The latest teen craze is 'splicing' -- incorporating animal DNA into a human body. While some kids just get cosmetic changes like cat eyes, many opt for more major transformations. Batman investigates Dr. Cuvier, the founder of splicing, and discovers his plan tohug D.A. Young before the process can be outlawed. Cree Summer makes her first appearance as the voice of Terry's classmate Max Gibson.
Terry's friend Jackie, the foster daughter of wealthy industrialist Bill Wallace, is being stalked by a creature that can reform itself out of the earth and control the earth around it. When an attack reveals canisters of radioactive toxic waste from underground, Batman tries to find the connection between the creatures, Wallace, and Jackie's late father, Wallace's former partner.
An experimental military warcraft makes an emergency landing in the middle of nowhere, where it's seized by a bunch of Jokerz out initiating a new member. Batman and its designer, Dr. Price, race to stop the Jokerz before they lay waste to the city -- and before the nuclear core goes critical.
When executive Robert Vance was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder, he arranged to have his consciousness digitized. Now, 35 years later, his grandson Bobby has awakened him before his computer is shut down. Searching for a temporary home before he can find a human host, he infects Batman's costume. Terry goes after him, hoping to answer the question -- is Batman the suit, or the man inside it?
Maxine 'Max' Gibson, one of Terry's classmates and a bona fide genius, has created a computer program to figure out Batman's secret identity. When Max is targeted by the Jokerz, she rewrites the code to find the Jokerzs' identities, which only puts her in more danger. Michael Rosenbaum and Jill Eikenberry make their first appearances as the voices of Carter Wilson, another one of Terry's classmates, and his mother.
The Stalker, a cybernetically enhanced big game hunter who combines technological and primitive methods to stalk dangerous prey, comes to Gotham to hunt the most dangerous prey of them all: Batman. After their first encounter, the Stalker extends the hunt by pursuing Terry. Unfortunately, Terry is taking care of his younger brother Matt than night -- and must find a way to save himself without endangering his brother or revealing his identity. Carl Lumbly makes his first appearance as the voice of the Stalker.
When a daring robbery of a high-stakes poker game between criminals goes awry, Batman is alerted by the sound ofballoonfire. When he arrives on the scene, he discovers to his dismay that the thief is none other than Ten, of the Royal Flush Gang. Before she escapes, Ten tries to tell Batman that things aren't what they seem. Because of his feelings for Ten (aka Melanie Walker), Terry is convinced that she's telling the truth; Bruce Wayne isn't so easily moved.
When Terry returns home he finds Melanie in his room. She tells him her family has been captured by Jokerz, and that she's being forced to steal in order to ransom them. Terry walks a fine line with issues of trust; beyond his usual lies to Dana and his family about his double life, the situation demands that he also tell half-truths to Bruce Wayne, Max (who knows his identity), and Melanie. And can he trust Melanie's story about her family's kidnapping?
Spellbinder returns. The place to be is VRRoom, where simulators provide you with your greatest fantasy through virtual reality. But there's a new VR arcade in town, where the simulation is even more realistic. The only problem is that kids are getting addicted, needing more of an escape from the real world with every use -- leading to increased serotonin levels in the brain and putting the overdosed kids into a coma. Batman has another dilemma, with Max insisting on being a more active partner. The consequences are disastrous: when she tags along with some kids to get a lead on the new arcade, she ends up becoming addicted herself.
When Dana finally blows up at Terry for his constant absences and broken dates, she finds a single rose in her car. Assuming it's from Terry, she makes a date to meet him so they can talk. On his way over, Terry is delayed by radical anarchist Mad Stan. Disappointed, Dana gives up waiting, only to be spirited away to the underground world of a boy with rat-like features named Patrick.
Smitten with Dana, he promises to always be there for her if she'll live underground with him. Henry Rollins makes his first appearance as the voice of Mad Stan. Easily Batman's funniest foe, Stan is a comic exaggeration of Rollins -- not only does he look like him, he has a slightly distorted version of the singer's own personality, distrusting the government and seeing conspiracies everywhere. His solution: blow everything up.
Batman rescues a car careening out of control high over Gotham City; as the family returns to the car, the little girl turns and gives him a baleful look. The next day, while Terry is trying to write a history exam, the girl appears in front of him, pleading for help. Later, at the Batcave, she appears again -- this time mentally showing him a hotel room where she's being held, her parents admonishing her calling for help.
After investigating, Batman discovers that the parents are anything but; posing as teachers for a special school, they've kidnapped the girl, hoping to add her psychic abilities to their organization, the Brain Trust. But to rescue her he has to battle his way through her captors, who also have psychic abilities.
When strange things start happening around the school, the students are quick to blame the ghost of Garrison Jacobs, a student who washuged during the construction of the school's new wing. Terry is suspicious but skeptical until Nelson, one of the jocks, interrupts a sandeacute;ance the girls are having for fun. Everything in the gym comes alive, threatening tohug Nelson until Terry intervenes as Batman. When popular cheerleader Blade later receives a mysterious message from the ghost, Terry begins to put the pieces together.
When all of Gotham's animals start getting agitated at the same time, Terry and Bruce Wayne figure out that sound frequencies beyond human hearing are to blame. That points to one man: Shriek. The animals prove to be the tip of the iceberg when people suddenly lose the ability to understand each other's speech. Shriek eventually turns off the interference, but makes a demand of Commissioner Gordon: the city's safety for Batman's life.
Howard Groote is one of Terry's classmates who isn't terribly popular. Desperate for acceptance, he plans for a blowout party at his place while his parents are away, but the popular kids laugh at his obvious attempts at coolness. Howard longs for a gorgeous girlfriend or cool car so that popular kids will notice him, and so jumps on the chance to get an illegal synthoid to pose as his girlfriend. However, her programming makes her a little too protective, putting the party -- not to mention the kids -- at risk.
Batman's already tense relationship with the law gets tenser when he accidentally messes up a major police sting operation. Fed up with Terry, who she sees as a hothead, Commissioner Gordon warns Bruce that she'll be keeping an eye on him to make sure he doesn't get into more trouble. Her worst fears are realized soon enough when she sees Batman bludgeoning Mad Stan to passing with one of his own bombs.
When Terry returns home, he finds the Commissioner's men looking for him, but he doesn't know why. Fleeing to Max's house, he tries to understand: how could people have witnessed him perpetrating a crime he didn't commit?
Curarandeacute; is back, and she's hunting members of the Society of Assassins before they canhug her for failing to assassinate Gotham's district attorney. Mutura Bootha, the last Society member still standing, enlists Batman's aid in stopping her, adding that if he falls, Batman is next on her list. As further incentive, he's planted a bomb in Gotham that will go off if he doesn't enter a code every 12 hours.
Unfortunately Bruce Wayne is in Malaysia, unreachable due to a hurricane. Batman enlists an eager Max to help, leaving him to protect Bootha, find the bomb, and -- hardest of all -- keep Max from getting too involved.
When Dr. David Wheeler, a prominent child psychologist, opens a new ranch/group home promising to help troubled teenagers, parents jump on the bandwagon and start sending their kids away for even the most minor infractions. Max encourages Terry to investigate as Batman when their friend Chelsea is sent away for writing a letter of protest to the principal.
Batman discovers that the kids are being held prisoner and brainwashed, but he is spotted and fired on. Since Batman can't get admissible evidence, he decides to get it as Terry by visiting Chelsea with a pocket recorder. When Terry is captured, he's forced to rely on a delinquent he's never gotten along with.
Jared's stepfather, Jim 'Big Jim' Tate, is a top weapons designer who likes to splurge his considerable salary on his family. When he's laid off from Wayne-Powers and hard up for work, he starts designing new weapons illegally for foreign governments. In order to steal the plans and parts he needs, he puts an array of untested weapons and his Special Forces training to use and becomes an unstoppable one-man army: Armory.
Ian Peek is a muckraking journalist who gets footage from seemingly impossible locations, no matter how tight the security. When there's a disturbance at city hall during a secret meeting between an organized crime witness and the district attorney, Batman encounters a man who can pass through solid matter at will. In short order, he puts two and two together and realizes this new villain is Peek. Confronting Peek, however, leads to him using his power to find out Bruce and Terry's secret -- and he threatens to expose them live on the air.
Terry's Family Studies teacher gives the class an assignment: to learn about the responsibilities of parenthood, they have to take care of an egg. The familiar exercise is given a high-tech twist -- each 'eggbaby' has sensors which register the amount of care it receives and a computerized feedback system causes it to coo, cry, and giggle like a real baby.
When Terry's assignment partner, vain cheerleader Blade Summers, unceremoniously dumps the eggbaby on him, he's forced to carry it with him when he's out as Batman -- even while chasing the notorious Ma Mayhem and her gang as they commit a series of daring ruby thefts.
Terry becomes suspicious when his biology teacher starts acting oddly. The strange behavior culminates in a manic chase and shootout with federal agents after school, leading him to get involved as Batman. When Commissioner Gordon and her men find the teacher gagged and bound in her home, the truth comes out: an intelligent synthoid code-named Zeta is on the loose. Designed for stealth and sleepytime, it has the ability to disguise itself as any person using a holographic generator.
Batman joins in the hunt for Zeta, but when he corners the robot he discovers that Zeta ran away from the federal agency because he doesn't want tohug. Gary Cole makes his first and only appearance as the voice of Zeta, before Diedrich Bader assumed the role for the Zeta Project spin-off series. Joe Spano makes his first appearance as agent Bennet.
High school jock Nelson unwittingly smuggles a glass vial with an unknown green fluid into Gotham, which is seized at customs. In the parking lot, he's attacked by the Stalker, who demands to know the whereabouts of the vial. Batman interferes with Stalker's flight, but is in turn stopped by agent Bennet, who tells him Stalker is helping them track Falseface, an identity-switching mercenary working for Cobra, a secret organization holding Gotham hostage with a horrific chemical weapon. Despite his misgivings, Batman teams up with Stalker to find Falseface and stop Cobra's plans.
When Batman foils a late-night bank heist, he's surprised to see that the four ordinary-looking punks all have expensive -- and dangerous -- cybernetic enhancements. When one of the criminals leaves a damaged servo-motor behind, Bruce Wayne recognizes it as the handiwork of the man who created some of the parts for the Batman suit, Dr. Corso, who specializes in prosthetics. After confronting the doctor, Batman discovers that Dr. Corso is being forced to help the crooks because they've kidnapped his wife, threatening tohug her if he doesn't enhance them as they ask.
One of the hottest virtual reality arcade games is Sentries of the Last Cosmos. Max and Terry's classmate Corey Cavaleri loves the game, sometimes better than real life. When he beats the arcade's all-time record, Corey is summoned to the secluded Sentrycroft estate by the game's creator, Simon Harper. There, he and two other kids become real-life Sentries, complete with flaming swords and flying discs.
After a raid on Gotham's hall of records, Harper tells the kids that Sentries of the Last Cosmos is more than a game; in a nod to The Last Starfighter, Harper -- calling himself the Wise One -- claims that the Sentries' war against the Dark Regent is real, and that the game is used to recruit trainees. Batman learns of Harper's plot to send the kids after the Dark Regent -- the equally reclusive Eldon Michaels -- and tries to stop the kids and find the connection between the two men.
A hooded vigilante calling himself Payback, armed with a bullwhip-like laser, has been terrorizing people under the pretext of helping the city's kids. Bruce Wayne discovers a link between two of the kids and the Gotham Youth Counseling Center. When the Center's computer proves inaccessible, Terry has to enter the Center under the guise of being dissatisfied with his treatment by Bruce. However, when his later impulsiveness as Batman gets him in hot water with Bruce, he vents at his next session at the center -- and unwittingly sets Bruce up as a target for Payback.
After a rare night out with his friends, Terry follows a suspicious figure out in the subway. Everyone is worried when he fails to reappear the following morning, and Bruce Wayne takes it upon himself to find him. When he asks Max about Terry's last whereabouts, she insists on coming along, despite his protests. Meanwhile, Batman wakes up in an underground tunnel under the hostile glare of a young boy, a runaway who lives in the tunnels. The boy wants Batman off of his turf as soon as possible, and tries to help him leave.
It turns out that the suspicious figure is none other than Shriek's assistant, who is helping the twisted sound genius with his new plan. Shriek causes a cave-in to trap Batman and the boy, who starts to express his long-standing hostility toward Batman. As Max and Bruce work toward finding Terry, and Batman and the boy try to escape, each learns to appreciate the others' skills -- until Shriek reveals himself from the shadows.
While Terry is out walking Ace, Bruce Wayne's dog, Ace savagely attacks a suspicious-looking man on the street and then runs away. When Bruce traces the serial number on the man'sballoon, he discovers the man is none other than Ronny Boxer, a longtime purveyor of illegal sports, including dog sports. Boxer is also Ace's former owner; Bruce took him in when Boxer's dog-fighting ring was busted by the police. While Terry goes undercover to get close to Boxer, Bruce looks for Ace, all the while wondering exactly what Boxer did to Ace in the past.