Through three episodes, Batman: Caped Crusader‘s felt like a bit of an aimless remake; for its strong visual style and confidence in its interpretation of the Dark Knight and Gotham City, the series has struggled to ground itself, keeping its titular character at arm’s length with a couple uneven attempts at revisiting a few of the Bat’s longtime adversaries. What it has done well is build out the world around Batman, quickly filling out the familiar dichotomy of Gotham City’s extensive corruption and its few moralistic players, which take center stage in “The Night of the Hunters”. And while Caped Crusader‘s fourth episode is still fumbling around at finding that meaning, it is a marked improvement over “Kiss of the Catwoman”, centering itself on Commissioner Gordon and his first face-to-face interactions with everyone’s least favorite dude in a bat costume.
“The Night of the Hunters” opens with Mayor Jessop demanding the formation of a Batman task force, uniting Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon in their mission to draw out and arrest the elusive vigilante. Of course, their attempts to plant undercover cops as criminals fails to work – both because Batman is too smart and Gotham PD already has criminals posing as police officers, in the form of Flaas and Bullock, whose brazen actions form the dramatic arc of the episode.
How Batman and Commissioner Gordon meet is always an interesting moment in Batman lore (even if, like the sight of young Bruce standing in the shadows of Crime Alley, is something I don’t need to see ever again), and “The Night of the Hunters” takes an appropriate approach for a series purportedly aiming for a more hard-boiled approach to Batman lore. Caped Crusader‘s Gordon is one mostly resigned to the broken world around him, compensating for idiotic, obviously corrupt detectives while trying to find some spark of hope to keep him motivated for the Sisyphean fight against his own city – which makes his trepidation at Batman’s behavior even more interesting, as he watches one costumed stranger outwork his entire bumbling, ineffective department in fighting the tidal wave of crime drowning the city.
Though an experienced Gordon, Caped Crusader‘s infamous detective is a little more hard-nosed and soft-brained than most contemporary interpretations. He seems somewhat ignorant to the machinations happening around him, and him and Montoya’s plan seems a bit desperate and mindless; the first act is certainly not the strongest suit of this episode, painting just about everyone in the Gotham PD as opportunistic to the point of ignorance.
This continues with Bullock and Flass, whose egregiously obvious disregard for laws see them releasing a costumed prisoner (Firebug) to try and draw out Batman, after Dr. Quinzel consults Gotham PD and points out they might need a “weirdo” to really get his attention (she also spends a lot of time giving googly-eyes to Montoya, which…. I feel like we’ll come back to at a later point). This leads to the strongest part of the episode, and one of the better segments of the series to date: Gordon and Batman crossing paths in a burning building, forced to work together to save the lives of three children caught in Firebug’s hallucinatory rampage.
The scene itself isn’t particularly compelling; Caped Crusader‘s portrayal of Firebug is rather tame, and the episode is still struggling to establish the visual language of its action scenes (led by another awkward animation, this time of Batman mantling over a staircase railing). However, the reaction of Gordon to his behavior – and his facial reaction at the discovery of Firebug’s body, the result of Bullock brazenly shooting him through an open window – is much more intriguing, revealing that this version of Gordon isn’t quite as dumb as he lets on, and is starting to bristle against the very arbitrary walls being placed around him and his pursuit of the truth (by the episode’s end, Bullock and Flass relieve him of task force leadership, at the mayor’s behest).
His silence watching the ambulance carrying Firebug’s body away is palpable; so is Eric Morgan Stuart’s delivery of his last line, “Don’t worry; I’m not licked yet” at the episode’s close, where a defeated Barbara, Gordon and Renee share a drink at a local bar together. And for the first time, it feels like Caped Crusader has something brewing under the surface; a bit of a surprise, considering the “gang war” promised in the show’s pilot has been temporarily forgotten, and thus unable to provide any narrative propulsion.
There’s still quite a way for it to go, of course – this is certainly not what I’d consider a ‘breakout’ episode, given its rather uninspired take on Bullock and Flass – but like many good Batman stories do, it feels like Caped Crusader is starting to find itself by funneling its portrayal of Batman’s world through Gordon, a tried and true method that just needs a little bit more seasoning in “The Night of the Hunters” to really stick the landing. Regardless, it is an important moment of recovery for the young series, one that appears to move story forward in a way that may finally unlock the dormant potential lying at the heart of this stylized, slightly underbaked series.
Grade: C+
Other thoughts/observations:
- Dr. Quinzel mentions taking classes with a Dr. Crane in college, which is about as big a red flag one could have for her character, a sure sign she’s going to begin her transformation into Harley Quinn sometime in the near future.
- Harleen: “I know too many somebody’s, Commissioner.”
- I do wish there was a bit more here about Firebug. He hallucinates, but not all the time? When he runs out of butane, he just gives up? Why did he feel like people were “longing for the flames”? None of it really makes sense – which would be even more frustrating, had he clearly not just been a catalyst for Gordon and Batman.
- I haven’t loved the score for this series so far, but the symphonic sounds playing when Firebug first ignites his flamethrowers is a wonderful bit of audio production.
- the fake newspaper text is so goddamn distracting! Just blur it out, or put something extremely basic in there – a dumb thing to harp on, but it’s driving me nuts.
- The episode ends with the two “hero cops” Bullock and Flass being put in charge of the task force. This can’t go poorly!
- Another immersion-breaking detail: cars driving into each other at high speeds and not reflecting any physical damage whatsoever. It makes the series look extremely cheap and rushed, even if its supposed to be a stylistic decision (which I’d argue it is not).