Plot summary: The Joker reveals himself at last, declaring that he will kill Mayor Jessop at precisely midnight, leaving Batman scrambling to foil the plot in time.
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Notes and Trivia
Episode: 19 (S2.E9)
Original Air Date: July 31st, 2026
Directed: Christopher Berkley (6)
Written: Greg Rucka (2)
Animation: Doghead Animation (4)
Music: Frederik Wiedmann (19)
We at last get a proper look and listen to the show’s version of The Joker, taking clear influence from both his original design and the source of the character’s inspiration, the 1928 film version of The Man Who Laughs. Though it was a silent film, the titular character, Gwyneplaine, was portrayed by German actor Conrad Veidt, which presumably informed Matthew Needham’s choice of accent for Joker.
In his debut appearance in 1939, The Joker declared via public radio that he would murder a specific Gothamite at precisely midnight. This was also incorporated into my favourite episode of BTAS, ‘The Laughing Fish‘.
The corpse Barbara Gordon identifies for a coroner is Barry Vance. This may be a nod to the lineage of Vances in the DCEU, most prominently Robert, the dead tech mogul who uploaded his consciousness into a computer in Batman Beyond.
Recap
Hattie Tetch dies of hysterical laugheter mid-broadcast, with The Joker taking over her show and promising to kill Mayor Jessop at exactly midnight, and the rest of the city by dawn.
With the city in a panic, Batman scrambles to get to the mayor just before midnight, Jessop had already been dosed, dying at midnight just as promised.
The horror doesn’t stop there though as the various corpses sit bolt upright and laugh some more, expelling more of the deadly gas.
Among the booby-trapped bodies is Rupert Thorne, who Alfred had been examining in the Batcave, thus infecting Bruce’s faithful servant!
Episode Ranking
Pretty tough to top this for a cold open, making use of the season-long plot device of Hattie Tetch’s popular TV show being hijacked by a calm, collected Joker pledging to kill everybody in the city in a scant few hours.
I appreciated them showing the city descending into panic, crawling over each other to either get home or flee town, boarding up windows etc. and highlighting what a huge drain on GCPD resources it is to maintain order, thus Jim Gordon has to directly ask Batman to stop Joker for them.
Alfred only manages to record a short few seconds of the broadcast to show to Batman. In fact it’s such a brief amount that I laughed on first watch because what was even the point? Yet Bruce gets a clue out of it all the same, recognising one of the henchmen flanking Joker as a Riddler man, thus deducing he’s taken control of the operation and sending him to The Stacked Deck they’re still using as a hideout, and also giving us another entry in the fine canon of ‘Batman moves through the shadows, only illuminated by gunfire’ scenes. Cooler even that though is that Bruce isn’t a step ahead at all, getting there to find a Joker impersonator and that all the men have been gassed, giving him nobody to interrogate.
Fun little moment where it briefly looks like Batman will accidentally cause the mayor’s death, as Jessop sits there repeating “I’m going to be fine” with a few minutes to go before midnight, only for the shooting to start because Bruce arrived to storm Flass’ makeshift safe house, shifting the POV to the security detail reacting in terror to the vigilante storming the castle and cutting through them like butter. But instead, Joker already got to the mayor hours ago, it seems. The classic “I did it thirty five minutes ago” thing.
Oh hey, the Flass/Bullock/Montoya subplot is back! Mayor Jessop rejects the protection of Renee in favour of Flass, suggesting some corruption at play as there’s really no reason to go against Gordon’s wishes but Jessop makes vague mention of Flass earning his trust. Bullock reminds viewers that he took the fall for Flass, begs to get on the private security detail, presumably to secure the mayor’s influence so he can be a detective again, but Flass tells him to beat it and gives him a lecture on taking what you can and whatnot. I’m sure that’ll pay off next episode.
The animation and voice direction are excellent here, topping any previous Bruce Timm production on the creepy Joker victims scale. It’s genuinely unsettling to see so many people laugh themselves to death, taking both the look and the sound of it way further than they were able to before. The only thing that comes close is Mask of the Phantasm which is seared into my brain. This has it beaten on scale though, with so many more victims and then the horrifying ‘second phase’ where the dead rise temporarily to infect more people. That aspect does raise some questions about the validity of timing the secondary triggers so precisely, but hey, you can’t interrogate this stuff tooooo closely or it all falls apart.
On first watch this was my favourite episode of the season, and while I do still think it’s excellent, I don’t think that’s true anymore. The biggest thing working against it is that it’s an incomplete story, ending on the cliffhanger of Alfred getting gassed and revealing the second phase of Joker’s scheme. I used to penalise a lot of BTAS episodes for this because I ranked the different parts individually but then realise the folly of my decision and switched to assessing multi-parters as a single entry… But this is not a Part I, Part II situation. The same thing hurt the Two-Face episodes at the end of Season One, and I think I need to be consistent, so for that, it only lands in third place. It’s very much a repeat of The Laughing Fish situation, where I reward something that is simple but flawlessly executed over something extremely ambitious but with some problems.
- Sudden Fear
- … And Be a Villain
- Dead Before Dawn (NEW ENTRY)
- Deep Cover
- The Stress of Her Regard
- The Devil’s Due
- Kiss of the Catwoman
- The Spectral Hand
- Rocket’s Red Glare
- Brute Force
- The Night of the Hunters
- Night Ride
- The Killer Inside Me
- Moving Target
- In Treacherous Waters
- Savage Night
- Zero Hour
- Her Dark Reflection
- Nocturne
Best Performance
Matthew Needham‘s choice of a German accent for such an iconic character would likely be considered controversial if more people watched this show. For better or worse, audiences think of either Hamill, Ledger or perhaps even Nicholson when they close their eyes and imagine the character. They have different styles, but all are American, and all have an element of whimsy Needham chose – or more likely was advised – to completely eradicate for his take. I think it works, as it gives him a far more unsettling edge that sets him apart from the cavalcade of clones of the most famous trio. He’s kind of hypnotic.
Jason Watkins’ read of “The leader is male, white. VERY white in fact.” got a chuckle from me. He’s also very good in the episode in general, chiming in with little comments here and there while helping with the investigation. Second choice for sure.
Everybody did a good job at the ‘laugh yourself to death’ thing. Larraine Newman throws in a “help me” that’s genuinely tragic. The rest sound suitably pained. Hamish Linklater is pretty good too, but there’s already so much going on.
Rogues Roundup
The Joker (Matthew Needham) (seventh appearance)
Well damn.
I was very hesitant about them bringing The Joker into the show as his shadow looms far too large and we could stand to see some other villains get a turn at bat… but this was superlative. I talked about it in the Best Performance section, but this choice to make Mistah J extremely quiet and unnervingly emotionless was a very wise decision. We’ve seen so many takes on Joker and almost all of them are indebted to either Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill or Heath Ledger one way or another. Their version may look a lot like the BTAS one, but the characterisation is nothing like any of them. Tom King’s ‘The War of Riddles and Jokes’ saw The Clown Prince ‘lose his smile’ and no longer find anything funny, but this goes way beyond that. Probably the best new Joker for a long time.
Something I raved about in ‘The Laughing Fish‘ was the idea of Joker as this inevitable force of nature to the point of seeming to possess superpowers. He calls his shot and no matter what Batman and the GCPD do to try and save the target, Joker still gets to them, because it’s impossible to get on his wavelength and predict his next move. That’s the essence of every version of the character to me, whether they highlight it or not, that he’s the one villain Batman can never really plan for, and this treatment nails that, starting with his chilling public declaration.
His matter-of-fact demeanour extends to his fight style, as he just pulls a fucking concealed shotgun on Batman out of nowhere for trying to block his exit, firing before Bruce even knows what’s happening. Again, villains that barely seem to care about fighting are scarier than the ones that posture.
But to bring things full circle, how on earth would you predict that he’d concoct a poison that makes a person laugh themselves to death, on a very exact (“to the second”) timer, and then on an entirely different exact timer give the victim rigor mortis that makes them sit bolt upright after death, laugh some more, and expel enough noxious gas to infect everyone in the immediate vicinity??? Insanely convoluted plan (complimentary).
There’s still room to grow from here so I’m not sending him straight to the top, but quite a climb from bottom of the list at the end of last season… though that was because I shouldn’t even have ranked him based off a 5 second appearance.
- The Mad Monk
- Harley Quinn
- The Joker (↑)
- Clayface
- Roxy Rocket
- Catwoman
- Scarecrow
- Mister Zero aka Mister Freeze
- Two-Face
- The Riddler
- Thorn
- Firebug
- Rupert Thorne
- The Gentleman Ghost
- Hattie Tetch aka Mad Hatter (–)
- Flass & Bullock
- The Terrible Trio
- Jim Corrigan/The Spectre
- The Penguin
- Hugo Strange and the Monster Men
- Onomatopoeia
- Nocturna
Title Card
The Matt Signal 
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