Batman: TAS, episode #14: The Clock King

There's a certain standard image that many people have of The Batman and of superheroes, in general. That image is largely of episodic stories centered on a constant. In this case, most people imagine that The Batman is always there, unchanging, and will always be encountering villains in single moments, where the latter have developed the latest scheme that our hero must resolve in order to keep the whole storytelling merry-go-round going. Next time, said villain will be back with a new scheme and we'll do this again. That's a pattern that DC Comics helped to set in stone during their prominence in the first half of the last century. Every issue was a single moment and a single read and plots beyond those 24 pages (if you were lucky) didn't really exist. It's a pattern that Marvel would deliberately stray from in many ways, which overall gave more strength to their setting and characters and explains some of why they eventually replaced DC atop the comics world. But the stereotypical image of superheroes remains in much of the public mind and was most obvious with our main character during the Batman TV show of the 60s.

What makes it unusually effective in The Batman's case is that, as I mentioned before, he's essentially the antagonist in his own stories. He is a constant and he will always be here to try to figure out the latest scheme of whomever the opponent is. In this case, it's the Clock King, who was originally a Green Arrow opponent, but made his Batman debut in that much-reviled (or -loved, as you like) TV series and has stuck with the Darknight Detective ever since. Appearance-wise, he's one of the more mundane of Batman's opponents, but that's because in both the 60s series and BTAS, they didn't show him in his 1970s form:

The 70s, man... However, they did go one step further in comic book naming conventions, calling this version of the character, Temple Fugate (a reference to the Latin tempus fugit ("time flies")), instead of the original, William Tockman.

This episode leans on The Batman in his scientific role, as he ends up doing the MacGyver thing inside the safe in order to break out and continue the pursuit. But it also showed him operating in broad daylight for the entire episode, which is the first time we've seen that in our survey. That, too, is a callback to the former TV series, where good ol' Batman was routinely operating in the middle of the day, removing much of the mystery and menace which is intended to be a key element of his identity in putting fear into the criminals he's encountering. But despite Fugate's mundane appearance (the script takes pains to have The Batman continue to refer to him as "Fugate", rather than his nom du guerre, as he would with many other opponents), he demonstrates a pretty amazing ability to not only face down the hero in single combat inside a constantly moving environment, but also pitch himself off the sides of buildings and land on moving trains. Not bad for a career office worker. Being that uptight presumably keeps one in really good shape.

But that, too, is the essence of "classic" comics, where the idea that an accountant can jump onto moving trains is no more implausible than someone dressing up as a bat to fight crime and this episode engages all of that to the fullest. Indeed, his mundane appearance combines well with the maniacal laugh of voice actor Alan Rachins to almost make Clock King more menacing than the otherwise more bizarrely appearing figures like The Joker. This is, indeed, an average nerd doing very strange things with murderous intent. (It's always the quiet ones.) And this is extrapolated into the plot, where the longest scene is the lengthy fight inside the clock tower, which is very classic DC comics in every respect, since its funhouse-like atmosphere tells you all you need to know about what genre you've sat down to watch, complete with ending pun about the Clock King's return ("It's only a matter of time.") One nice world-building touch was the inclusion of a story in the newspaper Bruce is reading in his limo, where we see that Selina Kyle's assistant, Mabel, is still active on their mission, even if the former is in jail ("Kolus cat rescued.") However, on that same note, we're also never told what Fugate's company actually did or why it would've been subject to a $20 million judgment.

For a character that's been around and regularly produced for as long as The Batman has, you're going to need stories that hearken to a standard, even if it's one that some in your audience aren't really fans of, simply because they reach a broader audience and meet the expectations of many who simply sit down to see a "Batman cartoon." This was one of those episodes, which was still delivered well and had a few high points, but ended up being not exceptional. Next time, the Clown Prince of Crime returns with The Last Laugh.