Some time in the future, Batman suffers a heart attack while stopping a robbery. He realizes that his time is over and retires to an embittered solitude. Twenty years pass. Wayne Enterprises has been taken over by Powers industries, Gotham City has become even darker, street gangs patterned after The Joker rove the streets, Barbara Gordon is the police commissioner, and Terry (Delgado?) has just discovered why his father has been murdered. Worse, his father's killers know he knows. A wild chase through Gotham ends at the gates of Wayne Manor, where a gang of Jokers corners Terry. The lone occupant of the mansion comes to investigate with his massive guard dog. Bruce Wayne is now a bitterly disappointed man with no way to exorcise his demons. He welcomes the chance to intervene, but suffers another heart attack in the process. Terry gets him back to the mansion in time and makes a startling discovery. Batman is resurrected in a new, high tech incarnation...much to Wayne's chagrin. He reluctantly takes Terry under his tutelage and aims him at a new generation of evildoers.
The main downside of this extrapolation of The Batman Animated Series is that they don't have a ready made rogues gallery to exploit. Batman's cast of villains is extensive and memorably grotesque. This isn't necessarily a flaw, since the series is relatively new and hasn't had time to fully flesh out its cast, but one misses The Joker, The Riddler, and Two-Face as opponents. In their place, they have substituted the evil corporate overlord, Powers, who has a little accident during the procedings and becomes the radioactive Blight. He isn't bad, and he echoes the grotesque fates of some of Batman's more baroque villains (Clayface comes to mind), but time must tell. The other weakness of the series is its insistance on placing its hero into a high-school confidential setting. While this may appeal to the Saturday morning crowd that watches it, it limits its appeal to the audience for its parent creations (which is probably broader than Warner Brothers's marketing department realizes). The real strength of the show is the relationship between Terry and Bruce Wayne. Wayne still dominates the show even though he is no longer Batman. Most of the other virtues of the Batman animated stuff remain intact here: the series continues to make the most of relatively limited television animation and it presents a reasonably complex story with surprisingly grotesque undercurrents. It's a promising start.