“A weary body can be dealt with, but a weary spirit... that’s
something else. Sometimes, old friend, I wonder if I’m really doing any good
out there.”On the heels of The Penguin’s latest mistrial, Batman faces a dark night of the soul as he wonders whether his nightly quest for justice has actually accomplished anything. He takes his yearly pilgrimage to Crime Alley to lay flowers where his parents died, but an altercation forces him to miss a stakeout, where Commissioner Gordon is shot. Heartbroken, Batman grapples with his insecurities, bubbling to the surface, while Gordon’s shooter still roams the streets.
“I Am the Night” stands as one of those forgotten episodes for me, which surprised me on this rewatch because there’s a great deal of interconnectivity at work, tying this episode into the center of many of the distinguishing plot threads in Batman: The Animated Series. While this show never ran a season-long story arc, opting instead for the occasional two-parter amid a sea of one-and-dones that all took place in the same universe, “I Am the Night” picks up more than a few recognizable stories and develops them in powerful ways.
Chief among these is the reprise from “Appointment in Crime Alley,” in which we were first introduced to Batman’s annual tribute to his fallen parents. I had previously written that this moment exposes “the humanity and the tragedy of Batman laid bare in a moment of remembrance,” and the effect of the repetition in this episode is all the more astounding for how it expands the earlier “appointment” into a moment of doubt. This being the second time we’ve seen the “appointment,” we can now appreciate that sense of fatigue Batman must feel; we too have done this before, and we can wonder whether Batman has been the change he wanted to see in Gotham. To have this moment of recrimination in Crime Alley is downright chilling.
And speaking of chilling, this episode layers in the detail that Jim Gordon is precisely the same age that Thomas Wayne would have been had he not died in Crime Alley. We haven’t seen terribly much of Batman’s relationship with Gordon – a warm moment of reassurance here and there, the strictly-business meetings in Gordon’s office (usually abbreviated by Batman’s early exit) – but this notion that Gordon is a surrogate father to Batman might be one of the most moving things in the entire series. We touch base also with Gordon’s actual child, Barbara (late of “Heart of Steel”), who’s still about ten episodes away from her debut as Batgirl; unfortunately, she’s not given as much to do as in her first episode, but her bravery in staring down The Jazzman is certainly commendable.
This episode is ably carried by Kevin Conroy, who – and I’ll say something controversial here – doesn’t get enough accolades for his role as Batman. What I mean is that Conroy’s brilliance as a voiceover actor is so frequently taken for granted that we really ought to stop and listen every now and again to appreciate fully what he’s doing. Conroy introduces Batman’s emotional dilemma, walks him through his doubts and reassurances, and lands Batman in a place of moral confidence in a breezy twenty minutes, and not one step of it feels rushed or unbelievable. It’s a credit to Conroy’s vocal dexterity that a two-dimensional cartoon carries an emotional range that many physical actors fail to possess.
There’s a running subplot in this episode that sees Batman change the life of a wayward youth, but for me that plotline didn’t land in the way the main plot with Gordon affected me. It serves its purpose well, providing that last-minute boost of affirmation that Batman needs, but it reminds one of the way that this show has struggled to utilize children (cf. “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement”). It might seem that children fare better on BtAS when they’re tragic reminders of the fragility of young innocence, as in “Robin’s Reckoning,” and that interpretation might be a particularly grim and unforgiving assessment of a show which is, at the end of the day, a children’s cartoon, but this episode reminds us that the mantle of the bat is built on tragedy. “Beware the Gray Ghost” served as a much more potent measure of the place of childhood in the Batman mythos, and it moved me to tears, where this episode’s Wizard (voiced distractingly by Seth Green, of all people) merely irritated me.
I had usually remembered “I Am the Night” (or should I say misremembered?) as that episode where Batman does not say “I am vengeance, I am the night,” et cetera. (That’s “Nothing to Fear,” for those keeping score.) But on this latest rewatch it’s a companion piece to the masterful “Appointment in Crime Alley” in its evaluation of Batman’s core anguish, a perennial reminder that he is after all only human – but that he nevertheless has built himself into something so much greater. He may be the night, but he’s also the knight, that guardian against Gotham’s worst impulse and the beacon toward our best selves. While it’s not explicit in “Shadow of the Bat,” I do wonder how much of Barbara’s decision to don her own set of bat-ears stems from seeing Batman save her father’s life time and again, from wanting to be as good as he convinces her that mankind can be. Batman has certainly played that role in my life, and it’s powerful stuff to see him at his most human in what might be one of the most meaningful episodes of the series.
Writer: Michael Reaves
Director: Boyd Kirkland
Villain: Jimmy “The Jazzman” Peake (Brian George)
Next episode: “Off Balance,” in which Batman comes down with a case of vertigo.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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