Batman: Caped Crusader 

Just finished watching the second season of Batman: Caped Crusader, and it’s… fine? It’s serviceable, I was interested enough to watch the whole thing, and yet, there’s something off. In the same way a lot of those DC Animated movies felt off. Because on paper, this should be great. A street-level Batman animated series by guys like Timm, Brubaker, Rucka with Reeves overseeing the production. Like I said, it’s fine. At least there’s something to tide Batman fans over while the second Reeves movie is still in production. There are worse Batman cartoons, it never reaches the nadir of The Killing Joke movie for instance, but at no point does it ever wow me. And something with those names in the credits should easily wow me. So what happened?

Because the first glaring issue above all else is this version of Bruce. He’s a real cipher of a character in this show. Yeah, all his usual shit like dead parents and being vengeance are here, but beyond that, he’s one of the more shallow interpretations of the character, one that compares poorly to other recent versions like Pattinson’s or the Absolute one in terms of character depth. While I like Hamish Linklater in other shows like Midnight Mass or The Good Wife, he doesn’t have the dry wit or subtleties that you’d expect from Kevin Conroy or Diedrich Bader. He’s so monotone even when playing Bruce Wayne in his civilian persona, almost sounds like he just woke up to record lines. So when I found out this was his first voice-over performance, that made total sense. There are so many instances where an otherwise talented screen actor is asked to dub a video game, a radio play, or a Ghibli movie, and they’re suddenly out of their element and unable to speak as well as they do on a filming location. You almost get the sense some actors just have a bad sense of claustrophobia that a VO booth increases as opposed to a filming set, that or the voice director just isn’t getting the right performance out of them. The retirement of Andrea Romano years ago is a real hindrance there.

But besides performance, this Bruce just doesn’t feel like an important fixture to the plot. You often hear criticisms of movies like Batman Returns that Bruce does nothing in that, but at least he forms one half of the main romantic arc and presents a contrast to both Penguin and Selina. Not to mention Keaton being able to convey a personality with just a look. But the Bruce Wayne of Caped Crusader feels almost like a nonentity in his own show, only really there to save the day but little else when it comes to actual emotional moments. I figured the first season would sow seeds that he’d mellow out and be human to Alfred, but not even that happens this time. And yes, you want to make sure he doesn’t hog the spotlight from the other characters, but I argue few of them get any real drama to work with either to expand their personalities. There are admittedly some moments for Jim Corrigan, Barbara Gordon, Roxy Rocket of all people, but they’re fleeting and don’t fully land. You never really get this show’s equivalent of Heart of Ice or Mad Love. And not for lack of trying, a character this season’s reinvented to go through the same plot beats Mr. Freeze went through in Heart, but it didn’t culminate into an effective tragedy. Instead, all it does is remind me of BTAS doing this story better. 

And that’s one of the parts of the show that it can never really take a side on, its relationship with BTAS. Because it obviously wants to be another cartoon reboot of Batman instead of just another continuation since they’d just revive BTAS if that was their desire, but then it does obvious fanservice like Carrie Kelley dressing up as the Grey Ghost or reusing the old Bruce Wayne character model from the JLU episode epilogue for a dream sequence. Which is all well and good, but then its versions of Harley, Mr. Freeze (named Mr. Zero in this because Golden Age), and Joker are almost repudiations of their usual selves, selves that were popularized by BTAS. I remember hearing Timm was very vocal about making this version of Harley the tonal opposite of her usual portrayal in an attempt to reclaim the character he created. And fair, but by scrambling all the parts that make Harley memorable, you’re just left with another Batman villain. Harley with an understated performance, no relationship with the Joker, and lack of real chaos to her personality is all for the worse. I guess she’s at least better than the version of Harley from the 2017 DTV movie?

Because the thing with making reinterpreting old franchise characters, the changes have to be interesting for them to work. The 2022 movie turning Riddler into a vengeful orphan looking to bomb Gotham for how its leadership failed to help him as a child works. Batman Returns turning Catwoman into a pseudo-zombie/angel of death desperate to kill Christopher Walken works. Since those changes offer more avenues for those characters to do interesting stuff and open up more psychological angles. But here, I can’t think of a reinterpretation that’s for the better. Riddler’s just a short-tempered asshole who gets his name by riddling people with bullets. The Bat God Barbatos is just a hoax set up by a con artist to make quick cash. Spectre’s just a zombie. Hugo Strange existed. Mad Hatter is now Gossip Gerty from the Schumacher movies. The closest thing to an interesting change is making Joker a humorless German scientist hoping to educate Bruce by force. The initial concept is good, but then the execution ultimately boils down to the climax of the Scott Snyder run with a Joker-zombie invasion. It’s hard to fully buy this new inverted version of the Joker when he does something regular Joker would do but with less of the panache. They can’t even bother to rip off the “two boats” dilemma in The Dark Knight instead if they wanted to go for a Joker more interested in testing Gotham than having a laugh. Instead of feeling like actual reinventions, they all just seem like watered-down versions with none of the pathos that makes Batman villains interesting and able to hold down stories on their own. They remind me of when people who hated the Nolan movies would joke that Nolan would make Mr. Freeze a serial killer with an icebox obsession, or Clayface just some guy with a skin disfigurement, forgetting Nolan was more thoughtful than “Take a Batman villain, make them mundane”. And yeah, the show’s meant to have a more somber, grounded tone than the comics, but that’s more of a hindrance if you’re gonna take very interesting concepts like Barbatos and reduce them to the backdrop of a scam plot right out of Scooby Doo. There’s no texture to these new versions of the characters. It’s like if WB took Swamp Thing and made an animated series where he was just a weed addict who might or might not have powers while he has a stoic romance with Abby, and they go on adventures where they fight drug dealers.

And “stoic” is a good word for this show, because while it’s not totally devoid of emotion, it’s also mostly disinterested in the potential sentimental complexities in these characters. Yeah, you wouldn’t want this to be like the Tom King run where Bruce spends multiple issues mad over his failed relationship with Selina, nor do you want this to have the tedious romantic arcs of the Arrowverse, but you can’t go the opposite way and have a passionless Batman. It’s almost clinical in its execution, characters moving around like data points instead of people, and you have to wonder why. I’ve heard a few defenders insist this is an attempt to evoke Golden Age writing where the detective heroes didn’t let their feelings get in the way of getting the job done, and you always know the people who say that haven’t actually read those Golden Age detective comics and make the annoying assumption that mainstream comics only started getting character drama in the 80s. Not to mention it’s a weak excuse when this is a show where Commissioner Gordon and Barbara are black and Montoya’s openly in a relationship with Harley, and none of them face any of the social issues that people of different races or sexualities would have faced in the 1940s or 50s, or anything reminiscent of Golden Age comics like EC’s Judgment Day or the works of Orrin C Evans. It’s more reminiscent of Bridgerton and Murdoch Mysteries in how it portrays the past. More in the pursuit of portraying a cozy period piece than something more complex. And it’s not as if a Batman show needs to be about real-life issues to be good, BTAS rarely tried for that outside of moments like the Sewer King episode, but at least there would’ve been something to the rather sterile procedural cases. If a show isn’t about anything except its own inherited aesthetic due to being the latest installment of a long-running franchise, and an aesthetic that other installments do better, what does it have to offer? If you’re going to tout yourself as the mature Batman cartoon, and your only real signs of maturity are you can show slightly more blood and bodies than your predecessors (but not to the degree of that Apokolips War movie, or Gotham, that show was bizarrely gory), it’s not really much. If I wanted that, I could go watch Invincible instead. Because it’s not like that show’s using “We’re just like an early 2000s comic!” to justify its shortcomings. While Caped Crusader only evokes the Golden Age on a superficial level, so I don’t know why anyone would go “It’s just like the Golden Age Batman!” to justify weak character work and a lack of emotional flavor.

I have to stress again I don’t dislike the show, it’s adequate. It’s more watchable than some of those DC Animated movies like Hush, Bad Blood, or those Crisis movies. But the high standards from its crew credits make it a frustrating watch at times. It’s a series that really wants to be seen as the next BTAS, when BTAS did a lot to shake up how people viewed western animation at the time and surprise a lot of viewers with what could have been another disposable tie-in cartoon like so many other shows inspired by the box office successes of blockbuster films. Think of how many other cartoons inspired by hit movies existed in the 80s, 90s, and the early 00s, and how many of them were as influential and inventive as BTAS. Even within its own franchise, before BTAS, DC cartoons were more of the Superfriends mold, so watching something like The Demon’s Quest or Perchance to Dream should’ve been a real eyeopener. But it’s 2026, and mature DC adaptations are quite common to such a degree that CC doesn’t have any tricks. Notice how the first season came out in 2024 only to be overshadowed by the HBO Penguin miniseries, a dramatically stronger show that was filled with playing around with viewers’ expectations, characters with conflicting emotions who were often at war with themselves as much as they were against their enemies, and stellar performances. That was actually trying and succeeding at being a show that took familiar Batman concepts and making it a mesmerizing series. While I’m not sure what CC wants to be. Just a halfhearted copycat of BTAS? Something to keep Warner Bros Animation busy? Mediocre churned-out content to make you go “Well, at least it was better than Beware the Batman”? Because it’s not as if the show’s meant to be a gateway show to introduce kids to Batman like prior animated series, as it’s not advertised as such as is clearly banking on people who already know Batman watching it. What is the show trying to be beyond the sum of its parts? Because it’s not like “Remind people that Batman is an IP” is much of an imperative these days. If Caped Crusader’s only real ploy is “What if the Joker didn’t laugh?”, then it’s hard to see what this show has to offer if it gets a third season. Because based on announcements of another Batman animated series adapting Scott Snyder’s Absolute run, I doubt it.

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