Plot summary: In the wake of his disfigurement, Harvey Dent descends into darkness and embarks on a violent revenge tour.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 9(S1.E9)
Original Air Date: August 1st, 2024
Directed: Christopher Berkeley (3)
Written: Jase Ricci (2)
Animation: Studio Grida (4)
Music: Frederik Wiedmann (9)
Two-Face’s design is relatively close to his original appearance, but with a twist: the disfigured side of his face is paired with his ‘good personality’, while the untouched side is married up with his ‘bad personality.’ Caped Crusader said fuck ableism, I guess?
Peter Mitchell is appointed as acting District Attorney of Gotham. In Executive Producer Matt Reeves’ The Batman Riddler’s first two victims are Don Mitchell and Pete Savage.
They were surprisingly restrained in the usual references to ‘2’ are here, with “a couple of reasons”, Tony Zito having four two’s in the poker game and Bruce seeing double due to his concussion. Oh and Harv kills two henchmen at one point? I dunno.
Rupert Thorne’s son is named Matthew, the same name as Thorne’s brother in BTAS.
Recap
In the wake of his disfigurement, Harvey Dent becomes a shut-in until Bruce Wayne takes him out to dinner. Unfortunately he suffers from a paranoid delusion and storms out after making a scene.
Things only get worse from there as his fractured mind sends him on a rampage, first shooting a mugger, and then assaulting a former witness that skipped town on Thorne’s orders.
Batman follows Harvey’s trail and only barely manages to get to Rupert Thorne before Dent can kill the mobster and his son.
When Thorne gets away Harvey suffers from an emotional breakdown and asks to be taken in, where Barbara Gordon approaches him…
Episode Ranking
Overall this is a solid story, but one we’ve seen many times. Harvey freaks out over his transformation and goes on a rampage to get revenge despite being heavily outnumbered by the mob. In this way it works decently, with his raid on Thorne’s mansion probably the highlight. The thing that pulls it back from being a top episode is the core premise being unimaginative, and a mixed bag of decisions made along the way.
I enjoyed Harvey’s little Citizen Kane dream sequence at the start of the episode, at first idealised with everybody he knows smiling up at him as he makes his triumphant speech, before rapidly turning into a nightmare as everybody remarks on his monstrous face… even though we can see it’s undamaged. It reminded me a little of Dent’s inability to accept reality in The Dark Knight Returns. Likewise his paranoia that everybody in the restaurant is talking about him when they’re not when Bruce takes him out, not out of genuine concern, but rather to play detective. In fact it was an interesting choice to have Bruce cause his freak out due to intensive questioning, which Alfred chastises him for, and while he protests a little, it does seem to sit with Bruce.
However I hate that he opted to chase Dent rather than try and save Zito from the fire, but Batman has been known to assess a situation and decide he can’t save somebody in time. It just didn’t seem like that was the case here. It doesn’t break the episode, but it sucks. They try to couch this in Bruce’s guilt, that he has hard-swung from not accepting responsibility for setting Harv off to deciding it’s his duty to bring him down… but I don’t think it quite works.
But then swinging it back towards the good was Harvey parroting Bruce’s words of encouragement back at Batman, now twisted from heroic determination to stubborn vengeance. It’s clever, and feeds the ‘this is all Bruce’s fault’ fire. Gah, I really don’t know! Ironically, it’s a very divisive episode!
Elsewhere, it was a nice little touch to have Jessop shower Harv in praise once it was confirmed he’d won the race, a standard political showing after months of shit-talking. Similarly, Bullock & Flass essentially shrugging and resigning themselves to not being able to find a culprit, while Montoya has the correct read that Dent is lying about not remembering what happened because he doesn’t want people to learn he’s crooked… which in turn riles up Bullock as he’s also dirty. Good character work.
I think ultimately due to Night Ride having a lot more heart where Bruce and Alfred are concerned, as well as the visual flair of that episode would give it a narrow lead over this one. This is also a soft ‘Part 1’ that isn’t labelled as such, so you do get a mostly complete story… but I do wonder what it would have looked like if this were the season finale (with a more incidental episode inserted earlier) to force them to punch up a couple of my problems with it so it has more of a ‘finale vibe.’
- … And Be a Villain
- The Stress of Her Regard
- Kiss of the Catwoman
- The Night of the Hunters
- Night Ride
- The Killer Inside Me (NEW ENTRY)
- Moving Target
- In Treacherous Waters
- Nocturne
Best Performance
Diedrich Bader is a good voice actor. We know this. But I think his work up to now has been lacking and is a large part of why this version of Two-Face doesn’t work as well as it should on paper. He made plenty of appearances before his transformation and was (for the most part) established as Bruce’s friend, and as I mentioned last episode tragedy befell him just as he decided to do the right thing which is narratively satisfying. But Bader’s Harvey lacks charm, and his Two-Face isn’t quite menacing enough. Neither version has quite enough emotional depth or mania. However, I actually think the synthesised ‘oh he’s just evil now’ Harvey voice he adopts once he starts targeting the mobsters is his best work, especially compared to the two extremes we usually get, where the ‘good’ half whimpers and the ‘bad’ half snarls. He tries to do both of these and it’s meh, but when he slides into a more calmly sinister mode he finally starts cooking in his eighth try at the character.
The thing is, beyond Bader it’s an embarrassment of great but overly brief roles, and solid but not outstanding seris regulars. William Salyers is SO good in a very short role as Emil Potter, who Dent shakes down for info in a bar. It’s only a few lines, but it’s super distinct. I also liked Kari Wahlgren as Vito’s mistress, as she lays the 1940s New Yorker schtick on good and thick.
It’s a great showing for John DiMaggio, who adds a decent mobster voice on top of his recurring work as Bullock, which is improved here. Finally Hamish Linklater does some of his Batman work bickering with Alfred.
Rogues Roundup
Two-Face (Diedrich Bader) (eighth appearance)
I’ve already talked about the delusional thoughts and Bader’s performance, so I’ll instead focus more on the ways in which the gimmick has manifested, the design and his actions. We see his ‘double-personality’ developing in his quick mood swings, particularly when his friend are sincerely nice to him and Dent immediately badmouths them after they leave. Literally two-faced, much like earlier in the season, though now with a violent temper attached.
I know a lot of people aren’t wild about this take on his disfigurement, which seems simultaneously more realistic and more stylised than what we’re typically used to. No discoloured skin (though his hair is slightly lighter), with most of his wounds looking more like large moles and random squiggly lines. Plus the partially missing lips and gnarled teeth. I don’t hate it, and in fact don’t often care for Two-Face designs where his skin is blue, red or cartoon pink, but I don’t know if this take was all the way there either.
Perhaps their most noteworthy choice with his behaviour is that he doesn’t care about coin flips at all, and instead just behaves erratically. People used to call that behaving schizophrenically. It SEEMS like he’s going to do a coin flip for the life of a mugger, but instead just shoots him in the leg, though we’re initially led to believe he’s killed him. He threatens Vito’s mistress but then doesn’t hurt her and instead gives her cash to leave town. But then he declares Vito to be sub-human, unworthy of a second chance as he’s a “cancer”, which is a loaded moral judgement but is said without malice or anger. In fact as mentioned in the trivia section, they’ve inverted his typical dynamic entirely, with his two halves swapped from the norm. I’m not saying he’s not Two-Face without the coin by any means, but I’m of mixed feelings about this iteration. He can certainly move up the list.
Rupert Thorne (Cedric Yarbrough) (fourth appearance)
Hey, he may be a merciless gangster running a criminal empire, but he likes quality time with his son! I’m being flippant, but this does give him a little more depth, especially when he demands his men prioritise his kid’s safety.
You also get the classic overconfident ‘there’s no way they can get in here!’ lines that always precede the person doing exactly that.
Harvey Bullock & Arnold Flass (John DiMaggio & Gary Anthony Williams) (seventh appearance)
I almost left them off despite their blend of corruption and ineptitude at the start of the episode, but then Bullock called Thorne to warn him Dent was coming after him. These two are really good non-threatening antagonists for this world and while I assume they’ll ‘redeem’ Bullock eventually, this lane works well.
- Clayface
- Harley Quinn
- Catwoman
- Two-Face (↑)
- Flass & Bullock (–)
- Firebug
- The Gentleman Ghost
- Rupert Thorne (–)
- The Penguin
- Onomatopoeia
- Jim Corrigan
- Nocturna
Title Card
The Matt Signal 
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