What’s Up With This 70’s Ass Episode of Batman?

Is "Off Balance" Batman: The Animated Series best kept secret?

“Off Balance” is an old episode of Batman: The Animated Series which is an absolutely essential collection of bizarre elements that come together to create an unforgettable experience. The main reason for this is that despite being made in the early 90’s, for some reason it looks and feels like it was made twenty years earlier.

For starters, all the characters look like this:

You might think, “oh, it’s early in the show maybe they’re still figuring the animation out,” but no, this was the 44th episode released and the 50th produced.

The villain is a Nazi armed with a hypno-eyepatch called ‘Vertigo,’ who’s in desperate need to acquire Wayne Enterprises’ newest invention, a sonic drill, which looks like a vibrator on the end of a gun and appears to have no practical applications other than super-villainy.

Anyway the drill is being slowly transported across a train station by Lucius Fox and discount security personnel and Vertigo shows up with a bunch of goons to steal it. Batman is passionate about this drill so he swoops in to save it but is incapacitated by Vertigo and his hypnovision, which creates this genuinely nauseating warping effect on the screen and a lot of genuine resentment towards Vertigo from me. Talia al Ghul, who we don’t know is Talia al Ghul, also shows up but is unsuccessful in defeating Vertigo.

Batman tracks Vertigo down to a local castle, as does Talia, because Vertigo’s about as subtle as the Beastie Boys. They’re immediately defeated by mooks, who use the sonic drill to tear open the Earth beneath them. And now the episode gets weird.

Despite falling into a freshly torn crevasse in the Earth, Batman wakes up in the basement of the castle, with a ceiling over his head, having lost his utility belt, and having learned that Talia has unmasked him. It’s here that we finally learn her name (turns out it’s ‘Talia’) and they flirt a bit and proceed to easily escape the basement which they may or may not have been imprisoned in. They find their way to a laboratory filled with mad science and are stopped by Vertigo and his vibrator.

After ranting like a jackass he activates a hypno device that affects the whole room, which he’s kindly rigged with a zillion booby traps. Without his utility belt, Batman doesn’t have any way to counter the vertigo caused by Vertigo but manages to guide himself and Talia safely to the exit by simply closing his eyes and relying on his other senses.

This sequence is like something out of an episode of The Prisoner. You’ve got this asshole monologuing in a thick German accent, the entire decor of the lab getting replaced with a yellow void, Batman navigating booby traps that materialise out of thin air, all the while a yellow swirl ripples over screen, and the image warps and twists along the Z-axis. It’s disorientating, nerve-wracking, trippy and brilliant and it’s completely baffling how and why they put this in a kids show. I miss the 90s, man.

Anyway they escape and track down Vertigo, who eventually falls out a window. They recover the drill, thank God, but Talia then betrays Batman and steals it. She escapes but Batman manages to put a chip on on the drill that allows him to remotely deactivate it from anywhere in the world. Ra's al Ghul is disasitifed about the whole situation.

This isn’t an episode that’s developed much of a reputation, but in a show as stacked as Batman that isn’t necessarily a slight against it. But it’s so unique, such a string of odd choices, from the villain, to the MacGuffin, the trippy acid sequence, that it belies either a total lack of network supervision, or an unshakable faith in the team, I can’t tell which. Plus it has Talia... or does it?