gleefully effusive Charles Nelson Reilly, whose character bluntly admits he’s only in it for the money), and takes a Rashoman approach to a story that filters its events through the vantage points of innocent bystanders, skeptics and believers, conspiracy theorists, and even the then-notorious alien autopsy video.

Somehow, Morgan and Bowman manage to maintain the series’ evocative atmosphere—groundbreaking at the time—while deconstructing the show’s screw-loose inspirations: restaging sequences through multiple levels of perceived reality; having the personalities of Agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully morph depending on who’s telling the tale; and for good measure, throwing in Jesse Ventura as a Man in Black. Aliens smoke cigarettes, shots are run forwards and backwards, and Mulder aggressively eats an entire sweet potato pie—anything, it appears, to say, “Hey, it’s okay if you want to believe, but it’s also okay to snicker at this stuff.” There were still a few strong seasons ahead before The X-Files seriously lost its way, but “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” served as a kind of loving shock to the system, reminding viewers that—as the wry re-write of the show’s theme indicated during the final fade—this was all just supposed to be a bit of fun.

Cowboy Bebop—“Pierrot le Fou” (1999, S1:E20)

A whole week early, the original viewers of the anime series Cowboy Bebop knew that “Pierrot le Fou” was going to be something off the beaten path when they got a look at the episode’s preview. Instead of the customary clips of spaceships, futuristic Wild West casinos, and exquisitely choregraphed fight sequences, accompanied by witty voice-overs from the show’s space-faring bounty hunter leads, they got: maniacal laughter; fast, near subliminal glimpses of a gun-wielding, top-hatted, roly-poly gent sporting a clown collar and an unsettling rictus of a grin; and a peculiar, silhouetted shot of the self-same gent doing impossible, mid-air flips while kicking the living Jack Daniels out of Bebop’s typically unflappable hero, Spike Spiegel.

That clown-from-hell is Tongpu, the Mad Pierrot, a heavily armed, essentially indestructible, and absolutely unstoppable assassin. It turns out Spike isn’t his target, just someone who wandered onto the scene as the maniac was fulfilling a contract. Which is just as bad, because once a soul has laid eyes on Tongpu, that person either dies as a consequence or spends what’s left of her/his limited life fleeing the madman’s pursuit. Spike being Spike, he decides that he is not only not going to run away, but will accept Tongpu’s invitation to an after-hours rendezvous on the battlefield of the killer’s choosing: the exquisitely designed and subtly ominous theme park, Spaceland.

Cowboy Bebop as a whole had already attained domestic notoriety—and placement in a late-night time slot—for its uncommon level of violence, delivered in a jazzy, adult atmosphere of sardonic cool. With “Pierrot le Fou,” director Shin’ichirō Watanabe not only pushed the envelope with wall-to-wall gunfire, explosions, wanton destruction of property, and a hearty body count—he threw cool out the window in order to poke at all the soft, sensitive places in the human psyche, the places you didn’t know you had. This comes through in the incongruous blend of absurdity and deadly action at the barrel of a comically cartoonish, gleeful angel of death; in composer Yoko Kanno’s demented hurdy-gurdy background music; in the lingering vision of a bullet-riddled, animatronic Goofy stand-in undergoing its prolonged and painful death throes; and in a stark, monochromatic flashback to the assassin’s torturous genesis and the unsettling revelation that this remorseless killing machine has the impulse control of a two-year-old. With stunning design and animation—the episode has “blown budget” written all over it—“Pierrot le Fou” took loyal viewers out of their customary universe of hip, and transported them to a surreal continuum of deadly, wacky dementia.

Star Trek: The Next Generation—“Conspiracy” (1988, S1:E24)

The first season of ST:TNG exhibited more than its share of growing pains. The production was lavish, the shots of the mammoth Enterprise-D, courtesy of ILM, were magnificent, and the cast, headed up by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard, was impressive. But the universe these characters plied, constrained by Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic vision of a paradisiacal Earth where war, hate and greed had been eradicated, was not a direct extension of the exciting, adventurous terrain that had been travelled by the cocky Captain Kirk and crew two decades prior. The ship was too powerful, easily skirting dangers that would have challenged its predecessors; the adversaries were less than daunting, consisting primarily of a race of scheming capitalists and an effete, pan-dimensional being with a bad sense of humor; and the crew was so hell-bent on cooperation at any cost, avoiding any form of interpersonal friction, that they were less the adventurers you looked forward to joining every week than  folks you might suspect of considering spirited rounds of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” a rollicking good time. Roddenberry & Co. had to have been well aware of the problem, and must have known that a course correction was needed. That course correction came late in the first season, and boy, was it a doozy.

“Conspiracy” starts off normally (blandly) enough, with the main crew, save Picard, bantering jovially on the bridge (and Worf [Michael Dorn] uttering the immortal line, “Swimming is too much like… bathing.”). That quickly ends after Picard receives an encrypted message from a colleague, summoning him for reasons unexplained to a meeting on a deserted planet. It’s when Picard transports down to his subterranean rendezvous that director Cliff Bole essentially goes all-in, bathing the set in an uncharacteristic, foreboding red light, having composer Dennis McCarthy lay an ominous drone on the soundtrack, and staging a confrontation between Picard and a clutch of suspicious—hell, paranoid— Starfleet officers who inform him that something has gone very wrong back at the home office, with inexplicable reassignments of personnel and cryptic orders being issued. Unnerved and back on the Enterprise, Picard then witnesses the aftermath of the destruction of his colleague’s ship, and decides that an unannounced drop-in to Starfleet is in order.

Back at headquarters, it turns out that a Body Snatchers scenario is in full swing, with creepy brain-controlling bugs, an upper echelon imbued with super-strength and impervious to phaser fire (not sure how that works, but go with it), and Picard treated to a lavish banquet of (shudder) mealworms. The pinnacle of WTF-ness comes at the very end, as a mind-controlled officer with a throbbing throat throws Roddenberry’s idealism back in his face—“We mean you no harm,” he sneers, “We seek peaceful coexistence”—and Picard and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) respond with a full-power, two-phaser salute that explodes the invader’s head in a startlingly splooshy on-screen effect.

Like a momma’s boy who’s abruptly decided that enough’s enough and runs off in his good Sunday suit for a healthy splash in the mud, “Conspiracy” wears its rebellion perhaps too flamboyantly on its sleeve. But after twenty-three episodes of mild, go-along-to-get-along adventure, it has the effect of a reassuring—if somewhat ham-fisted—palette-cleanser. Roddenberry reportedly endorsed its production, and even held firm against studio pushback over that exploding head. The follow-up episode (and season closer) would see the welcome return of the Romulans (and both episodes were supposed to be harbingers for the advent of the Borg at the start of season two, had a writers strike not intervened), so it’s clear that Next Gen was working its way toward becoming the beloved classic that fans would eventually embrace. But wild swing that it was, “Conspiracy” stands alone, a defiant exception to its creator’s hopeful vision.

The Prisoner—“Living in Harmony” (1967, S1:E13)

Imagine this: It’s 1967 in Great Britain. You keep hearing about this strange, surreal series, The Prisoner, in which Patrick McGoohan, late of Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), plays a spy who abruptly resigns his post, and is subsequently subdued and carted off to the Village, an isolated town where the leader, known only as Number 2, attempts to find out the reason for his resignation by subjecting him to a variety of mind-bending interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, you have been preoccupied with other matters (you know, general British stuff), and thus have been unable to catch the show until late in its run. Now, at the very end of December, you finally have a chance to sit down and see what all the fuss is about. So, on a cold Friday evening, you pull up a chair, fire up the telly, and watch in anticipation at the screen fades up on…

…A western?

A very odd western, in which a sheriff abruptly resigns his post and is subsequently subdued and carted off to Harmony, an isolated town where the leader, known only as the Judge, attempts to find out the reason for the Sheriff’s resignation by subjecting him to HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!

Created primarily because star and producer McGoohan wanted to try his hand at a classic oater à la Sergio Leone, “Living in Harmony” starts out as a recasting of the prime Prisoner scenario (it’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is another one of Number 2’s mind games), but then goes its own course, incorporating scripter Ian L. Rakoff’s anti-war sentiments in the character of a sheriff who refuses to arm himself, and bringing in Alexis Kanner as a mute, sociopathic gunslinger. With McGoohan at his ironic, charismatic best—he pretty much out-Eastwoods Eastwood—“Living in Harmony” flips the tables on the notion of a WTF episode, dropping into an otherwise strange and iconoclastic series a bit of naturalistic grounding. Reaching beyond its genre, it gives the surreal a breath of fresh—if slightly horse-scented—air, and cements The Prisoner as one of TV’s most off-beat experiments.

Black Mirror—“White Bear” (2013, S2:E2)

True confession time: The “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror is the only one I haven’t rewatched for this article. I can’t. I won’t. It’s not that it’s bad—quite the contrary: it’s one of the series’ best. But it did such a number on me the first time around that I can’t bring myself to relive the trauma again. It’s my Voldemort, a presence so intimidating that I shudder just writing its title, as if that mere act will conjure it up to drag me into its particular brand of hell. (And if you’ve already seen this episode and feel this is an overreaction, well, more power to you. In the coming robot apocalypse, let’s be roomies—I could use your fortitude.)

What makes “White Bear” so disconcerting is how far it goes to convince you that it’s a regular episode of Black Mirror, creator Charlie Brooker’s tart, conjectural examination of the ways humanity can be warped by the growing digital landscape. At the start, a woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes with a splitting headache in a strange house in a strange town, only to discover that society has abruptly trifurcated into hunters, prey, and smartphone-wielding spectators. So far, so typical—the woman’s chased by sadistic maniacs, betrayed by putative allies, and finally makes her way to a transmitter that supposedly is broadcasting the society-bending signal. And it’s in that facility, at the episode’s presumed climax, that Brooker springs the trapdoor you didn’t know you’d been standing on all along.

And despite the fact that I’ve issued an all-purpose spoiler alert up above, I’m going to go ahead and fortify that with an ULTRA DOUBLE-SPECIAL ONE-TIME-ONLY SPOILER ALERT right here, because if you haven’t yet seen “White Bear,” what happens in its last act will have the greatest impact if you have no idea of what’s actually going on. So, you’ve been warned. Ready? Here we go…

Turns out it was all B.S. The mysterious setting is actually a theme park of retribution, the stalkers and victims are staff, the spectators are all park visitors willing to shell out some cash for the privilege of relishing the torment of a woman who, it’s revealed, was complicit in the torture and murder of a young child. The actual murderer—her boyfriend—took the easy way out by committing suicide, and so society has decided to vent its rage upon the accomplice, who has her memory (painfully) wiped every night, every morning wakes with the same headache, every day is immersed in the same nightmare scenario, and every evening is forced to witness the same grotesque pageant that lays her atrocities out before her.

And in a series that had previously shown us a Prime Minister blackmailed into video-streaming his carnal relations with a pig and posited a world of mandatory consumerism, complete with legally-enforced commercial viewing, “White Bear” might be Charlie Brooker’s most subversive work, forcing us to empathize with a sociopath, making us stare into her stunned, uncomprehending eyes as she witnesses the evidence of her crimes, and raising questions both about the morality of capital punishment—particularly as a form of public catharsis—and of warehousing criminals for so long that the point of punishment recedes into meaninglessness. Black Mirror had always trafficked in social commentary; with “White Bear,” the series doubled down, conjuring images that couldn’t easily be exorcised, and challenging viewers in a way couldn’t blithely be dismissed.

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer—“Hush” (1999, S4:E10)

More true confessions: After the first season, I pretty much dropped out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not that I didn’t like the show—what’s not to love about Joss Whedon’s blend of inventive fantasy, beguiling characters, and witty dialogue?—I just didn’t feel strongly motivated to continue. But after three years of friends continuously berating me for my grievous error, I decided to revisit the series in its fourth season, to see what I was missing. And the night I tuned in just so happened to be the night that “Hush” aired. After which, I literally uttered the key phrase in the title of this article.

This is another entry that pokes at all the soft, tender places of your psyche. It’s there in the mere presentation of the episode’s main adversaries, the Gentlemen: elegant, cadaverous figures (fronted by the inimitable Doug Jones) who float inches above the ground and move with a disconcertingly sinuous formality. It’s there in their unholy mission: to cut the hearts out of seven still-living humans. And it’s there in their mode of attack: they operate by stealing the voices of every soul in Sunnydale, rendering their victims incapable of crying out for help.

Whedon, who scripted and directed, has the amazing capacity to make even his “break-out” episodes relevant to his characters and their arcs, and “Hush” is no exception. Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (Emma Caulfield) argue over his inability to communicate his feelings; budding witch Willow (Alyson Hannigan) bemoans the fact that her Wicca group is “all talk;” meanwhile Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her soon-to-be-boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas) busy themselves concealing their secret lives —as Slayer and Initiative member, respectively—from each other. But what stands out in the episode is the way Whedon makes the silence serve multiple functions, not only as a subtextual element, but as surrealism in the sight of street riots devoid of angry voices, in the primal terror of having to face your death without the voice to proclaim your agony, even in comedy as Giles (Anthony Head) attempts to bring the Scooby Gang up-to-speed with some hastily prepared overhead projector slides (and, for some reason, a cassette playing Danse macabre).

“Hush” received writing nominations from both the WGA and the Emmys. It was far from Whedon’s only stand-out episode—the devastating “The Body” was yet to come in the following season. The Buffy creator has said the whole point of the episode was to get himself away from his trademark facility for dialogue, to demonstrate he was more than just clever banter. Clearly he succeeded, highlighting his series’ strengths while subverting one of its most celebrated aspects. And in the process, he created one of the most delightfully unsettling hours in television history.

***

Yes, the world is strange, and chaotic, and sometimes terrifying. But when I find myself awash in doubt and confusion, I ease my tortured soul with this one truth: There are more than just ten TV episodes that have inspired the cry, “WTF?!” Maybe you know of one, or more…comment below, and do your part to spread peace and happiness.

Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!

Peter Sarsgaard has joined the cast of The Batman. Director Matt Reeves shared a GIF of the actor waving on Twitter last week, writing “Oh… Hi, Peter… .” Although Sarsgaard’s role is currently undisclosed, multiple outlets speculate that he’ll be playing Harvey Dent. (Either that, or a cop named Wasserman.)

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Half way through a shave…

A post shared by Maggie Gyllenhaal (@mgyllenhaal) on Dec 5, 2019 at 5:22am PST

If he does end up playing Two-Face, then that brings The Batman‘s villain count to four. Sarsgaard will be joining Paul Dano as the Riddler and Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, with Colin Farrell in talks for the Penguin. (The Hollywood Reporter also says that John Turturro will be playing “crime boss Carmine Falcone,” but his level of villainy is currently unknown.)

Previously, it was announced that Jeffrey Wright will be taking on the role of Commissioner Gordon and Andy Serkis will be playing Alfred Pennyworth. Robert Pattinson, of course, remains the Batman.

The Batman arrives in theaters June 25, 2021, according to Deadline. 

Photo by Cristiano Betta, licensed under CC BY 2.0

We are, for the most part, creatures of habit. It’s not an absolute—even the most circumspect of us will occasionally feel the urge to break out of our norms, to seek the novel and, occasionally, the risky. But, face it: in the end we seek security, stability, a return to the familiar, an assurance that the universe is just so, has always been that way, will always be.

One striking example: episodic TV. Whether you binge an entire series or kick it old school and opt for a weekly fix, there is something eminently reassuring in being able to return to the same cast of characters and the same familiar, well-established scenario. Even if the setting is dystopic and the people inhabiting it are right bastards (hellooooooo, Succession!), just the fact that you know pretty much what you’re in for from chapter to chapter instills a warm, comforting glow in your otherwise stressed-out psyche. Audiences like that. Showrunners, studios, whole networks and streaming services like that. They count on it.

Well, maybe not showrunners so much. For any number of reasons—a desire to spread their production wings…an impulse to deepen and challenge their characters…maybe just sheer boredom—the creative forces behind established TV series have regularly sought to break away from the dependable, throwing their viewers out of their comfort zones and compelling them to look at the perhaps-too-familiar in a new light. It can be a risk, but when the effort is successful, it can leave loyal fans a little stunned, a bit giddy, and, ideally, re-energized in their appreciation of the tale being told. Sometimes, the outcome can be proclaimed a TV classic.

Below, in no particular order, is a set of episodes that dared to veer off the beaten path, and in doing so left their mark not just on their viewers, but on our notion of what a TV show is capable of.

(NOTE: Of necessity, the following discussions will be rife with spoilers. We’ll try to do it in a way that won’t seriously affect your appreciation of the episodes if you haven’t seen them, but have a care, me bucko…ye have been warned.)

The Dick Van Dyke Show—“It May Look Like a Walnut” (1963, S2:E20)

If I Love Lucy was the prototypical sitcom for the 1950s—what with its setting in a small, walk-up apartment building and its husband-wife dynamic that often seemed to morph into parent-child—The Dick Van Dyke Show was a paragon of the New Normal, Sixties-style. Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) was comfortably middle-class, happily living in a suburban ranch home and employed as head writer of a successful variety show. His wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) may have been satisfied to keep house and raise their young son, but she was also bracingly independent, and could rock a pair of capri pants like nobody’s business. Most hearteningly, the relationship between the two evoked a true partnership, anticipating the push toward gender equality that would soon be coming to the fore in society in general.

And that marriage-between-equals dynamic is where “It May Look Like a Walnut” starts, with Rob mercilessly teasing his wife over her reaction to the late-night horror film he’s watching on TV, while she counters by decrying the inanity of a scenario that sees an alien emissary from the planet Twylo—a man with a striking resemblance to comedian Danny Thomas, save for the four eyes (two front and two back)—disseminating booby-trapped walnuts around the world in order to mutate earthlings into Twlyo-ites, all to stop humanity’s push into space. Oh, and the mutants also lose their thumbs. Gotta hand it to series creator and writer Carl Reiner: It’s at least as credible as anything that happens in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

It seems less silly the morning after, when Rob wakes to find walnuts cropping up in the most implausible places, as well as his wife, son, and co-workers acting very oddly, and his TV show casting as its next guest star Danny Thomas, who just so happens to notice the stain on Rob’s tie while facing away from him. Plus, Rob’s having a helluva lot of trouble lighting a cigarette without any thumbs.

“It May Look Like a Walnut” tips its hand early that this is all a dream sequence, yet the accretion of goofy, sci-fi (term deliberately used) details into Rob Petrie’s otherwise normal, Camelot-era world—capped off by the sight of Moore sexily surfing out of a closet on a wave of walnuts—took an audience expecting reassuring sitcom hijinks and gave them something more akin to the show’s network-mate, The Twilight Zone. (As if it wasn’t obvious enough, Rob himself makes reference to a “Twylo zone”— guess they couldn’t get Rod Serling in to do a spit-take.) “It May Look Like a Walnut” wasn’t the only time The Dick Van Dyke Show would dip a toe into the genre pool, but for pure, satirical dedication, it was one of the series’ better deviations.

Doctor Who—“Blink” (2007 – S3:E10)

It’s no secret that the Doctor’s companions are viewer surrogates, bringing a much-needed human perspective to the alien time-traveler’s adventures. They’re also wish-fulfillment surrogates—after all, who hasn’t toyed with the fantasy that one day the Doctor might single them out, whisking them away from their humdrum, conventional pursuits (don’t kid yourself, your pursuits are humdrum and conventional) and taking them on the adventure of a lifetime?

“Blink” finds a way to literalize that desire. Taking the viewpoint of a never-before-seen character, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), the episode starts with the woman being dropped into a tantalizing mystery —an abandoned house where strange, gothic statues seem to move on their own—and then has her stumble upon a set of DVD Easter eggs where the Doctor (David Tennant) gazes through the screen and speaks directly to her.

Conceived as way to allow Tennant and his then-current companion Freema Agyeman to focus their energies on subsequent, more-demanding episodes of the series, “Blink” successfully synthesizes the feel of what it would be like to have your own life suddenly subsumed by something more incredible and magical. Sally and her own version of a companion, Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson), take point in the adventure, while the Doctor and Martha Jones remain largely relegated to the background (or maybe to the side—at the end we see them trotting off to some other, never-explored, confrontation). Scripted by Steven Moffat, the episode introduced one of the series’ most intriguing adversaries: the Weeping Angels, statue-like creatures who can only move when not seen and whose “kills” are more poignantly conceptual than literal—they whisk their victims into the past so that they die before any of their loved ones and acquaintances are even born. But more than that, it gave its watchers a more direct in-road into the Whovian universe, no TARDIS required. Like Sally Sparrow engaging in banter with a video-bound Gallifreyan, viewers of “Blink” felt the potential for the strange to reach past their screens and touch their own lives.

Star Trek—“The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967, S1:E28)

“A Wagon Train to the stars…” is what Gene Roddenberry promised the execs at NBC (even though he had something more profound in mind). And in its first season, that’s what Star Trek delivered: action, adventure, strange creatures, and a bevy of females for perpetual horndog Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) to bed. It was all good fun, in that conventional, zero-sum TV way: Whatever the challenges, the viewer could rest assured that it’d all turn out okay by the end, and in the final fadeout, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would be back on the bridge, sharing a good-natured chuckle (at least in the case of the two humans) over the narrow scrape from which they had just extricated themselves.

From the get-go, “City on the Edge of Forever” signaled that it was not going to follow the established template. Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) undergoes an involuntary case of drug-induced psychosis, and flees through a time portal into a past where he somehow succeeds in erasing Starfleet—and the starship Enterprise—from existence. Kirk and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) follow, and discover, in depression-era America, the missionary Edith Keeler, an idealist positing a future in which humanity has grown beyond war, greed, and hate, and has thus managed to harness unimagined energies to reach the stars—in other words, Keeler is Gene Roddenberry recast in guest star Joan Collins’ body. Kirk, of course, is smitten, but Spock discovers a grim consequence: If allowed to go unchecked, Keeler’s contagious idealism will delay America’s entry into World War II, thus ceding victory to Germany. For history to be righted, Keeler must die.

And in Harlan Ellison’s brilliant script (liberally rewritten—to Ellison’s eternal ire—by Roddenberry and company, but still respecting the author’s intent) there will be no clever, last-act save. There will be no corbomite bluff, no computer that Kirk can coax into self-immolation. There will just be Kirk doing what he must—as McCoy stares aghast and Spock learns firsthand the steep price humans pay for their emotions—followed by a grim return to a restored future. And, instead of a jocular, back-slapping wrap-up, there would be a disquieting reunion with the landing party, punctuated only by the captain uttering a mild (but for the time shocking) profanity.

“City on the Edge of Forever” won a WGA award for Ellison’s original script, and a Hugo for the episode itself. Beyond that, in a television landscape where all problems were supposed to be tied up in a neat bow by the end of an hour, it dared to capture the complexities of true drama, and showed that science fiction television could reach beyond the ray guns and rubber monsters, touching on something deeper, and more disturbing.

Batman: The Animated Series—“Read My Lips” (1993, S1:E59)

The producers of Batman: The Animated Series worked hard to get concessions from their network’s Standards and Practices department so the ostensibly kid-oriented program could depict the Bat kicking crime’s ass the way any good Dark Knight should. There were a few absolutes, though: among them, go light on the threatening with guns (to the extent that at one point the animators were forced to put a clown’s face on the muzzle of the Joker’s weapon), and, fer chrissakes NO KILLING.

Then came, “Read My Lips.”

In one of the more bizarre episodes of the series (scripted by Joe R. Lansdale), the Caped Crusader sets out to discover the mastermind behind a series of successful robberies. What he discovers is that the gang is taking orders from Scarface, a dummy under the control of a meek (and nameless) Ventriloquist. A paranoid dummy, it should be noted, brilliant but convinced that someone in his gang is repeatedly ratting him out to the Bat.

And it’s only when Batman has been captured and manages to sow chaos among the criminals by convincing Scarface that his own operator is the snitch, that you realize director Boyd Kirkland has been doing something insidious all along: Even though only one gang member cops to believing that Scarface is a real person, everyone, including Batman, acts like he is. Kirkland changes the puppet’s expressions depending on its moods, and when the Ventriloquist moves the dummy, the limbs are animated in a way that makes it appear they’re operating under their own volition. A subtle imparting of humanity, but with a devious intent: When a machine gun accidentally goes off and destroys the puppet, the image of bullets ripping through Scarface’s body—graphically animated and held for long, agonizing seconds— becomes one of the most disconcertingly violent moments imaginable, not just on a kid’s show, but on television in general. And just as you’re telling yourself, “Okay, calm down, it’s just wood, fabric, and stuffing…and just drawings of them, at that,” the episode imparts its coup de grâce: a fade-out that has the now-incarcerated Ventriloquist viciously taking a wound-forming knife to the raw pine head of Scarface Mk. II. Many adults had already figured out that Batman: The Animated Series was more than your stock kiddy cartoon. It took “Read My Lips” to teach them that mere ink on cels still had the capacity to truly unsettle.

The X-Files—“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” (1996, S3:E20)

In its first season, The X-Files reveled in its ability to take the kind of outlandish urban myths found in the pages of the Weekly World News, and, if not treat them with actual gravitas, then at least imbue these stories with enough tongue-in-cheek verve to let people whose IQs didn’t equal their waistband size feel less guilty about enjoying them. As the show’s popularity spread, though, it became clear that creator Chris Carter felt that he had to take all those Unsolved Mysteries and actually make them mean something. By the third season, the show had hit its storytelling stride, but the delight in the wackiness of the myths that were the show’s original raison d’etre had been somewhat pushed aside.

“Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” written and directed respectively by series stalwarts Darin Morgan and Rob Bowman, sought to put a pin to the series’ ballooning sense of gravity. Built around that most basic of urban myths—the abduction of two earthlings by alien “grays”—the episode has Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson) being interviewed by an illustrious fiction author (a gleefully effusive Charles Nelson Reilly, whose character bluntly admits he’s only in it for the money), and takes a Rashoman approach to a story that filters its events through the vantage points of innocent bystanders, skeptics and believers, conspiracy theorists, and even the then-notorious alien autopsy video.

Somehow, Morgan and Bowman manage to maintain the series’ evocative atmosphere—groundbreaking at the time—while deconstructing the show’s screw-loose inspirations: restaging sequences through multiple levels of perceived reality; having the personalities of Agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully morph depending on who’s telling the tale; and for good measure, throwing in Jesse Ventura as a Man in Black. Aliens smoke cigarettes, shots are run forwards and backwards, and Mulder aggressively eats an entire sweet potato pie—anything, it appears, to say, “Hey, it’s okay if you want to believe, but it’s also okay to snicker at this stuff.” There were still a few strong seasons ahead before The X-Files seriously lost its way, but “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” served as a kind of loving shock to the system, reminding viewers that—as the wry re-write of the show’s theme indicated during the final fade—this was all just supposed to be a bit of fun.

Cowboy Bebop—“Pierrot le Fou” (1999, S1:E20)

A whole week early, the original viewers of the anime series Cowboy Bebop knew that “Pierrot le Fou” was going to be something off the beaten path when they got a look at the episode’s preview. Instead of the customary clips of spaceships, futuristic Wild West casinos, and exquisitely choregraphed fight sequences, accompanied by witty voice-overs from the show’s space-faring bounty hunter leads, they got: maniacal laughter; fast, near subliminal glimpses of a gun-wielding, top-hatted, roly-poly gent sporting a clown collar and an unsettling rictus of a grin; and a peculiar, silhouetted shot of the self-same gent doing impossible, mid-air flips while kicking the living Jack Daniels out of Bebop’s typically unflappable hero, Spike Spiegel.

That clown-from-hell is Tongpu, the Mad Pierrot, a heavily armed, essentially indestructible, and absolutely unstoppable assassin. It turns out Spike isn’t his target, just someone who wandered onto the scene as the maniac was fulfilling a contract. Which is just as bad, because once a soul has laid eyes on Tongpu, that person either dies as a consequence or spends what’s left of her/his limited life fleeing the madman’s pursuit. Spike being Spike, he decides that he is not only not going to run away, but will accept Tongpu’s invitation to an after-hours rendezvous on the battlefield of the killer’s choosing: the exquisitely designed and subtly ominous theme park, Spaceland.

Cowboy Bebop as a whole had already attained domestic notoriety—and placement in a late-night time slot—for its uncommon level of violence, delivered in a jazzy, adult atmosphere of sardonic cool. With “Pierrot le Fou,” director Shin’ichirō Watanabe not only pushed the envelope with wall-to-wall gunfire, explosions, wanton destruction of property, and a hearty body count—he threw cool out the window in order to poke at all the soft, sensitive places in the human psyche, the places you didn’t know you had. This comes through in the incongruous blend of absurdity and deadly action at the barrel of a comically cartoonish, gleeful angel of death; in composer Yoko Kanno’s demented hurdy-gurdy background music; in the lingering vision of a bullet-riddled, animatronic Goofy stand-in undergoing its prolonged and painful death throes; and in a stark, monochromatic flashback to the assassin’s torturous genesis and the unsettling revelation that this remorseless killing machine has the impulse control of a two-year-old. With stunning design and animation—the episode has “blown budget” written all over it—“Pierrot le Fou” took loyal viewers out of their customary universe of hip, and transported them to a surreal continuum of deadly, wacky dementia.

Star Trek: The Next Generation—“Conspiracy” (1988, S1:E24)

The first season of ST:TNG exhibited more than its share of growing pains. The production was lavish, the shots of the mammoth Enterprise-D, courtesy of ILM, were magnificent, and the cast, headed up by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard, was impressive. But the universe these characters plied, constrained by Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic vision of a paradisiacal Earth where war, hate and greed had been eradicated, was not a direct extension of the exciting, adventurous terrain that had been travelled by the cocky Captain Kirk and crew two decades prior. The ship was too powerful, easily skirting dangers that would have challenged its predecessors; the adversaries were less than daunting, consisting primarily of a race of scheming capitalists and an effete, pan-dimensional being with a bad sense of humor; and the crew was so hell-bent on cooperation at any cost, avoiding any form of interpersonal friction, that they were less the adventurers you looked forward to joining every week than folks you might suspect of considering spirited rounds of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” a rollicking good time. Roddenberry & Co. had to have been well aware of the problem, and must have known that a course correction was needed. That course correction came late in the first season, and boy, was it a doozy.

“Conspiracy” starts off normally (blandly) enough, with the main crew, save Picard, bantering jovially on the bridge (and Worf [Michael Dorn] uttering the immortal line, “Swimming is too much like… bathing.”). That quickly ends after Picard receives an encrypted message from a colleague, summoning him for reasons unexplained to a meeting on a deserted planet. It’s when Picard transports down to his subterranean rendezvous that director Cliff Bole essentially goes all-in, bathing the set in an uncharacteristic, foreboding red light, having composer Dennis McCarthy lay an ominous drone on the soundtrack, and staging a confrontation between Picard and a clutch of suspicious—hell, paranoid— Starfleet officers who inform him that something has gone very wrong back at the home office, with inexplicable reassignments of personnel and cryptic orders being issued. Unnerved and back on the Enterprise, Picard then witnesses the aftermath of the destruction of his colleague’s ship, and decides that an unannounced drop-in to Starfleet is in order.

Back at headquarters, it turns out that a Body Snatchers scenario is in full swing, with creepy brain-controlling bugs, an upper echelon imbued with super-strength and impervious to phaser fire (not sure how that works, but go with it), and Picard treated to a lavish banquet of (shudder) mealworms. The pinnacle of WTF-ness comes at the very end, as a mind-controlled officer with a throbbing throat throws Roddenberry’s idealism back in his face—“We mean you no harm,” he sneers, “We seek peaceful coexistence”—and Picard and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) respond with a full-power, two-phaser salute that explodes the invader’s head in a startlingly splooshy on-screen effect.

Like a momma’s boy who’s abruptly decided that enough’s enough and runs off in his good Sunday suit for a healthy splash in the mud, “Conspiracy” wears its rebellion perhaps too flamboyantly on its sleeve. But after twenty-three episodes of mild, go-along-to-get-along adventure, it has the effect of a reassuring—if somewhat ham-fisted—palette-cleanser. Roddenberry reportedly endorsed its production, and even held firm against studio pushback over that exploding head. The follow-up episode (and season closer) would see the welcome return of the Romulans (and both episodes were supposed to be harbingers for the advent of the Borg at the start of season two, had a writers strike not intervened), so it’s clear that Next Gen was working its way toward becoming the beloved classic that fans would eventually embrace. But wild swing that it was, “Conspiracy” stands alone, a defiant exception to its creator’s hopeful vision.

The Prisoner—“Living in Harmony” (1967, S1:E13)

Imagine this: It’s 1967 in Great Britain. You keep hearing about this strange, surreal series, The Prisoner, in which Patrick McGoohan, late of Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), plays a spy who abruptly resigns his post, and is subsequently subdued and carted off to the Village, an isolated town where the leader, known only as Number 2, attempts to find out the reason for his resignation by subjecting him to a variety of mind-bending interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, you have been preoccupied with other matters (you know, general British stuff), and thus have been unable to catch the show until late in its run. Now, at the very end of December, you finally have a chance to sit down and see what all the fuss is about. So, on a cold Friday evening, you pull up a chair, fire up the telly, and watch in anticipation at the screen fades up on…

…A western?

A very odd western, in which a sheriff abruptly resigns his post and is subsequently subdued and carted off to Harmony, an isolated town where the leader, known only as the Judge, attempts to find out the reason for the Sheriff’s resignation by subjecting him to HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!

Created primarily because star and producer McGoohan wanted to try his hand at a classic oater à la Sergio Leone, “Living in Harmony” starts out as a recasting of the prime Prisoner scenario (it’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is another one of Number 2’s mind games), but then goes its own course, incorporating scripter Ian L. Rakoff’s anti-war sentiments in the character of a sheriff who refuses to arm himself, and bringing in Alexis Kanner as a mute, sociopathic gunslinger. With McGoohan at his ironic, charismatic best—he pretty much out-Eastwoods Eastwood—“Living in Harmony” flips the tables on the notion of a WTF episode, dropping into an otherwise strange and iconoclastic series a bit of naturalistic grounding. Reaching beyond its genre, it gives the surreal a breath of fresh—if slightly horse-scented—air, and cements The Prisoner as one of TV’s most off-beat experiments.

Black Mirror—“White Bear” (2013, S2:E2)

True confession time: The “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror is the only one I haven’t rewatched for this article. I can’t. I won’t. It’s not that it’s bad—quite the contrary: it’s one of the series’ best. But it did such a number on me the first time around that I can’t bring myself to relive the trauma again. It’s my Voldemort, a presence so intimidating that I shudder just writing its title, as if that mere act will conjure it up to drag me into its particular brand of hell. (And if you’ve already seen this episode and feel this is an overreaction, well, more power to you. In the coming robot apocalypse, let’s be roomies—I could use your fortitude.)

What makes “White Bear” so disconcerting is how far it goes to convince you that it’s a regular episode of Black Mirror, creator Charlie Brooker’s tart, conjectural examination of the ways humanity can be warped by the growing digital landscape. At the start, a woman (Lenora Crichlow) wakes with a splitting headache in a strange house in a strange town, only to discover that society has abruptly trifurcated into hunters, prey, and smartphone-wielding spectators. So far, so typical—the woman’s chased by sadistic maniacs, betrayed by putative allies, and finally makes her way to a transmitter that supposedly is broadcasting the society-bending signal. And it’s in that facility, at the episode’s presumed climax, that Brooker springs the trapdoor you didn’t know you’d been standing on all along.

And despite the fact that I’ve issued an all-purpose spoiler alert up above, I’m going to go ahead and fortify that with an ULTRA DOUBLE-SPECIAL ONE-TIME-ONLY SPOILER ALERT right here, because if you haven’t yet seen “White Bear,” what happens in its last act will have the greatest impact if you have no idea of what’s actually going on. So, you’ve been warned. Ready? Here we go…

Turns out it was all B.S. The mysterious setting is actually a theme park of retribution, the stalkers and victims are staff, the spectators are all park visitors willing to shell out some cash for the privilege of relishing the torment of a woman who, it’s revealed, was complicit in the torture and murder of a young child. The actual murderer—her boyfriend—took the easy way out by committing suicide, and so society has decided to vent its rage upon the accomplice, who has her memory (painfully) wiped every night, every morning wakes with the same headache, every day is immersed in the same nightmare scenario, and every evening is forced to witness the same grotesque pageant that lays her atrocities out before her.

And in a series that had previously shown us a Prime Minister blackmailed into video-streaming his carnal relations with a pig and posited a world of mandatory consumerism, complete with legally-enforced commercial viewing, “White Bear” might be Charlie Brooker’s most subversive work, forcing us to empathize with a sociopath, making us stare into her stunned, uncomprehending eyes as she witnesses the evidence of her crimes, and raising questions both about the morality of capital punishment—particularly as a form of public catharsis—and of warehousing criminals for so long that the point of punishment recedes into meaninglessness. Black Mirror had always trafficked in social commentary; with “White Bear,” the series doubled down, conjuring images that couldn’t easily be exorcised, and challenging viewers in a way couldn’t blithely be dismissed.

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer—“Hush” (1999, S4:E10)

More true confessions: After the first season, I pretty much dropped out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not that I didn’t like the show—what’s not to love about Joss Whedon’s blend of inventive fantasy, beguiling characters, and witty dialogue?—I just didn’t feel strongly motivated to continue. But after three years of friends continuously berating me for my grievous error, I decided to revisit the series in its fourth season, to see what I was missing. And the night I tuned in just so happened to be the night that “Hush” aired. After which, I literally uttered the key phrase in the title of this article.

This is another entry that pokes at all the soft, tender places of your psyche. It’s there in the mere presentation of the episode’s main adversaries, the Gentlemen: elegant, cadaverous figures (fronted by the inimitable Doug Jones) who float inches above the ground and move with a disconcertingly sinuous formality. It’s there in their unholy mission: to cut the hearts out of seven still-living humans. And it’s there in their mode of attack: they operate by stealing the voices of every soul in Sunnydale, rendering their victims incapable of crying out for help.

Whedon, who scripted and directed, has the amazing capacity to make even his “break-out” episodes relevant to his characters and their arcs, and “Hush” is no exception. Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (Emma Caulfield) argue over his inability to communicate his feelings; budding witch Willow (Alyson Hannigan) bemoans the fact that her Wicca group is “all talk;” meanwhile Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her soon-to-be-boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas) busy themselves concealing their secret lives —as Slayer and Initiative member, respectively—from each other. But what stands out in the episode is the way Whedon makes the silence serve multiple functions, not only as a subtextual element, but as surrealism in the sight of street riots devoid of angry voices, in the primal terror of having to face your death without the voice to proclaim your agony, even in comedy as Giles (Anthony Head) attempts to bring the Scooby Gang up-to-speed with some hastily prepared overhead projector slides (and, for some reason, a cassette playing Danse macabre).

“Hush” received writing nominations from both the WGA and the Emmys. It was far from Whedon’s only stand-out episode—the devastating “The Body” was yet to come in the following season. The Buffy creator has said the whole point of the episode was to get himself away from his trademark facility for dialogue, to demonstrate he was more than just clever banter. Clearly he succeeded, highlighting his series’ strengths while subverting one of its most celebrated aspects. And in the process, he created one of the most delightfully unsettling hours in television history.

***

Yes, the world is strange, and chaotic, and sometimes terrifying. But when I find myself awash in doubt and confusion, I ease my tortured soul with this one truth: There are more than just ten TV episodes that have inspired the cry, “WTF?!” Maybe you know of one, or more…comment below, and do your part to spread peace and happiness.

Originally published in November 2019.

Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!

I’m going to take a contrary position here. Here we go: It’s conventional wisdom that science fiction and animation are two forms ideally suited for each other. Makes sense—the unbounded palette of the cartoon allows for the creation of technologies, worlds, and scientific concepts that are unrestricted by the limits of live-action filming. (This is not exactly true, by the way—animation tech and production budgets impose their own constraints. But close enough.)

But did you ever consider that, maybe, science fiction is too grounded a genre for the likes of cartoons? After all, animation customarily traffics in talking animals and magic kingdoms; having to adhere to such principles as physics and chemistry can put a damper on the medium’s more fanciful impulses. Why deal with rocket ships when you can just as easily have characters sprout wings and fly to Mars?

Okay, that’s a spurious argument: Cartoonists can do whatever they want. If they want to make something based on a strict read of quantum field theory, sure, go ahead. If they want to imbue a baby-diapering assembly line with human aspects, as director Bob Clampett did with Looney Tunes’ Baby Bottleneck (1946), no court is going to stop ‘em. Science fiction conceits and the cartoonist’s will to anarchic fancy accommodate each other quite well, and over the one-hundred-odd years that the two mediums have been playing together, they have managed to capture the technological preoccupations of their times, document humanity’s concerns for their present moment, and speculate on people’s hopes for the future.

So let’s step into our time machine (Science! That’s impossible to implement! ‘Cause paradoxes!) and travel through the decades to see how cartoons have used the lexicon of spaceships, robots, and electronic gizmos to tell their tales. In so doing, we may well discover a bit of reverse time travel, the past reaching out to our present—to entertain, to provoke, and most importantly, to remind us that it’s always fun ‘n games with ray guns until someone gets disintegrated…

The 1920s: KoKo’s Earth Control (1928)

The Fleischer brothers—Max and Dave—were inveterate gadgeteers, as obsessed with the technology of cartooning as they were with its art. They were creating sync sound cartoons before Walt Disney, and their catalog of over twenty patents included the setback camera, a system that overlaid animated, 2D characters onto physical, 3D settings, and, most significantly, the rotoscope, a process to trace footage of human performers onto cartoon cels—a technology still in use to this day.

Neither sync sound nor rotoscoping figure much in the silent cartoon KoKo’s Earth Control, but a gadget-happy atmosphere still permeates. Clown KoKo and canine companion Fritz travel to the ends of the Earth (or, more literally, the bottom, walking the perimeter of a spinning disk) to reach a room studded with knobs, dials, and levers: the legendary Earth Control. While KoKo amuses himself with toying with the elements and shifting day to night and back, Fritz battles the irresistible urge to pull a lever whose label bluntly warns that activation will result in the end of the world. Do I have to point out that temptation wins?

At a point in the century where it seemed wonderful inventions were being introduced on a daily basis—and ten years after more ominous inventions threatened to reduce civilization to ashes (and this was before Albert Einstein & Friends leapt into the mix)—the notion of humanity teetering on the brink of apocalypse at the pull of a lever must have felt both tantalizing and terrifying. Fortunately, director Dave Fleischer merely uses the end-of-all-life-as-we-know-it for some customary visual puns, including a volcano that turns into a giant dude smoking a cigar, and some live-action gimcrackery with the camera, starring, presumably, some Inkwell Studios staffers and the streets of New York, both of which are slightly worse for wear by the end. Technology could be a promise or a threat, but happily the Fleischers could make you laugh at both prospects.

The 1930s: Mickey Mouse in “The Worm Turns” (1937)

There’s an odd incongruity to watching happy-go-lucky Mickey doing the mad scientist bit while whipping up a batch of “Courage Builder” serum, an impression not dissipated by him spouting a cheery, “Oh, boy!” while his infernal formula brews. It’s only furthered when the syringe-wielding cartoon mouse comes to the aid of a more… um… mousy mouse under attack by a cat. The animators work hard to keep Mickey visually separated from the two combatants, but still, the question could fairly be asked, “What the hell kind of subspecies is Mickey, anyway?”

Whatever he is, the rodent who helps keep the lights on at the Disney studios is more plot engine than participant here, repeatedly deploying his serum as the repercussions of his interference keep scaling up—first, saving the mouse from the cat, then the cat from an enraged Pluto, and then Pluto from Dogcatcher Pete (with, as a coda, an emboldened fire hydrant getting the last laugh on the mutt—poor Pluto rarely catches a break in these cartoons). Anticipating noted (if fictional) mathematician Ian Malcolm’s observation that just because science can do something doesn’t mean that it should, “The Worm Turns” demonstrates the consequences of profligately bequeathing power without considering the upshot. Released a scant month before the debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the cartoon makes its point while Disney was at the peak of its animation prowess, a status demonstrated in every painstakingly executed frame.

The 1940s: Superman in “The Mechanical Monsters” (1941)

Legend has it that when the Fleischer Studios was approached by parent company Paramount to budget out a series of Superman cartoons, Max and Dave Fleischer—none too eager to tackle the caped superhero —deliberately overbid at an exorbitant cost of $100,000 per episode. They were probably not happy when the studio took one look at the price tag and said, “Cut it to $30,000 [approximately $525,000 today and still pricey for the time] and you’ve got a deal.”

However reluctant the Fleischers may have been to bring the Last Son of Krypton to the screen, they were committed enough to their craft not to waste Paramount’s largesse. The Fleischer Superman cartoons were groundbreaking both for their embrace of action and adventure in a genre that still clung closely to pratfalls and slapstick, and for their lavish, deco-inspired animation, with proto-geek director Dave investing special attention on all that gee-whiz technology.

All that tech-love is raised to near-orgasmic proportions in “The Mechanical Monsters.” In the course of ten minutes, you get the titular, towering robots (which are never referred to as such in the cartoon), complete with flame-thrower eyes and retractable propellers and wings, plus an awesome panoramic control panel (with each robot being controlled by a knob, a lever, and four whole buttons!), a menacing subterranean smelting facility (every good mad genius needs one), and crackling arcs of energy overlaid onto every electrical device presented, whether or not it makes sense. The design of the robots, with their lanky, lumbering walk, became so iconic that they crop up in the likes of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, and the entire opening of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, while the highlight has Supes putting the beatdown on an army of automatons. The ensuing mechanical carnage—with metal limbs, torsos, and heads flying everywhere, capped off with the control panel engulfed in flames—is not just a cool piece of animation, it might just stand as history’s ultimate teardown.

The 1950s: Merrie Melodies – “Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century” (1953)

It was typically Bugs Bunny who would go up against the alien entity eventually dubbed Marvin the Martian (he was nameless in his original appearances). But when director Chuck Jones was indulging his satirical side, the vainglorious Daffy Duck—who had long stopped being officially daffy—was a more suitable foil. With a movie-going audience who as kids had reveled in the comic strip/radio/movie serial adventures of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, et al, and who had subsequently grown up in a time that saw more than a few of them experiencing the worst of humanity in combat and its aftermath, a skewering of innocent, pulp-y science fiction adventure may have felt long overdue.

In a universe of towers that soar and platforms that project precariously out into space (in brilliant background designs by Philip De Guard), where electric eyes trigger doors opening up on even bigger electric eyes, Jones finds opportunities for customary slapstick (does Daffy get repeatedly blasted and disintegrated? Of course!), subversions of SF concepts (who knew rocket ships had reverse gears?), and a few lashings of Cold War anxiety as Daffy’s feud with Marvin over the highly coveted Planet X (last repository of Illudium Phosdex, “the shaving cream atom”) escalates eventually to planetary annihilation. In Jones’ conversion of the Looney Tunes ethos from rampant anarchy to mordant wit (but still with tons of explosions courtesy of the Acme Company), there were clear echoes of America’s post-war acceptance that the world was perhaps more complex than we had previously allowed. “Duck Dodgers” sums that realization up in a closing shot where, after Daffy has declared primacy over the pathetic patch of rock remaining after the conflagration, Porky Pig gazes into the camera and utters a curt, “B-big deal.” The future could still be swell, but the shadows—even in space—would pursue us.

The 1960s: Space Angel, “The Slave World” (1962)

When you’re cranking out an animated science fiction kids show on a budget, you have to accept that certain compromises will be made. Like, you can’t always put science in your science fiction. Like, you can rarely bother to actually animate the damn thing. Like, you run the risk of traumatizing an entire generation of young viewers via your other, cost-cutting innovation: Syncro-Vox, which superimposed real human mouths onto drawn characters’ faces. Weird looking to begin with, the process wasn’t helped by a lack of integrity in registering live action to cartoon, leaving many a tyke to wonder if, in the future, they too might fall victim to the scourge of Migratory Lip Syndrome.

Still, there were compensations. There was lots of lovely Alex Toth art, bringing a comic book kick to Space Angel’s visuals. And while narrative arcs could frequently be summed up as one-damn-thing-after-another—perfect for a show that was broken up into five 5-minute chunks meant to be stripped out over five after-school afternoons—occasionally adventures could rise to something close to actual narratives. Such was the case when the titular Space Angel Scott McCloud (voiced by Ned Lefebver) and his crew of communications expert/target-of-the-occasional-sexist-joke Crystal Mace (Margaret Kerry) and engineer/Scotsman (of course) Taurus (Hal Smith) visit a pair of roving worlds that drift into our solar system every thirty years. Setting aside the question of how such an advent does not wreak havoc on the planets in our own system, what Scott & co. find is one sphere filled with committed pacifists, the other populated by a warlike race with no compunction about raiding their neighbor for slave labor.

Subtlety was not Space Angel’s strong suit: The oppressed are rendered as humanoid, dignified, and quite Caucasian, while the oppressors are presented as troll-like, imperious, and vaguely Asian. Nor was producer Cambria Productions especially obsessed with concealing their myriad cost-cutting efforts. When the slaves show via video monitor how their attempts to reach out to Earth for assistance foundered because they unfortunately always attempted contact while Earth was in the midst of a world war, the point is illustrated with glimpses of actual, documentary combat footage. Nobody in the cartoon remarks upon the incongruity, but any adults watching when this cropped up could be forgiven for having to scoop their jaws up off the floor (no intervention by Syncro-Vox necessary). Slapdash as Space Angel was, it still fired young imaginations on the potential of the future, and occasionally slipped in a bit of morality about whether humanity was truly ready for it.

The 1970s: Star Blazers, “We Will Return!” (1979 American airing)

The Seventies were not an especially halcyon period for weekday afternoon cartoons. Animation was frequently mediocre, and stories were hampered by the intervention of well-meaning parents groups intent on guarding tender minds from the corruption of actual entertainment. Some solace could be found in the import of Japanese anime, although by the time such shows as Battle of the Planets (née Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) made it to American screens, they too had gone through an extensive laundering process. Then came Star Blazers.

Imported, as was Battle, in the wake of Star Wars’ success, this space epic—born in Japan as Space Battleship Yamato and marking the first directorial effort of the legendary Leiji Matsumoto—ventured into conceptual areas little explored on TV screens before the sun went down. The story—centering on the crew of the spaceship Argo as they travel to the distant world Iscandar to retrieve a technology that would save a ravaged Earth from the attacks of the warlike Gamilons—was serialized, with a title card flashed at the end of each episode showing the number of days left before worldwide annihilation. Because of that, there was no reset button to push, no way to restore things back to square one for the next episode. Characters learned, and grew. People died. Let me emphasize that last point: People died. And stayed dead. For a generation raised on entertainment that rarely challenged them to consider such inconvenient concepts as consequences, this was a hammer blow.

Nearly as disorienting for its young viewers were episodes that took a pause in all the action to explore the impact of the Argo’s mission on its crew. In the bittersweetly titled “We Will Return!”, as the Argo prepares to enter a space warp that will take them out of communication with Earth for the better part of a year, the crew is given one final opportunity to reach out to loved ones. Amidst all the tearful farewells, one of the lead characters, Derek Wildstar (voiced by Kenneth Meseroll)—having lost his family in Gamilon attacks—meets with Argo Captain Avatar (Gordon Ramsey), whose son similarly died in battle, to commiserate over knowledge that no one waits on the other side of a video screen for their call, and to toast the onset of their mission with a consoling glass of, ahem, spring water. (Okay, it was actually sake. You didn’t think the censorship gates had been completely thrown open, did you?)

For the show’s target audience, watching two characters share this quiet, deeply emotional moment was an unanticipated induction into meaningful, no-foolin’ drama. Not all of Space Battleship Yamato’s more mature beats made it through to American TV—among other things, an extended digression into the Yamato’s WWII history was, not surprisingly, excised—but what survived delivered a signal to its preteen audience that cartoons could present emotions far deeper than what they were accustomed to.

The 1980s: Heavy Metal (1981)

Not long into a viewing of this anthology film based on an American “adult” comic magazine based on a French “adult” comic magazine, audiences became aware that there were several things to be counted on from one sequence to the next. One was that if any opportunity was offered to depict gore in its splooshiest fashion, it would be eagerly embraced. Another was that by the end of the film, everyone watching would have a complete, working knowledge of metal and punk bands of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Yet another was that if a female character appeared on the screen, it would be only a matter of minutes before everyone would get a good glimpse of her tits. Things were simpler in the eighties. (No they weren’t; producers were just willing to cater to the tastes of horny teen boys to a ridiculous degree.)

HM is a decidedly mixed bag. Building their film around the framing story of an orb of pure evil and how it wields its influence across the universe, the producers—which included Ivan Reitman—recruited numerous studios to bring their own distinctive styles to each sequence. Sometimes, as with the noir-ish “Harry Canyon”—based on the work of French artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud—the result was a tight, amusing adventure that anticipates the comic likes of The Fifth Element; sometimes, as with the Frazetta-esque “Den” and “Taarna”—the former based on Richard Corben’s work, the latter, again, on Moebius—they were exercises in epic style over narrative substance; and sometimes, as in the toony “So Beautiful & So Dangerous”—Angus McKie’s tale of a secretary inadvertently abducted by drug-snorting aliens and wooed by an amorous robot—it boiled down to, “Okay. And your point is…?” Imperfect as Heavy Metal was, in a movie marketplace where Star Wars was spreading an increasingly influential shadow, the film stood out as an impertinent, raunchy counterargument. Plus it gave all those horny teen boys an excuse to tell their parents that they were just going to the movies to watch spaceships.

The 1990s: Batman: The Animated Series – “Heart of Steel, Parts I & II” (1992)

There may have been a half-century between the Fleischer Superman series and Warner’s successful porting of the Dark Knight to TV animation, but it’s hard to ignore the shared DNA. Save for a handful of video screens in the Batcave, Gotham is visually firmly ensconced in the Deco ‘40s, a perfect setting both for a dashing billionaire playboy to woo any available debutantes (check out Bruce Wayne’s chunky-yet-luxe limo!), and for a Dark Knight to brood amongst the towering spires. Still, the passage of fifty years is going to leave its mark: Where the Man of Steel had to battle robots whose operator’s ambitions didn’t extend far beyond bank robberies and diamond heists, by the time the Bat faced down an army of androids, their goal was nothing short of world conquest, via replacement of influential humans with their automated counterparts.

Director Kevin Altieri has expressed regret over having Wayne/Batman (voiced by the indispensable Kevin Conroy) make mention of “wetware”—a term that would subsequently fall into disuse—but, hey, he’s owed props for at least trying to bring in scientific concepts that were at the forefront of attention at the time. And this is another instance where the Fox Standards and Practices department showed uncommon lenience in the level of violence depicted, with the megalomaniacal AI H.A.R.D.A.C. (Jeff Bennett) incapacitating its inventor (William Sanderson) with a disturbingly fiery burst of electricity, and several machine-spawned surrogates “dying” on-screen (the rationale for the latter being that as long as they were robots, the fatalities didn’t count…never mind that the things were indistinguishable from humans). Featuring the series debut of Barbara Gordon (Melissa Gilbert), who was able to demonstrate her detective skills even before she officially donned her own cowl-and-cape, “Heart of Steel” brought a dash of modern-day paranoia to the world of old-school mechanical monsters.

The 2000s: WALL-E (2008)

How amazing was Pixar, back in 2008, back when they were still in the midst of an unprecedented run of hit films? And how profitable were they, not just in selling out theaters, but in leveraging the all-important ancillary marketplace? A decade’s-plus worth of kids had grown up in the company of Woody and Buzz action figures, cuddled Nemo and Dory plushies, steered their Lightning McQueens across imaginary finish lines, and served up perfect cassoulets in their Ratatouille casserole dishes (that last may not have actually happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised). So with all the dollars filtering in from all the Walmarts of the world, and with all the tchotchkes flowing out to all those homes, what could possibly have made more sense than for director Andrew Stanton to tell a tale centered on…the perils of malignant consumerism?

Pixar had consistently upped its production game from film to film, but WALL-E’s first act represented a quantum leap. There was an undeniable palpability to the film’s rendition of a ravaged, garbage-choked world, while its depiction of a humble robotic trash compactor courting an elegant, iPod-ish exploration probe (in other words, Lady and the Tramp with microprocessors)—enacted practically dialogue-free—was sweetly beguiling. And when the film shifted to outer space and WALL-E’s and EVE’s efforts to steer a wandering cruise liner full of comfortable, coddled, and morbidly obese humans back to Earth before they’re subsumed by their own, mass-market decadence, it managed to deliver its cautionary message with customary Pixar wit and uncommon grace. Functioning at the top of its skills, the studio demonstrated that it could make you care about both the fate of a squat, cube-shaped robot, and the destiny of humankind (literally) at large, and still leave you optimistic about the prospects for both.

The 2010s: World of Tomorrow (2015)

All right, calm down, Rick and Morty fans, we’ve got you covered elsewhere (but in case you want to know: “Auto Erotic Assimilation”). But while R&M was busy establishing surprisingly credible science fiction chops for a cartoon about an alcoholic super-genius and his frequently victimized nephew, maverick animator Don Hertzfeldt was delivering a glimpse into a future that was no less acidic, and dramatically more poignant.

On the eve of humanity’s extinction, a clone reaches out to the past to engage her young prototype. Teleporting the child to her time, she takes the girl on a guided tour of a personal life that features romantic dalliances with inanimate objects, a career implanting the fear of death into graceful, towering robots, and moments when the nagging sense that something is missing overwhelms all other concerns, all while humanity desperately strives for immortality, at the cost of losing track of the value the past might hold.

Hertzfeldt had long established a magical ability to invest deceptively simple line drawings with an incredible amount of soul. Casting those characters into an abstract ecology of cross-hatched structures and pulsing, all-enveloping “outernet” landscapes, the animator guided the Oscar-nominated World of Tomorrow from a standard, dystopian view of the future into something at once wryly comic, and deeply affecting. Hopefully, one hundred years hence, when the big marketing push begins to transfer human consciousness into tiny, black cubes, it will still be around to deliver a cogent warning.

So, that’s my list of ten. But, hey, I didn’t have to stop there; I can think of tons of other great examples. Like when the Terry Bears bought a robot. Or when Bugs Bunny was chased by a robot. Or when Gumby’s home was destroyed by robots. Um, I seem to be caught in a rut, here. But, you see? That’s where you come in. There has to be at least one, inspirational science fiction cartoon that grabbed your imagination, and that I didn’t bother to mention here. So go ahead, comment below—the future of humanity depends on it! (Too far? Okay, maybe it’s just a fun thing to do.)

Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastique and Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!