One episode is about a fake psychic running a financial cult on Gotham's wealthy elite. The other episode is about an actor who becomes a living pile of clay and cannot stop changing shape, and it is devastating.
This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 19 and 20: \"Prophecy of Doom\" and \"Feat of Clay, Part 1.\"
\"Prophecy of Doom\" introduces Nostromos, a self-styled seer who has built a loyal Brotherhood of wealthy Gotham citizens by delivering accurate predictions of disaster, disasters his assistant Lucas has been engineering in advance. When Bruce Wayne's friend Ethan Clark invites him to a Brotherhood event and Nostromos singles Bruce out as being in mortal danger, Batman sees through the scam immediately and sets about unravelling it. The animation was by AKOM, the studio notorious for driving Bruce Timm batty, so expect a lot of weird shots.
Then \"Feat of Clay, Part 1\" arrives and the show changes register entirely. Matt Hagen was once one of the most celebrated film actors in the country, before a car accident left him disfigured. A substance called Renuyu, developed by Roland Daggett's company, allows him to reshape his features without makeup, but Daggett has been using the addiction as leverage, forcing Hagen to impersonate people in service of increasingly criminal schemes. When Hagen uses Renuyu to impersonate Bruce Wayne and assault Lucius Fox, Daggett decides the liability has become too great. His men force-feed Hagen an overdose of the compound and leave him for dead. But, he doesn't die. He wakes up in his car, reaches for his rearview mirror, and sees what he's become, leading to one of the series' best origin stories.
We dig into what \"Feat of Clay\" does better than almost any other villain origin in the run, what Daggett establishes as a recurring corporate villain archetype for the series, and the choice to end Part 1 on the rearview mirror rather than the transformation.
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📌 Topics covered this episode:
– Batman: TAS Episode 19 \"Prophecy of Doom\" recap & review
– Batman: TAS Episode 20 \"Feat of Clay, Part 1\" recap & review
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