Batman: The Animated Series - "The Man Who Killed Batman"

“Dear friends, today is the day that the clown cried. And he cries not for the passing of one man, but for the death of a dream.”

The word is out in the Gotham underworld: Batman is dead at the hands of Sidney Debris (Matt Frewer), a bumbling putz in the employ of Rupert Thorne. Dubbed “Sid the Squid,” Sidney tells Thorne what really happened the night Batman died, how he became the toast of the underworld, and how The Joker (Mark Hamill) reacted when he learned that his greatest adversary had perished.

Even though Batman is almost entirely absent from the episode, “The Man Who Killed Batman” is one of the greatest episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, hands down. It’s another Paul Dini/Bruce Timm collaboration, which is an automatic win for the audience as these two masters bring their expertise to bear on this deep dive into Gotham’s underbelly, a place both comically caricatured and surprisingly terrifying. In its focus not on its hero but on how the world looks from the vantage point of someone so close to the ground, “The Man Who Killed Batman” recalls the work of Will Eisner, who in his comic The Spirit would often devote whole episodes to this sort of story.

Sidney Debris would have fit right into the world of The Spirit; Sidney’s a lovable shrimp who somehow fell into a heist job with Thorne’s gangsters, only to find himself the center of Gotham City for a night. As ever, the character design on Sidney is first-rate; visually, he’s a small and doughy man, far from threatening, and Matt Frewer (of Max Headroom fame) gives him a spot-on stammer to match his status as a fish far, far out of water. Sidney is the kind of guy you’d love to see crop up again in the Gotham universe, but at the same time he’s designed like a nutshell to allow this story to play out, and I struggle to see a use for him in other stories beyond the charm of a reprise.

As usually happens with a Paul Dini episode, The Joker steals the show with his note-perfect blend of lamentation and jubilation at the news that Batman has died. His first instinct is to stage a robbery to see if Batman turns up, but his dismal sense of defeat at Batman’s absence is peculiarly haunting as he instructs Harley Quinn to put back the stolen gems because “Without Batman, crime has no punchline” – a note that sums up Dini’s Joker precisely. The episode reaches a crescendo with Joker’s ersatz funeral for the dearly departed Dark Knight, a two-minute tour de force through all the power of Dini’s alliterative prose wedded to Hamill’s wild oscillation between blind fury and dark comedy. (It’s no wonder Mark Hamill continues to perform this monologue in character at conventions – it’s a gasser!) Arleen Sorkin tries to steal the show back with a rendition of “Amazing Grace” on the kazoo, but Hamill elopes with it wholesale. This mad notion, that The Joker would sincerely mourn the death of Batman, speaks to the playful core of this interpretation of their relationship and why some of the earlier Joker episodes didn’t work as well – it’s never about the schemes, but rather it’s about the punchline, that bizarre sense of obligation Joker has to Batman for creating him and giving him a vast criminal playground.

Dini and Timm, too, are at play in the wondrous carnival of their own creation. Their version of Gotham City holds these kind of stories exceptionally well. I won’t spoil the ending of the episode (though the fact that we’re not even halfway through the full run should give you a hint), but it’s remarkable how little Batman needs to be involved for this story to succeed. One almost imagines that Paul Dini could man an anthology series about Gotham City with Batman solely on the periphery, his Gotham Central pervaded with the freaks and 1930s mobsters he deployed with aplomb in his episodes. (We almost got that in the late 2000s with Streets of Gotham, but that comic series quickly integrated Batman into the bulk of the stories.) Batman’s shadow looms over the story, but the real stars are the tight script, the cinematic directing, and that ineffable Joker voice.

“Well, that was fun – who’s for Chinese?”

Original Air Date: February 1, 1993

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Bruce Timm

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), and Rupert Thorne (John Vernon)

Next episode: “Mudslide,” in which the feet of clay melt away.

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