When I was in middle school, I got to read for class what would end up being one of my all-time favorite short stories, Richard McConnell’s ‘The Most Dangerous Game.’ Even today, this century-old story feels like an early example of an action movie or exciting comic book. You could drop Keanu Reeves into the story and film it almost unchanged and end up with an exciting product. That’s why it gets remade over and over again. That’s why Batman: The Animated Series riffed on it, and that’s why Batman Beyond is taking inspiration from it as well in this week’s episode.
Batman Beyond: Bloodsport
The conceit of this week’s story is pretty simple: there’s a hunter arriving in Gotham that has zeroed in on Batman as the ultimate prey. Batman can hide, hunt, fly, and fight. There are few fictional characters who could fight a hunter like this one on even ground.
The new guy is given the simple name of Stalker. This character, voiced by veteran of DC animation and live-action Carl Lumbly, is equal parts cool and concerning. Watching this episode in 2023 feels cringe-y compared to how it might’ve felt 24 years ago when it was airing.
Stalker is a tall, lanky man of color with tribal markings all over his body. He speaks with a slight (indeterminate) accent and electronic tribal-sounding music backs his scenes. He fights in little more than a loin cloth, wielding a powerful spear as his weapon of choice, along with high-tech gear like smoke bombs that mark the target with fluorescent powder to make them easier to track. Putting a person of color in a loincloth and giving them a spear just feels weird these days. It probably was weird back then, too, it just wasn’t as well known.
Hunter villains CAN be awesome
Hunter-type villains can work. Marvel’s Kraven has proven to be an entertaining adversary for Spider-Man more than once; he’ll be the villain of the upcoming Spider-Man 2 PlayStation game and he’s getting his own movie. The jury’s still out on whether that will be watchable. But this particular hunter leans hard on the idea of a man of color matching typical ‘savage’ stereotypes, and it’s tough to watch at this point.
That’s not to say the episode is unwatchable. Stalker is still a cool idea as someone who believes that the Bat is a single contiguous spirit that finds hosts to inhabit, and who wants to catch and defeat what he sees as a sort of semi-immortal hunter. Stalker’s design is rad as well.
The best moments occur in a flashback as Stalker relates his origins to Terry’s little brother, Matt, who he has kidnapped as bait. The flashback, like Batman himself, is all black and red, with silhouettes telling the story. Stalker talks of a panther he fought that is depicted as having a red lighting scar on its forehead (Harry?! Is that you?). After Batman tricks him into frying his own cybernetic implants, Stalker’s vision scrambles and Batman and the memory of the panther bleed together, with the red bat and red bolt morphing into each other.
It makes for a visually striking and memorable sequence that I just wish had been applied to a more three-dimensional character.
Near Misses
Meanwhile, the B story of this episode is that Terry is neglecting his real-life responsibilities to be Batman. Unfortunately, this is little more than a reason to get Matt into Stalker’s reach. There’s so much room to mine interesting development for Terry out of his complicated life. Unlike Bruce, Terry has a family, connections, and responsibilities that can’t be fulfilled by a butler. Terry has to be Terry. Bruce could take a vacation from being Bruce to focus on being Batman.
I wish the show would do more with this aspect of Terry. In this way, Terry feels like the answer to the question, “What if Spider-Man wore the bat suit?” He’s a scrappy and smart kid with very little money but tons of heart. In more recent years, the struggle between identities has taken center stage with Peter, and it would be great to see it with Terry as well, rather than it just being a way to add in some wacky hijinks about lying to people you love.
This episode is fun to watch, but works best when you remember how old the episode is and keep in mind the lessons we’ve learned since then.
