Batman: The Animated Series - "Night of the Ninja"

“I did some research, Mr. Wayne. I know you spent some time in Japan. Do you think this ninja person is connected to that?”

A specter from Batman’s past appears when a slew of Wayne properties are burglarized by the ninja Kyodai Ken (Robert Ito). Kyodai harbors a grudge against Bruce Wayne, who embarrassed him years earlier in a training dojo, but even Batman isn’t sure he’s ready for this rematch.

I’m coming into this episode with a very heavy bias – I have never liked the intersection of ninjas and superhero narratives, and I am not even convinced that the two stories belong together. I understand the allure of the samurai, isolated warriors bound by a code of honor; these stories have worked well for Wolverine, for one, and I think you can do interesting things with Batman as a kind of ronin (a samurai without a master). But here and in Daredevil, I just don’t understand the appeal of ninjas, whom Batman describes as “spies and assassins. Their only code is to get the job done.” But if one mark of a good Batman story is that you can’t imagine another character in his place, this episode roundly fails; I could just as easily imagine this as an episode of Daredevil, and I still wouldn’t care.

I do like that the episode gestures toward Bruce Wayne’s formative years on the road to dark knighthood, but the episode doesn’t really do anything with the flashbacks other than use them to introduce Kyodai Ken. We’re left with a good number of questions, chief among them what drew Bruce Wayne to Japan in the first place, but it’s also apparent that the past doesn’t fully bear on the present. I can’t believe for a moment that Batman needed special ninja training to defeat Kyodai, though the scene in which Bruce Wayne has to fake incompetence because Summer Gleason is watching ends up being pure gold.

There are some good ideas in “Night of the Ninja,” though they’re not given much development. Summer Gleason, a top journalist in Gotham, sets her sights on the connection between Bruce Wayne and Japan, but she’s shuffled offstage to be bound and gagged without ever really pursuing the story; one could imagine, for example, a version of this episode in which she gets dangerously close to exposing Batman’s true identity through the Japanese connection. On the other hand, Kyodai’s vendetta against Bruce Wayne never really lands because his motivation is quite weak, on top of which Bruce actually calls him out on that – “I was forced to become a thief after I was cast out of the dojo.” / “As I remember it, being a thief was what got you thrown out in the first place.” Had the episode developed Kyodai’s lower-class envy of Bruce Wayne, there might have been more compelling subtext to the episode, particularly to this day. Then there’s the Batman/Robin relationship, in which Batman refuses to trust Robin, only to be bailed out by his sidekick in the episode’s climax. It’s a decent subplot for the pair, even if it does retread territory from “Robin’s Reckoning,” and I have to say Robin has two of my favorite moments in the episode (one, a goofy face made behind Bruce’s back; the other, an unwitting double entendre when he chastises himself, “Way to go, Dick.”).

After more than ten strong episodes, we were playing with the house’s money. I don’t know if “Night of the Ninja” is material for a “bottom ten” list – it’s light-years better than “The Underdwellers,” for one – but it probably won’t land on any other lists for me. That is, unless I come up with a “Top Ten Stories Ninjas Didn’t Improve.”

But the episode might all be worth it for the way Kevin Conroy pronounces “Kyodai,” as though he becomes a sumo wrestler for the span of two syllables.

Original Air Date: October 26, 1992

Writer: Steve Perry

Director: Kevin Altieri

Villain: Kyodai Ken (Robert Ito)

Next episode: “Cat Scratch Fever,” in which a leopard fails to change her spots.

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