Plot summary: The Clock King resurfaces armed with technology capable of temporarily slowing the passage of time, with Mayor Hamilton Hill once again in his sights.
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: ‘Time Out of Joint’
Original Air Date: October 8th, 1994
Directed: Dan Riba (6)
Written: Alan Burnett (6) (story) & Steve Perry (6)
A cursed episode as it’s the sixth script for Dan Riba, Alan Burnett and Steve Perry. 666!
The title for this episodes comes from an episode of Batman 66’ in which Clock King appeared.
Recap
Another episode, another auction for the opening scene. This one is legitimate though, with Gotham’s elite bidding on antiquities for charity.
Bruce wins a clock once owned by Marie Antoinette… only for it to be snatched by The Clock King… who can teleport now!
The next day, Fugate brings a doctor, Wakati, his breakfast and medicine, ostensibly working as his butler. Dr. Wakati demonstrates his invention, a device that can slow and accelerate time, but expresses his doubts about humanity being able to be trusted with such power.
Clock King of course steals the device and makes his move against Mayor Hill despite heavy GCPD security, using the gadget to waltz in unseen. He makes some vague threats before Batman & Robin arrive to fail miserably at capturing him.
Fugate partially damages the device during his escape, giving Batman a lead, and requiring him to reveal his true nature to Dr. Wakati, demanding he repair it.
The Dynamic Duo race over to Wakati’s mansion, but Fugate left a second device on the Batmobile, freezing it in time!
Batman explains that hours are passing in seconds around them and that if another car hit them it could cause an atomic explosion. So we DO have two episodes in a row with an atom bomb!
Bruce instead locates the device and destroys it, sending them careening back into real time and crashing the Batmobile. Worse still, they lost 48 hours of investigation time!
Arriving at Wakati’s, they find the doctor in a similar condition of quantum stasis. Once freed he fills them in on Fugate’s plan to blow up the Mayor during the opening of a new courthouse. They take a pair of time dilation devices and ride back to Gotham in seconds.
Arriving after the bomb has already been triggered, Bruce instead sprints it out to open water in the nanoseconds before it explodes. Fugate trips over AGAIN while trying to escape and gets arrested.
Best Performance
For as solid as Alan Rachins is as Clock King, I’m giving the nod to Roscoe Lee Brown for his small part as Dr. Wakati. While he got an Emmy Award for his recurring role as The Kingpin on rival show, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, his distinctive voice overpowers everybody else in this episode, even with limited dialogue. The most impressive thing for me was his ability to avoid the trope of older actor getting lost in utterly ridiculous faux-techno babble. What a pro.
Alan Oppenheimer is a really fun auctioneer, too. And I guess Loren Lester is good at sounding bored.
Ranking
So… what was going on here with the devices? Fugate clearly already has one of the devices at the start of the episode, and yet when Wakati demonstrates it to him in their first scene together, it’s presented as though he’s just finished the first prototype. And even if that was a flashback or something, does he not later notice his tech going missing? There end up being a half dozen or so of these devices in play during the runtime, and it’s implied Fugate relies on Wakati to build and/or repair them, with Batman outright stating he isn’t clever enough to do it himself.
That kind of sloppiness is debilitating, but even without that, for some reason the time dilation tech bothered me more than the literal werewolf and other assorted monsters. It feels like something that could have worked in a comic, but to see it playing out with ‘look how fast they’re going!’ gags, it just feels wrong.
It’s just fundamentally not a very interesting episode, putting all of its eggs in the basket of the time dilation. They draw it well, making everything affected by the device blue, but as I said, the gags aren’t all that good and there’s nothing else to sink your teeth into.
- The Laughing Fish
- Mask of the Phantasm
- Almost Got ‘Im
- Heart of Ice
- Harlequinade
- 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
- House & Garden
- 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
- 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
- Time Out of Joint
- Sideshow
- The Under-Dwellers
- The Forgotten
- The Terrible Trio
- I’ve Got Batman in My Basement
Villain Watch
The Clock King (Alan Rachins) (second appearance)
For a while now I’ve been worried that I underrated Clock King, as he was pretty solid in his debut episode, but this dissuaded me from that notion and if anything, he’s going down another few spots.
He was well utilised as an idiosyncratic intellectual, but that’s thrown out the window in favour of a guy using stolen tech to move faster than the human eye can perceive. He trips over twice while doing this, and just generally comes across as more of a buffoon than before. A shame, as I enjoyed the opening with him throwing away the priceless antique clock after stealing it.
- The Joker
- Poison Ivy
- Harley Quinn
- Mr. Freeze
- Two-Face
- The Ventriloquist
- The Phantasm
- Mad Hatter
- Penguin
- Catwoman
- HARDAC (and Randa Duane)
- Clayface
- Ra’s al Ghul
- The Riddler
- Lloyd Ventrix
- Count Vertigo
- Clock King
- Killer Croc
- Nivens
- Josiah Wormwood
- Scarecrow
- Roland Daggett (and Germs & Bell!)
- Rupert Thorne
- Talia al Ghul
- Sid the Squid
- Thoth Khepera
- 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
- The Terrible Trio
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.
