Tyger Tyger

Coming up next is one of the strangest and most-confusing episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. "Tyger Tyger" was the 42nd produced episode, but the 30th aired on Oct. 30, 1992. I'm guessing it got bumped up to run in time for Halloween. However, this isn't really a good Halloween episode, as it's simply not a good episode at all.

The most fundamental flaw with this episode is that it goes against everything this show stands for. Batman is best when he's fighting more "normal" villains. When you start delving too deep into the supernatural, or science fiction, then you start running into problems. There are a couple of exceptions, like Clayface and Man-Bat, but for the most part, Batman should not be fighting monsters. So when this episode started off with a gorilla man, I immediately thought, "What is a gorilla man doing on my Batman? I don't want to see him fight a gorilla man." And it really just put me in a bad mood the whole rest of the way. These monsters were just strange and weird. They might have worked better in a different show, but they really felt out of place in Batman. I'll take a point off for that.

Surprisingly, I will add one point for a nice bit of continuity. After Selina was kidnapped by the gorilla man, Batman visited Kirk Langstrom, who was the Man-Bat and is kind of the expert on half-human/half-animal creatures. This show had a very loose continuity, but whenever they do something like this, it makes me happy.

Now, why is it that every Catwoman episode sucks? In this one, we never even got to see Catwoman. Just Selina, then her as a Woman-Cat, which was extremely odd and stupid. First of all, I never really understood why the evil doctor turned her into a cat in the first place. Just because she likes cats doesn't mean she wants to be one. And if your great creation, Tygrus, needs a wife, then why not make him one like you made Tygrus originally? In fact, if you think cat-humans are the ultimate life forms, then why not turn yourself into one? Seriously, this doctor's motivations made no sense. Also, the episode was kind of inconsistent with Selina's mind in her cat form. At first, the doctor said she'd only be confused by Batman and forget she was ever human, and that's how it was, for about two seconds. OK ... so what was the point of that? What was the point of any of this episode? I suppose a story like this would work in the comics because you could say that even after Selina turned back into a human, she still retained some cat-like agility and strength and whatnot. But you can't do that in a TV show like this where every episode is a stand-alone story that can be viewed in any order. Am I done ranting now? I guess so. The score's back down to a 4.

Despite all the strangeness and lack of logical motive in this episode, it still had plenty of elements to be entertaining. But it wasn't. For an episode where Batman went to a jungle and fought a Man-Cat, it really had crummy action. All the characters were extremely stiff and seemed to stand around a lot and move very slowly while fighting. Not only did this episode fail in its attempts to be a deep psychological story, it also failed in what should have been easiest for it — having some good action sequences. For this last failure, I'll take the score down another point.

Final score: 3