What Killed the Dinosaurs? Ice Age!

Batman: The Animated Series (1992)

Rating ... B (61)

The opening credits set the stage nicely. Cops and criminals are associated with white and black, respectively, as beams of light from police vehicles penetrate the darkness where shadowy figures are lurking about. Batman arrives to dispatch the criminals yet oscillates between the two shades; as we learn later, his motives aren't entirely altruistic.



More than any other episode, Mean Seasons (3.13) demonstrates the elegant, poetic storytelling for which people fondly remember Batman: The Animated series. By elegant and poetic, I mean the ability to say a great deal without needing a great deal of space (or time) to do it, to the degree that folks regard the brevity of the work as poetic.

From a literal perspective, Mean Seasons is the Batman formula, pure and simple. Villain makes his/her appearance. Villain strikes once more, and once more. Batman apprehends Villain. Aside from perhaps a showdown with a mechanical dinosaur, no incident is longer than is strictly required and the dénouement is curt and stoic.

Mean Seasons is a villain-du-jour episode and its one-timer is Calendar Girl, a mysterious woman with an extensive bag of pyrotechnic tricks who dresses head to toe in solids along with a theatre mask to hide her face. After she wrecks two PR events from different corporations and leaves behind a calendar page with a date circled, Batman's supercomputer is able to cross-reference the data to discover her identity; she's Paige Munroe, a former model and public starling cast aside in favor of younger talent.

Figuratively, Mean Seasons has a lot on its mind. From sleazy producers looking for action on the casting couch, glamorous showgirls, and adults applauding hackneyed youth-oriented TV programming, the episode emphasizes society's natural preference for things to be at their prime, without regard to what is left. This conceit is demonstrated when Batman and Batgirl first encounter Paige's profile through their computer. "Pretty girl," Batman remarks. "Don't you mean, pretty woman?" Batgirl responds. Paige is easily of the age to be called a woman, but Batman reacts to her beauty and thus unconsciously selects the more favorable term.



The Calendar Girl costume Paige dons is also revealing. Because she wears one solid color only, we cannot distinguish detail in her image - we can only see the shape of a woman. Her face is concealed by an emotionless mask, completing the symbolic ensemble. Society desires the abstract of a woman, not one in the particular, and her outfit derisively gives them what they seek.

The episode includes a small subplot about a Wayne Enterprises employee forced to retire by age policy as a companion to the main story. Wayne abolishes the policy and allows the man to stay because he understands the need for the collective to value the individual - not simply the work performed by that individual.



Paige's situation, however, is not so favorable. After kidnapping three corporate bigwigs, intent on killing them in revenge for the way she was treated, Batman arrives to bust up the party. Calendar Girl has pretty good aim with a scythe but Batman defeats her when she becomes distracted; a projector showing clips of her past appearances (intended to show the executives what they took from her) malfunctions when Batman throws a henchman into it, and the image of Paige on the screen evaporates as the film stock burns in the projector. This is the moment Calendar Girl realizes her identity as Paige has been lost; the point when she was let go from these companies was when a strong-willed individual would reject the companies' valuation of her self worth, but unfortunately she chose to reject herself. Upon apprehension, Bullock removes her mask and Paige recoils at the prospect of the public glimpsing her face. Though the episode hinted that her face may have become disfigured or otherwise signficantly altered from her modeling days, we discover that isn't the case. Batgirl sees Paige's face reflected in a shard of broken glass and exclaims, "She's beautiful!" Batman - "She can't see that anymore; all she sees are the flaws." Mean Seasons is an impeccable and economical tragedy about the value of a human life, as determined not by the bearer, but by everyone else.



Highlights from a few others:



Two-Face (1.10) tells the story of how district attorney Harvey Dent became Two-Face. Crusading to be re-elected, Harvey is already having anger issues before an accident disfigures his face and makes his double personality problem visually evident. Dent is tough on crime but his alter ego is twice the zealot, thieving directly from mob boss Rupert Thorne's money laundering fronts out of a mixture of vigilante justice and personal vengeance. There's also another hazy amalgam that concern's Two-Face's motivation; while his deeds are clearly of his own volition, the flip of a coin (chance) is often responsible to determine whether or not, or how much. The dilemma is that both Dent and Two-Face believe his deformation was caused by random chance, and deny that action on his part could have meant otherwise. When Two-Face flips a coin to determine Thorne's fate and Batman throws a box full of similar coins to obfuscate the result, we see the extent of Two-Face's denial as he is literally unable to decide without his coin, despite how he obviously wishes to see Thorne gone. Batman - and Dent's fiance - represent the viewpoint of being able to affect things for the better through human initiative, and he vows to rescue Dent from his worse half, though he'd prefer a little luck in the process. The face showing of the coin tossed into the fountain in the last scene is optimistic towards his efforts.



If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich (1.35) and What Is Reality? (1.43) make a nice Riddler twofer. In the former, Edward Nygma vows revenge on a corporate exec who obtains the rights to Nygma's successful puzzle game via contractual loophole and fires him afterwards to avoid paying him royalties. Batman solves all of Nygma's riddles and saves the executive, but the Riddler remains at large. Wayne Enterprises buys the proposal for Nygma's game, owned by the executive, who pockets a tidy profit, but it turns out the cost of a guilty conscience is worth more than money. And in the latter, Riddler entraps Gordon in a virtual reality world and Batman must enter the game to rescue him. All the while Nygma has been trying to erase his identity in the real world and migrate to VR, where no misfortunes befall him because he makes all the rules. Batman saves the commissioner from the fantasy but not Nygma - how he can learn to accept reality is a riddle nobody else can solve.



There's also Moon of the Wolf (1.38) where Batman battles a scientist with a werewolf serum and a victory-driven athlete who takes the potion for its strength benefits despite the side effects. The scientist withholds the antidote for relieving the athlete of his lycanthropy and won't relinquish it until the athlete does him some favors, and the athlete ultimately attacks the scientist and destroys the antidote in a fit of werewolf rage. Fame and fortune became his with his performance at the Gotham olympics but he gave up his humanity to achieve it; the ironic twist on grass is greener is that the cost of secular reward is that which is required to appreciate it.

House & Garden (2.05) is probably the best example of the series' focus on weird individuals with some desire for normalcy who find a twisted way of going about obtaining it. Mad Love (3.21) focuses on Harley's love affair with Joker, which persists through his abuse and selfishness because of her desire to reform the unreform-able. Other stand-outs include The Last Laugh (1.04), Vendetta (1.20), Nothing to Fear (1.03), Heart of Ice (1.13), and Cult of the Cat (3.15).