Plot summary: Ra’s al Ghul seeks out an ancient scroll with hopes of gaining the powers of an immortal Egyptian queen.
Each Saturday and Sunday Matt Waters recaps an episode of the legendary Batman: The Animated Series, building an overall ranking along the way. Plus best performances, the ever-popular Villain Watch and more!
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Notes
Episode Title: ‘Avatar’
Original Air Date: May 9th, 1994
Directed: Kevin Altieri (17)
Written: Michael Reaves (12)
This is the first (and possibly only) time Batman is depicted as willing to kill a sentient being in the series.
It’s a Star Trek reunion, as Nichelle Nichols, David Warner and Brock Peters starred together in the sixth movie, The Undiscovered Country.
The archaeologist in the opening is modelled after Peter Cushing in The Mummy (1959).
Thoth’s little dalliance with Ra’s may be a reference to The Shining.
Recap
We begin with an archaeological dig in Egypt, 1898, and some white dude is looking to plunder another culture to fill the coffers of a museum. Fortunately for said culture, the man sees bright lights, and when his colleagues on the surface attempt to pull him out, they wind up with nothing but frayed rope!
In the present, Bruce Wayne prepares to open a pharaoh exhibit at one of Gotham’s museums. Lucius Fox admires the ‘treasures’, remarking on The Scroll of Osiris, an incomplete document, and the oldest in the world.
Surprise, surprise, a masked individual breaks into the museum after dark and steals the scroll. Luckily, Batman anticipates the theft and puts a stop to it, unmasking the culprit to reveal Ubu, Ra’s al Ghul’s bodyguard.
Talk of the devil, or rather The Demon, he arrives to chuck a damn cobra at Bruce, who passes out almost immediately after being bitten, but does manage to administer an anti-venom before losing consciousness. Ra’s makes off with the scroll.
After recovering, Bruce heads for Gibraltar to find Talia, who reveals the scroll is a map to the tomb of Queen Thoth, but she doesn’t know why her father wants to find it. Bruce and Talia embrace.
The next day, she flies Bruce to Cairo, home to one of her father’s old safe-houses, which contains the completed scroll… as well as Ra’s and Ubu, who instantly capture them.
Revealing Thoth ruled two continents for 1,000 years thanks to her command over life and death, Ra’s states his plan to replicate the feat by claiming her powers. Bruce gets in a nice dig about Ra’s chauvinism and gets imprisoned in a glass box for his troubles.
Escaping thanks to a sonic emitter that shatters the glass, the lovers head for the tomb, which Bruce memorised the location of despite only getting a quick glance at the completed map. Because of course he did.
Walking into another trap, Batman and Talia can only watch as Ra’s discovers a secret entrance to a sub-chamber, leaving the others to battle.
Thoth rises from what looks like but is probably not a Lazarus Pit surrounded by scores of corpses, which Ra’s doesn’t take as a red flag. They begin making out, but Thoth’s true zombie appearance is revealed, as she drains Ra’s of his life force!
Batman and Talia interrupt and rescue Ra’s, but can do nothing to harm the Zombie Queen. Bruce topples an enormous statue, triggering a full-on collapse of the tomb, burying Thoth.
A recuperated Ra’s apologises for his treatment of Talia, which is all she needs to hear to pull a gun on Batman, steal his horse, and leave him in the desert. Oh, Talia.
Best Performance
Shrug. Kevin Conroy? Helen Slater? Let’s say the latter for the sake of mixing things up. Bruce & Talia are the only characters with substantial dialogue, and I’ll go for Slater because Talia goes through more of an emotional journey. She seemed to change the accent up a little, to the point I wondered if it was a different actor.
David Warner turns in his typical Ra’s performance, which is fun, but has diminishing returns. Nichelle Nichols is in the episode for less than two minutes, unfortunately.
Ranking
It amuses me that the producers nixed a number of pitched stories in the past because they contained supernatural elements they considered inappropriate for the tone of the series, and yet this episode features two immortals seeking world domination. Heck, Thoth summons sentient slime, warps her appearance and drains Ra’s’ life force.
That aside, this is fun enough. I found it less problematic than previous globetrotting episodes, but obviously nothing in it could match Bruce and Ra’s having a topless sword fight. There’s also a bit of a pacing issue with Bruce and Talia getting captured twice in just over a minute. I would also fully understand if a Zombie Queen is simply too #NotMyBatman for you.
I enjoyed Bruce and Talia’s reunion, even if her routine of betraying him at the last minute is getting a little tired (even more so given the MANY tie-in comic books I was reading around the time of this writing that repeat the trick a lot.)
- The Laughing Fish
- Mask of the Phantasm
- Almost Got ‘Im
- Heart of Ice
- The Trial
- Shadow of the Bat Part I
- I Am the Night
- Robin’s Reckoning Part I
- The Man Who Killed Batman
- Perchance to Dream
- Two-Face Part I
- A Bullet For Bullock
- Joker’s Favor
- Read My Lips
- Feat of Clay Part II
- The Demon’s Quest Part II
- Harley and Ivy
- Robin’s Reckoning Part II
- Beware the Gray Ghost
- Mad as a Hatter
- Heart of Steel Part II
- Appointment In Crime Alley
- Two-Face Part II
- Pretty Poison
- Shadow of the Bat Part II
- Feat of Clay Part I
- His Silicon Soul
- Off Balance
- Vendetta
- Birds of a Feather
- Heart of Steel Part I
- On Leather Wings
- See No Evil
- The Clock King
- It’s Never Too Late
- Joker’s Wild
- Eternal Youth
- The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy
- The Cat and the Claw Part I
- Zatanna
- Day of the Samurai
- Avatar (NEW ENTRY)
- The Demon’s Quest Part I
- The Mechanic
- The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne
- Terror in the Sky
- P.O.V.
- Christmas with the Joker
- Fear of Victory
- Be a Clown
- The Worry Men
- What is Reality?
- Fire From Olympus
- Night of the Ninja
- Mudslide
- The Cat and the Claw Part II
- Nothing to Fear
- Prophecy of Doom
- Tyger, Tyger
- Blind as a Bat
- If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?
- Dreams In Darkness
- The Last Laugh
- Cat Scratch Fever
- Moon of the Wolf
- Paging the Crime Doctor
- Sideshow
- The Under-Dwellers
- The Forgotten
- I’ve Got Batman in My Basement
Villain Watch
Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner) (fourth appearance)
As mentioned in the voice acting section, I’ve found Ra’s to have diminishing returns. He’s ancient and wants to radically lower the world’s population. That’s cool. But he has been drifting a bit too close towards generic mwahaha villain for my liking.
I’ll leave him where he is for now, but if his final episode continues on this trajectory, he’s going down.
Ubu (George Dicenzo) (third appearance)
What can I say? He and Batman seem to finally settle their grudge? I probably should never have ranked him as he’s a mostly mute bodyguard? All of the above?
Talia al Ghul (Helen Slater) (fourth appearance)
This is Talia’s final appearance in the series, and she went out doing what she loves: betraying Bruce for her father. The concept of a hero falling for a villain who isn’t all the way evil is a popular one across all fiction, and Batman is no exception. After multiple episodes casting Catwoman in the role, and then Andrea Beaumont filling it for Mask of the Phantasm, we’re back to the second most enduring version.
She displays slightly more agency here than in the two-part episode ‘The Demon’s Quest’, so I’m willing to boost her back up to what was probably her rightful place in the first place. It’s a shame they couldn’t find more to do with her though.
Thoth Khepera (Nichelle Nichols) (first appearance)
Listen, we all enjoy The Mummy. Thoth emerging as a bodacious undead babe before revealing herself as a withered zombie crone is good stuff too. It’s just a shame that she appears so late in the episode and gets dispatched relatively easily despite being invulnerable.
She might have been a better character for a straight-to-video film, giving all three villains more time to develop. But as she is, I like her, but can’t go too far.
- The Joker
- Poison Ivy
- Mr. Freeze
- Harley Quinn
- Two-Face
- The Ventriloquist
- The Phantasm
- Mad Hatter
- Penguin
- Catwoman
- HARDAC (and Randa Duane)
- Clayface
- Ra’s al Ghul
- The Riddler
- Clock King
- Lloyd Ventrix
- Count Vertigo
- Killer Croc
- Nivens
- Josiah Wormwood
- Scarecrow
- Roland Daggett (and Germs & Bell!)
- Rupert Thorne
- Talia al Ghul
- Sid the Squid
- Thoth Khepera (NEW ENTRY)
- Maxie Zeus
- Jimmy ‘Jazzman’ Peake
- Tony Zucco
- Man-Bat
- Hugo Strange
- Red Claw
- Arnold Stromwell
- Mad Bomber
- Tygrus
- Rhino, Mugsy and Ratso
- Kyodai Ken
- Gil Mason
- Nostromos (and Lucas!)
- Cameron Kaiser
- Dr. Dorian (and Garth)
- Mad Dog
- Ubu
- Professor Milo
- Romulus
- Sewer King
- Boss Biggis
- Montague Kane
Plugs
Eager for more long-form coverage of Batman? Why not check out my podcast with Mike Thomas, The Tape Crusaders, which reviewed every Batman movie and delved a tiny bit into the animated series.
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