Batman Prophecy of Doom Television 

Five Thoughts on Batman: The Animated Series‘ Prophecy of Doom

By | September 4th, 2017
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome to our review of the nineteenth episode of Batman: The Animated Series. In this episode a new villain named Nostromos is trying to swindle Gotham’s rich out of all their money by pretending to be able to see the future.

1. A Weird Episode

I titled a section on each of the episodes from The Under-Dwellers to Forgotten something similar to this and I believe Prophecy of Doom represents a step up in that kind of storytelling. This is an episode that like those deals with something we haven’t really seen yet on this show, yet unlike those it balances its Bruce Wayne and Batman segments well. The story here is shown as starting with getting information as Bruce Wayne, and then handling everything that develops from that as Batman. It’s a formula that the team would be smart to remember if they are going to continue doing some of these out of the box episodes.

2. A Middle of the Road Original Villain

This show can create some really memorable original villains and in the case of The Sewer King some really bad ones. In the case of Nostromos they’ve created a villain who is serviceable. He isn’t offensively bad but he certainly doesn’t possess any qualities that would make him memorable or that would make the audience want to see him return. Then even if he did return the character they’ve set up isn’t very versatile so we’d be getting a very similar story unless they wanted to reinvent him. He also kind of reeks of a knock-off Mysterio but not as cool.

3. The Animation and Sound

I know I praised the animation last week, but we’ve come full circle and I have to say that some of this animation looked clunky. There were several segments earlier in the episode where things didn’t move smoothly or characters mouths didn’t match up with what they were saying. This last point could be that some of the audio was off. Kevin Conroy’s audio specifically sounded like it had an echo too it. This only stayed for the early portions of the audio but it is quite noticeable especially compared to the quality of other episodes and last week’s episode in particular.

4. Batman/Bruce Wayne

This episode kind of stretches what Bruce could get away with in regards to hiding the fact that he’s Batman. There’s a scene in which Bruce gets into an elevator alone, someone cuts the cable to the elevator and Batman comes out. Would the henchman who cut the wires not notice? Would no one notice that Bruce never got out? Are there no security cameras in the elevator? There are holes in this story.

5. Notability

This episode really lacks anything to bring a viewer back. I don’t believe anyone is going to say that this is their favorite episode of the series and you get the feeling that the creators knew that. This is by no means a bad episode; it’s simply a filler episode.


//TAGS | 2017 Summer TV Binge | Batman: The Animated Series

Ryan Perry

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