How About That Thing?

Remember when I said I had a lot of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers articles and blueprints? Yeah, I also have a lot of Batman: the Animated Series articles and blueprints I wanted to get to as well. Again, I’ll try to space them all out to one degree or another so they don’t become monotonous,but know I’ll probably be talking about BTAS a lot as well for a while.

This time around, we’re talking about another super obscure villain this series made into a shining star. Temple Fugate: The Clock King. AKA: This guy

Compared to a lot of Batman’s arch rivals, Fugate is pretty normal looking. He doesn’t have some sort of robot suit, he doesn’t have a fetish for Alice in Wonderland, and he DEFINITELY didn’t take a bath in bleach. But it isn’t long before you figure out what winds up his pocket watch, if you know what I mean.

Temple Fugate’s origin story? Seven years from the present day, Hamilton Hill: the future mayor of Gotham City, made him late for an appointment. And… Well, that’s basically it. I mean yeah, you could make the argument that the company he worked for went bankrupt and he lost his job, but I’m sure he could find work again. One little mark on an otherwise pristine record? I’m sure there’s all kinds of companies who could use an efficiency expert like that.

But at the same time, I could see a guy like Fugate hyperfocus on the fact someone made him late. Plus, it wouldn’t be much of a superhero cartoon if it didn’t have a villain, so…

Seven years later, Temple Fugate enacts his revenge. And how does he do so? Well, for starters…

Well, okay. I’ll give you points for creativity. I kind of figured you’d go the route of placing a time bomb in the mayor’s car, or a timing mechanism designed to fire a sniper shot precisely at the moment the mayor pulls up to one intersection… But then I remember despite being surprisingly dark and well made, BTAS was still for kids. So good for you.

Pretty soon, the traffic lights start malfunctioning, the subways run late and show up on the wrong platforms, and anarchy reigns supreme. Everything is off time, and someone is pinning it on the mayor and his reelection campaign.

Batman is on the case, and… Can I just say, this right here.

Seriously, a generous chunk of this episode is Batman riding around in a fucking limousine being driven by Alfred. There’s something about this that… I’m not sure if I want to say tone-deaf, or absurd, or silly, or what, but the idea of Batman riding around in a limo like this is just silly to me. Like, I get that the bat mobile isn’t readily available or anything, but come on, man. 

Furthermore, several people clearly saw that it was Bruce Wayne’s limo at that. You’re seriously telling me nobody saw Bruce Wayne poke his head out of that limo to point at the malfunctioning traffic light, and didn’t bother to notice Batman come out of that exact same limo later? The odds of someone spotting that might be few, but they aren’t impossible.

Anyway, Batman figures out pretty quick that Temple Fugate is the man responsible. He tries to catch him at the scene, only for Fugate to spout a cute little line about how the 9:15 is always six minutes early, and LITERALLY FALLS BACKWARD OFF THE LEDGE AND ONTO THE TRAIN BELOW! I would also like to point out that this wasn’t a backflip. If anything, it looks like one of those trust fall exercises where the guy goes limp, and falls over backwards, expecting everyone else to catch him. And he somehow managed to land on the train with no injuries to speak of. My god, this dude has skill.

Batman tries to meet him at his house, and… Whew boy.

You know, I own up to having an appreciation for a well-maintained clock, or even a watch, but this? This puts me to shame. This is downright cartoony! Like, I know he has a kink for clocks, but even this guy has to have his limits. Just looking at this house, all I can wonder is how the hell does this guy sleep at night. all these clocks ticking and tocking in one house, dinging on the hour every hour in perfect unison… Definitely the kind of thing that puts that one single solitary clock of mine that chimes every fifteen minutes into perspective.

Despite there being a cartoonish amount of clocks, though, there’s no Fugate.

Where is Fugate, you ask? Well, you’d think he’d be content with just ruining a man’s political career as revenge for ruining his own. You’d think that… But then this happens.

Damn, that escalated rather abruptly. Seriously, I feel like I missed a couple steps. How exactly did we go from ruining the mayor’s campaign to tying him to the hands of a giant clock? And how on Earth did Temple Fugate do this all by himself? At no point in the episode did they establish that he had henchmen doing his dirty work. This whole thing is apparently a one-man operation.

Regardless, Batman saves the mayor, he defeats Fugate, and as the credits roll, I begin to think that, upon retrospect, this probably wasn’t as good of an episode as I remember it being.

Honestly, all snarkiness aside, I actually do like this episode. I will say, though, this is definitely one of those episodes where you might want to turn off your brain. You’ll be thinking about the nonsensical portions of it for days