Batman Beyond #16 Review and *SPOILERS*

....... Just Like New Coke

Written By: Dan Jurgens
Art By: Stephen Thompson, Lisa Jackson, Dave Sharpe
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: September 7, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

After dealing with all of Futures End, Brother Eye, Dr. Cuvier and a psychotic Terry McGinnis, it looks like Tim Drake's time travel adventures are finally coming to an end............ and since I wasn't really a fan of seeing Tim getting his ass kicked over and over again in a strange place and time, I can't wait for Rebirth to come along and show us what Batman Beyond is supposed to be like...... I still don't even know what Tuftan was doing in this series, but it doesn't matter anymore because it won't be brought up here and thankfully, it's finally over.  In our previous issue we saw all our major players finding out that Terry McGinnis is still alive and in the guise of Rewire, but it's not all RC Cola and Pinatas because Spellbinder gets inside of Barbara Gordon's mind as well as Terry's and because Terry has a mental connection to the Batman suit.......... well, we saw Tim Drake get his ass kicked again.  Let's jump into this issue and see how everything ends and if Tim Drake can open up his own can of whoop ass before he walks off into the sunset.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

As for the final fight between Terry McGinnis and Tim Drake.......... Well thankfully, we don't get it because who wants to see two good guys beating the holy hell out of one another, especially when one of those heroes isn't in his right mind?  Yeah, it turns out that Matt McGinnis is the actual hero of this book because he finally makes his way with the Batmobile on autopilot to Tim and Barbara's location and offers enough of a distraction for Tim to shake the ass beating he got last issue off of him and......... I actually got a little disturbed at how much Tim began beating on Spellbinder.  I mean, yeah, it initially was bad from one point of view because everyone still saw Spellbinder as a little old lady, but it got worse when the spell was broken.......... and Tim seriously makes up for all the times that I bitched about seeing him get his ass kicked.......... It's fucking brutal....... and goes on for awhile......... Shit.

After I eventually close my mouth because of the beating I witnessed, things began getting more towards those pinatas and RC Colas I was talking about because after Matt repeats his name a couple of times, Terry is able to shake the whammy Spellbinder put on him out of his system and I imagine somebody putting on "We Are Family" on whatever futuristic Eyepod they have here because it gets back to where we always wanted this series to be............ Well, not completely because we're still stuck in a world that Brother Eye destroyed, but hey, we got Terry back on the trolley and all of our threats are behind us for the moment......... Goddamn though, that was such a brutal fucking beating.

In the end, after Dan Jurgens tries to make all of this time travel nonsense make sense........ which it actually does, it's just that it really came off to me that in the beginning of this series that everyone believed Terry McGinnis went back in time, but with that not being the case, everything is finally put right in the world and Tim Drake finally decides that it's time to call it quits to the whole superhero game........ and for some reason wants to go off and see the world..... but I saw a bit of it, when Tim went off looking for Matt McGinnis in Metropolis awhile back and from what I saw then....... there isn't much to look at in the world anymore.......... actually, it reminds me a lot of New Jersey.  So yeah, Tim gave the cowl back to Terry and everything was right in the world......... except for our epilogue that shows that Tim may not be done with time traveling just yet, when out on the road with his motorcycle it looked like he was pulled into a bright light and after everything we've seen from Futures End and this series, I'm saying time travel.

That's it for this series of Batman Beyond and while I can't say that I was a big fan of what we got from everything over the past fifteen issues, I can say that this issue doesn't fool around in giving us a tidy ending to our Spellbinder arc, while putting us on the fast track to get everything set up for Batman Beyond: Rebirth.......... which really, all you needed was Terry back in the cowl and Tim doing something else....... and that's what we get here........ So yeah, kudos.  With that though, I would have liked something that felt like it had a little more weight to it because everything that we've dealt with in this series was solely due to Spellbinder keeping Terry in a haze for however long and we don't really have a reason for it besides for keeping Batman out of the game......... no real endgame situation and making Tim just disappear into a flash of light at the end just kind of makes me angry about the fact that it seems there's no resolution in sight for this out of time hero.  Everything was very low key except for Tim beating the holy hell out of Spellbinder and for as much as I wanted to see Tim dish out as much as he's taken, this felt really excessive.  All in all, this wasn't a great ending to a series, but for as little as we've actually done in this series lately, this seemed to remain consistent with that and maybe should be looked at as more of a bridge to the next series instead of an actual ending.

Bits and Pieces:

Batman Beyond's series comes to an end with this issue....... or really just bridges the gap between this series and the Rebirth one and while things seem to rush to get to this conclusion.......... not a lot goes down here and for whatever reason I still feel angry at Futures End for causing all of this.  That may just be me though.  All in all this gets us to where we want to be for Rebirth and has an interesting new art style to close us out with......... just not a lot to actually digest though.

5.8/10