Caped Crusader

Okay we are reaching the home stretch of Prime Video’s new animated series, Batman: The Caped Crusader and I have to say that I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to. There are two episodes left and lots of questions. What happened to Harley Quinn? What will become of Harvey Dent? Are we going to see Selina Kyle again? Am I going to get something that resembles Oracle out of Barbara Gordon? So many loose ends, so little time. I am sure that there will be another season of this show but I’d really prefer if they wrapped it up before the season ends.

Episode 9 is very much the fallout of Harvey’s attack. Bruce is trying to get him out of the house. But it is very clear that Harvey’s brain is fracturing. He is very quickly descending into madness. So again, we have a bit of pretty accurate characterization. We seem to have a lot of origin stories from this show. The very beginning of Batman villains. I am really glad that we seem to be focusing on literally every villain that isn’t the Joker. Joker is just so overused and boring, so I am glad to see some other characters get the spotlight. You can really tell that Bruce Timm is heavily involved in this series. He has been the spearhead for every good, animated version of Batman and really DC in general.

We are spending a whole lot of time with Harvey and I just want to know where my women are at. They gave me a whole season of self contained episodes and they just fumble the bag in the last 3 episodes. Suddenly everything ties together. But not everything, only the stuff regarding Harvey Dent, all of a sudden we have an ongoing storyline. It just feels like a wild shift in the writing that wasn’t entirely necessary.

I’m really not vibing on these last few episodes. I like Harvey and I just don’t care nearly enough to spend this much time on him at the expense of the other characters that were introduced. The penguin was left super open ended in literally the first episode and we haven’t seen her since. I was promised Harley Quinn in proper colors but I have yet to actually see that. Selina is just chilling in prison I guess? Honestly it now feels like they bit off more than they could chew. Like they wanted to use everyone in Gotham but they didn’t quite know how to build stories for that many people.

I would now like to launch my official complaint about Harley not being in official colors. I have press assets that show her in her actual jester costume, so the weird color change was wildly unnecessary and just kind of hammers home that they took away all of her unique traits. No accent. No real distinct change between Harleen and Harley. They really did not do her character justice, and as she is one of my favorites….I hate it alot.

Overall I think the series was good. But the writing at the end of the season seemed to really fall apart. We kind of just wandered through Gotham meeting people and doing crime all season, which is great until we decided to randomly have a narrative throughline in the last few episodes. The random and aggressive tone shift was just a bit much. I think the season could have been wrapped up a lot better. And honestly if we were going to focus the last few episodes on a single person I would have rathered it had been someone we had already seen. Following Harvey, making him two faced, and then going into the aftermath of that in the last few episodes was a huge waste of time.