Batman: Caped Crusader Doubles Down On Its Anachronistic, Noir Charm

There’s a scene in the second episode of Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 that epitomizes how the show works: Batman (Hamish Linklater) is pursuing a Rocketeer-esque figure — Roxanne Sutton (Wunmi Mosaku) — during a train heist. We’re on the outskirts of Gotham, and at one point, Roxanne leaves the train and gets into her rocket, which flies over the countryside as the Batmobile pursues. The rocket skims the ground, and eventually Batman can’t follow; the rocket busts through a fence and over a ravine. The rocket doesn’t go very high, and Batman can’t drive into thin air. This is the world of Caped Crusader: rockets and ray guns exist, but we’re not getting nuts about it.

With the debut of Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2, the series continues to be one of the best and most underrated DC TV projects around. This time, the show is better than ever, even if it occasionally suffers from one odd tick: For all of its brooding Bat-goodness, Batman himself is very chatty, which sometimes makes the series feel like a 1940s radio show that never existed. Luckily, a fresh take on the most famous Bat-baddie of all makes this run of episodes a season to remember.

Batman’s struggle against injustice on the mean streets of Gotham is nothing compared to his struggle against public perception. Like James Bond, Batman tends to yo-yo in the public consciousness from colorful and self-aware romps to dark and gritty tales. The trouble with this dichotomy is that there’s no one “true” Batman; even when you go deep into comic book history, the upbeat and corny Robin was introduced very early in Batman’s history, in 1940, just one year after Bats’ debut in 1939. So, if you want to go back to Batman’s very early history and create a new, but retro series about Batman, the influences are, chronologically, all non-linear.

Bruce Timm, creator of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, has returned to familiar territory in crafting a version of Batman that feels like the dark and gritty “original” Batman, even though what we’re getting is actually a fairly complex conglomeration of different styles and influences, each traveling from different points in history to cover and create this stylistic, anachronistic version of a vintage Gotham City. There’s certainly a 1939 Bob Kane and Bill Finger Batman here, but also touches of the gothic stories that writer Gardner Fox brought to those early days. Timm references his own work with characters and situations from the ‘90s series, but also nods to Alan Moore.

Visually, much of Batman’s look in this show comes from the earliest Detective Comics appearances, as does the preoccupation with street-level old-timey mobsters. Throughout Season 2, The Riddler (Ronan Raftery) isn’t so much a supervillain but rather a brutal and ruthless gangster, collecting protection money and shooting up local businesses. Like Season 1, Timm and his collaborators are interested in once again suggesting that to become a character like, say, Poison Ivy (Fryda Wolff), all you need is a backstory filled with psychological chaos, and a present-tense hyperbolic plot device. The idea that Batman lives in a world in which his own split psyche is reflected back on him in his various foes is very loud in Caped Crusader Season 2, so much so that, as is true with many TV and film versions of Batman, the various antagonists become more compelling than the Dark Knight himself.

Batman: Caped Crusader also makes zero attempts to make it seem like any of this is kids’ stuff. The animation style and tone still will remind ‘90s fans of the beloved animated series, but the blood, language, and themes of this series are even more hardcore than the violent pulp novels.

This brings us to the biggest swing of the batarang in Season 2: the introduction of a new, sinister take on the Joker. Again, it's tempting to argue that this Joker goes back to basics: A homicidal murderer with the visage of a riverboat gambler. But in Season 2, the new Joker (Matthew Needham) feels innovative, and at least when it comes to TV and film Jokers, new. Part of the brilliance of this take on the Joker is how little he talks and how little he laughs. In a Comic-Con interview, Needham said that the audition guidelines were to make the Joker “European and humorless.” In short, the revelation that Caped Crusader Season 2 has made is this: the laugh of the Joker is more interesting and terrifying when that laughter comes not from him, but from his victims.

Throughout the series, each of the seemingly stand-alone last two episodes of Caped Crusader Season 2 teases the coming of the Joker, and when he finally arrives in Episodes 9 and 10, the show transforms from noir-crime thriller — with touches of sci-fi — to a full-on horror story. Without spoiling the final episode, let’s just say the types of monsters Batman faces in the end are terrifying and, even for longtime comic book fans, surprising. At the top of the season, if Batman wanted to pursue a rocket, he needed to switch from driving the Batmobile to piloting a WWII-style Bat-Spitfire with machine guns blazing.

In the finale, logistical decisions and famous-Bat agility aren’t quite enough. Yes, Batman can win the day with superior intelligence and cool dieselpunk-ish gadgets. But the basic question asked in the final moments of this season is more essential: How much is Batman’s darkness the cause of the chaos around him, and how close is he to crossing the line? This is very old material, and having a final confrontation between Batman and the Joker might seem, superficially, to be a redo of a billion Batman fights we’ve seen before.

But this Joker isn’t like the others. He’s pretty much like Emperor Palpatine, suggesting that maybe Batman can turn to the dark side, eventually. And the exciting thing about Caped Crusader Season 2 is that sometimes, even for brief moments, we’re worried the Joker might be right.

Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 hits Prime Video on July 31.