Not since the likes of “Perchance to Dream” have I had to toss up a spoiler warning this big, but “Over the Edge” is one of the greatest episodes of The New Batman Adventures and indeed of the entire Batman animated project because of how fearlessly Paul Dini breaks all the rules and yet manages to put all the toys back without feeling like a cop-out. It’s an episode akin to a long chain of dominoes, toppling over in logical succession but with profoundly destructive influence.
This episode starts with a bang as Commissioner Gordon pursues Batman and Robin through the Batcave, firing a hail of bullets after them. He calls for their surrender, revealing that he knows their secret identities. All of Gotham has turned against the Dark Knight, and Batman recounts to Nightwing how it all went wrong, beginning on a night when the Scarecrow broke loose, haunted Gotham – and killed Batgirl.
And yet, it’s all a dream, the ultimate fake-out ending when it’s revealed that the entire episode has been one long nightmare inside Batgirl’s mind as she exorcises Scarecrow’s fear toxin from her body. This is an imaginary story, Alan Moore might say, but aren’t they all? In the hands of any writer less talented, it’d feel like an insult, a waste of an episode, but Dini takes the opportunity to say something new and otherwise impossible about the Bat-mythos and the family relationships that hold it together. Where The New Batman Adventures has struggled to give us a non-dysfunctional Bat-family, leave it to Paul Dini to give us a story of two fathers – Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne – both blaming themselves (and both blaming Batman, too) for Barbara Gordon’s demise. If you’re anything like me, and you care more about Batman than most real people, this episode is a real tearjerker because of how tangible Dini makes the family dynamics feel.
It’s heart-wrenchingly believable to imagine that Barbara’s death would drive her father to investigate, finally, Batman’s secret identity, and that furthermore his rage would lead him to try to destroy his one-time friend. Bruce’s sad defense, that “the only way I could hold on to my sanity was to take matters into my own hands,” is a moment of pure pathos until Gordon replies bitterly, “That makes us even.” It’s a sobering reminder that the real power of the Batman myth is that it’s the story of one man’s efforts to heal himself by healing others, by expelling any internalized grief and manifesting it into something productive; without that impulse to save, we get something like this episode’s Gordon, a sad shell of a man who wants to eradicate his own loss by exploding it out onto others. (There’s a third father in play, of course – Alfred Pennyworth, who sacrifices his freedom to ensure that his charges can escape the police. The episode doesn’t dwell on him, for Dini is careful not to overplay this moment of quiet, selfless heroism, but his inclusion is not accidental.)
And because it’s a Paul Dini episode, the man jams as many villains as he can into the plot – six, by my count, including new redesigns for Riddler, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The talk show appearance of four villains protesting Batman’s unfair vigilantism is classic Dini, head-scratchingly funny and yet entirely plausible that this blend of nutcases would find this avenue of deluded self-justification. “We were helpless, lost souls crying out for understanding,” laments the Mad Hatter as Harley Quinn sobs about the nightmares she endures because of Batman. The idea of a television audience sympathetic to the villains isn’t quite new to Batman – Frank Miller did it in The Dark Knight Returns twelve years earlier – but its execution here is quintessential Dini humor. While the Scarecrow’s appearance in this episode is fairly brief, it’s Bane who emerges as a figure of pure terror, first a warped weapon of Gordon’s fractured psyche before revealing himself as the self-serving mastermind brute from the source material. He works better here than he did in his debut because he’s allowed to serve his own goals, even in spite of working as a gun for hire, a mercenary in the service of Gordon’s pain.
It’s an episode littered with heartbreak and grief, in big moments and small. The beat where a broken Gordon, dangling from the GCPD rooftop, bites back tears and accepts Batman’s hand is a quiet emotional scorcher, but the episode’s most powerful moment comes in the real world, when Barbara tries to admit her secret identity to her father (having already received the tacit permission of her Bat-father). I just want to quote the Commissioner’s response, because it’s damned beautiful, aided by the underrated Bob Hastings in the role that will always be the voice I hear in my head when I read a Gordon story:
Sweetheart, you’re capable of making your own decisions. You don’t need me to approve or even acknowledge them. And in this case, I can’t. All you need to know is I love you. All of you. (kiss) And that is all I have to say on the subject.The whole episode, we learn, is borne out of Barbara’s deep-rooted fear that her secrets will destroy her families, so this quiet revelation – that Gordon both knows about her alter ego and is protecting them both by not admitting it – is a masterclass in concise writing, resolving the episode’s central conflict for maximum emotional effect. Again, Dini has found a way to take an imaginary story and give its revelations significant weight in the “real” world of the story. Moreover, he manages to craft an episode in which the bad guys, despite being largely imaginary, nevertheless do not win; the fears that crippled Barbara prove both unfounded and insufficient. Both her fathers are always already on her side, wanting what’s best for her despite any jeopardy it might create for them. It’s a love much stronger than whatever romantic relationship The New Batman Adventures has been trying to generate between Bruce and Barbara, and as a result it’s one of the best episodes of what has been an odd and uneven run.
Writer: Paul Dini
Director: Yuichiro Yano
Villains: The Scarecrow (Jeff Bennett) and Bane (Henry Silva)
Next episode: “Mean Seasons,” in which Gotham doesn’t love its little calendar girl.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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