“Humans make errors in judgment. It is sometimes necessary
to protect them from their own inadequacies.”In this two-part episode, a robotic suitcase pilfers Wayne Enterprise and absconds with advanced wetware technology, which Bruce Wayne hopes will be the future of artificial intelligence. His old mentor Karl Rossum (William Sanderson) has no leads, but he’s got a glamorous assistant and a colossal computer in his basement – both of whom are at the heart of a scheme to replace Gotham’s elite with android duplicants. They weren’t counting on Barbara Gordon (Melissa Gilbert), though, who notices right away that something’s amiss about her father, the commissioner.
A recurring theme throughout this series has been my reversing my opinion on episodes I didn’t previously enjoy as a kid (it seems hard now, for example, to believe that I ever had an unkind word to say about “Robin’s Reckoning”), and boy howdy does that apply here. My thought halfway through the second part was, “Man, this could be the backbone of a really cool Ben Affleck movie.” I think maybe I was too young to appreciate what’s going on in this episode, probably mildly resenting the absence of a recognizable villain.
Before we get to the main plot, let’s talk about Barbara Gordon. In “Heart of Steel,” she starts to get the Harvey Dent treatment, by which I mean the show is seeding her character long before she’ll become the major player we know is in her future. Though she doesn’t don a cape and bat-ears, there’s much of Batgirl at play in this episode; Barbara is smart, intuitive, something of a detective, with the moxie to light the Bat-signal and tug on Batman’s cape. The episode ends with her conspiratorially winking, “I sort of enjoyed it,” but the characterization of Barbara is so spot-on that you almost don’t need that foreshadowing.
The plot proper involves the supercomputer H.A.R.D.A.C. and its attempt to replace humanity with a race of robotic duplicants. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of Blade Runner (with William Sanderson here playing a role comparable to his part as replicant designer J.F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), probably the closest to science-fiction horror that BtAS will ever get. “Heart of Steel” fosters an amazing sense of paranoia from its opening moments, where anyone could be an android, and it continues with moments like the one where Mayor Hill is confronted in his office by his menacing duplicant. The repetition of cold hands (mirroring, dare I say, a heart of ice) and the bait-and-switch where characters are revealed to be robots – these are the narrative beats that stick with me. (Well, them, and the playful inclusion of Barbara’s plush companion Woobie Bear, who ends up being a pivotal plot point when Barbara suspects something’s afoot with her father.)
As I said with “Robin’s Reckoning” – something my younger self would never have conceded as possible, with his short attention span – I almost wish that “Heart of Steel” were longer. It seems that H.A.R.D.A.C.’s plot is just getting started once Batman catches on (though Barbara gets there first), and I wouldn’t have minded an episode that shows more of what might happen to Gotham if its top producers become robots. One could imagine the tragic terror of Bruce Wayne with a robotic Lucius Fox or (heavens forfend) Alfred Pennyworth, and one wonders what duplicant Mayor Hill might have tried to accomplish with the power of his office. If the best episodes leave us wanting more, then, perhaps “Heart of Steel” is among them.
Writer: Brynne Stephens
Director: Kevin Altieri
Villains: H.A.R.D.A.C. (Jeff Bennett) and Randa Duane (Leslie Easterbrook)
Next episode: “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?,” in which Edward Nygma manipulates the hand of fate.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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