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This page is about the Justice League Unlimited episode. For other uses of "epilogue" and "epilog", see Epilogue (disambiguation).

{{Infobox Television episode | title=Epilogue | image=Epilogue.png | series=Justice League Unlimited | season=2 | episode= 13 | airdate= July 23, 2005 | story by= Bruce Timm and Dwayne McDuffie | teleplay by= Dwayne McDuffie | director= Dan Riba

"Epilogue" is the 13th episode of the second season of Justice League Unlimited and the 26th of the overall series. It is also the second season finale of which tied together and continued some plot points from Batman Beyond. This episode focuses around Batman, revealing a dark secret.

Plot

The story, set in 2054 (fifteen years after Terry became the new Batman), centers on a 31-year-old Terry tracking down a geriatric Amanda Waller, who reveals his origins to him. The episode serves as the unofficial series finale, revealing that Bruce Wayne is actually Terry McGinnis's biological father.

Amanda Waller explains through flashbacks that, even though she trusted and respected Batman, she was aware of him growing older and slower, thus accepting the idea of either Bruce retiring or being killed at some point. Finding the idea of a world without Batman unacceptable, Waller used her Project Cadmus connections to gather the technology for "Project Batman Beyond", whose goal was to physically create a new Batman, starting with a secretly collected sample of Bruce Wayne's DNA. After finding a young Neo-Gotham couple—the McGinnises—with psychological profiles nearly identical to those of Bruce's parents, a nanotech solution was injected into Warren McGinnis to rewrite his reproductive material. The eventual result was his wife Mary McGinnis giving birth to Terry, a child sharing the genetic traits of his mother and Bruce Wayne.

When Terry was 8 years old, Waller employed an elderly Phantasm (Andrea Beaumont, Bruce's ex-fiancée, whose exit from Bruce's life became one of the reasons why he became Batman in the first place) as an assassin to kill Terry's family, hoping the trauma would put him on the path to becoming Batman. However, Beaumont could not commit the act, arguing that Bruce would never resort to murder to achieve his goals. Waller eventually conceded that Beaumont had been right and abolished the project altogether. Eight years afterward, Warren would be murdered, and Terry would meet Bruce by happenstance—resulting in Terry becoming Batman's successor. Waller concludes by reminding Terry that he is Bruce's son, not his clone, and that despite the circumstances of his existence, he still has free will to live out his own life; Terry comes to terms with his revelations, and continues in being Batman. With a new sense of purpose, Terry plans to propose to Dana, while continuing his life of crime fighting.

Whether Bruce was the genetic father of Matt McGinnis as well was not clearly established in-story, since nothing was stated as to the longevity of the alterations made to Warren McGinnis's DNA; however, the series' creators have said that this is the case. The fact that Matt McGinnis was born with black hair despite both of his biological parents having red hair is also an indicator of Bruce Wayne's dominant DNA.