The New Batman Adventures - "Sins of the Father"

“It’s your kind of show, Puke-Face – a double feature!”

Young street rat Tim Drake (Mathew Valencia) runs afoul of the police and the mob alike after his father disappears. Having stolen something valuable from mob boss Two-Face, Steven “Shifty” Drake vanished, and Two-Face has his eyes on the boy to recover his stolen property. After saving Batman’s life, Tim finds his way into the Batcave, where he finds a new destiny as the next Robin.

This episode has always felt a little bit like bookkeeping to me. We met the new Robin last week in “Holiday Knights,” but this episode goes back to give him a proper origin story. I’ve never thought, though, that he needed one, much less that it needed to be the second episode of The New Batman Adventures. “Robin’s Reckoning” was a masterstroke, but it found a way to weave Dick Grayson’s origin into a compelling story through the use of flashbacks. It told us that the most interesting thing about Robin wasn’t his backstory; it was how he used his crimefighting skills to heal. 

“Sins of the Father” is no “Robin’s Reckoning,” though it is a very competent Robin story. (It’s a little like saying “Deep Freeze” is no “Heart of Ice.”) The other major sticking point with this episode is that it isn’t Tim Drake’s origin story. It’s Jason Todd’s, the second Robin in the comic books. Tim was the third Robin, introduced in 1989 after Jason Todd’s murder at the hands of The Joker the previous year. Possibly due to his rough upbringing on the streets of Gotham, Jason Todd had been increasingly more violent as Robin, leading to a fracture with his mentor before his untimely death. Tim Drake, on the other hand, was brought on as a purer version of Robin, someone who understood the necessity of a light in Batman’s darkness. All of this is to say that the Tim Drake we get is rather a watered-down version of both Jason and Tim. Though The New Batman Adventures is looser with censoring content, Jason’s fate and roughness had to be tempered, but in changing his very name we lost something essential about Tim. 

It’s not that “Sins of the Father” does anything wrong. It’s a very safe episode, and that safety leads it to feel formulaic and a little boring. Two-Face is reduced to a fairly basic gangster villain, with only a passing flirtation with the number two. Robin’s origin feels very preordained, with little room for surprise. The only real bombshell in the episode is Batgirl, who continues to make a stronger presence in TNBA than she did in BtAS; she’s got a great sequence where she catches Tim prowling in Wayne Manor, and it’s just a treat to see her fighting next to Batman as equals. 

One last thing about “Sins of the Father” is that it bristles against what seems to be the story it would rather have told. Throughout the episode, it’s noted that Robin has vanished, that Dick Grayson has divorced himself from the Bat-family, and it’s established as a kind of mystery, albeit one for which the episode has very little time – until, that is, Dick Grayson makes his big return in the episode’s final moments, with a wide grin on his face and a big “welcome back” atmosphere. We know, of course, what happened – that Dick grew up, in more ways than one, and assumed the mantle of Nightwing – but we won’t get the full story until “Old Wounds,” another Rich Fogel/Curt Geda episode. (That story was told, roughly simultaneously, in a tie-in comic book miniseries, for which you will not be surprised to learn I have fond memories.)

Original Air Date: September 20, 1997

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: Two-Face (Richard Moll)

Next episode: “Cold Comfort,” in which Mr. Freeze’s problems come to a head.

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