One episode features Batman catching an invisible man who is creepier than he should be. The other features Adam West and is genuinely one of the best episodes in the series.
This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 17 and 18: \"See No Evil\" and \"Beware the Gray Ghost.\"
\"See No Evil\" opens with a string of gem thefts committed by a man no one can see. The thief turns out to be Lloyd Ventrix, an ex-con who stole an experimental invisibility suit from Wayne Enterprises, a suit that turns out to be slowly poisoning him, and has been using it to visit his estranged daughter Kimmy, who has been calling the invisible man \"Mojo\" and treating him as an imaginary friend, unaware that it's her father breaking into her room through the window (yeah, its as creepy as it sounds).
Then \"Beware the Gray Ghost\" arrives, and the show goes somewhere different. A series of mysterious bombings are plaguing Gotham, and Batman finds himself unable to identify the pattern, until he makes a connection to a black-and-white pulp adventure show called The Gray Ghost that he watched obsessively as a child, a show that may have contributed more than anything else to why Bruce Wayne became the kind of man who puts on a cape. To find the missing episode he needs, Batman tracks down Simon Trent, the actor who played the Gray Ghost, now broke, blacklisted, and reduced to selling his own merchandise to pay rent. Simon Trent is played by Adam West, whose casting turns the episode into something the show rarely is: a genuine act of self-reflection about what popular heroes mean to the people who grow up with them, and what it costs the people who embody them.
We discuss why \"Beware the Gray Ghost\" is one of the most emotionally resonant episodes in the entire run, what Adam West brings to the role that no one else could, and what it means that this version of Bruce Wayne was inspired not by tragedy alone but by a fictional hero in a cape.
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📌 Topics covered this episode:
– Batman: TAS Episode 17 \"See No Evil\" recap & review
– Batman: TAS Episode 18 \"Beware the Gray Ghost\" recap & review
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