Written by Eva Dorkin and Sara Dyer
Directed by Curt Geda
Animation by Dong Yang
Original Air Date : September 17, 1999
My Rating: 3.5/5

Description: This episode is a pretty surprising one, not that it's particularly good but it's definitely interesting in many ways.
To sum it up very quickly, let's say it deals with a new fad that teens get more and more addicted to: the splicing. Initially created by Dr. Cuvier, it allows to mix genes from a human being with genes from any animal or other human being. In fact, it enables people to look like any animal or pet they want. But when D. Cuvier uses spliced teenagers to commit crimes such as an attempt of murder on Sam Young (Gordon's husband), it's up to Batman to stop him.

'Splicers' features many surprising scenes that make it a very fun episode. For example that scene when Batman gets spliced by Cuvier and becomes a bat (for real, not only the outfit =)) is very enjoyable and is reminiscent of the first Batman episode ever , " On leather wings", although the plot doesn't make any connection to Man-bat  (which si too bad).
Another great sequence would be the one with Ace who eventually saves Batman's life when Cuvier's body is all full of splicing genes (at the end Batman breaks into Cuvier's lab and during the fight, Cuvierinjects into his body many "splicing medics"). I thought it was very interesting to see Ace get the leading part for once and not only a small supporting role.
This episode has a lot of action. Which leads me to the "bad points" part.
Indeed there's too much action. It looks like the writers were running out of time and rushed the whole story. Everything goes too fast, especially that Man-bat sequence. It's too bad, since the good ideas are spoiled by the writing crew.
Otherwise the animation is very good, with very consistent characters, and fast and well rendered action sequences (or fights)

Overall a nice episode but that could have been much better.
Note: Cuvier was the name of a french zoologist from the 18th century...

Salvor