The New Batman Adventures - "Old Wounds"

“He was so upset he couldn’t even talk about it. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that. What is it between you two?”

Robin finally asks Nightwing (Loren Lester) why he parted ways with Batman. Though the former Boy Wonder is reluctant to share, he tells his successor about the night Batman went too far, leading to a few confessions with Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong) and a confrontation with The Joker (Mark Hamill) where tensions boiled over.

Although the Batman animated project has largely eschewed long narrative arcs and dense continuity callbacks, “Old Wounds” is maybe the closest the show ever came to addressing its own internal mythology in an episode that promises a major revelation to answer the long-running question of why Nightwing gave up the mantle of Robin. I have very strong memories of this storyline – not as its animated instantiation but as the five-issue tie-in comic book miniseries, The Batman Adventures: The Lost Years, which preceded the episode. I remember that series fondly for its deliberate introspection, getting inside Dick Grayson’s head and tracing his path to a new identity.

Perhaps “Old Wounds” would have benefited from the breathing room that a two-parter would have given it, because the episode moves so briskly through its events that everything seems rushed and a little thin. This is an important story, maybe the second most significant one The New Batman Adventures would ever tell (in four weeks, “Mad Love” makes the case for being the most significant). The way it’s handled, though, seems perfunctory – Batman was a jerk, and Robin had enough – and it doesn’t quite gel with the healthy and positive relationship these characters had in The Animated Series. I’m reticent to pull a “book did it better” with this review, but The Lost Years took two issues to divorce Robin from Batman, establishing the conflict between Bruce’s increasing prickliness and Dick’s bristling under his mentor’s wing. “Old Wounds” distills that pattern down to an incident or two, giving us the acute feeling that we’re being rushed past important backstory. When Barbara says that “It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that,” the problem is that itwas the first time the audience saw Dick like that.

Another drum I hate to beat – but once more feel the unfortunate need to strike – is that the episode gets into very strange territory when it accidentally implies that Barbara Gordon transferred her attraction to Dick Grayson onto Bruce Wayne after the former left Gotham. You can’t say I’m reading into this because of what we’ve seen from the show thus far, and you equally can’t ignore the fact that this episode includes promising sequences of Dick and Babs on a dinner date, followed by a later scene in which he visits her apartment while she’s wearing her other nightwear. I say promising because it’s an age-appropriate gesture to the long history these two share in the comics, building on light continuity with the Sub-Zero movie that preceded the redesign. But the relationship is scrapped as quickly as it’s acknowledged, ending after Batgirl reveals her identity to Dick Grayson, in a scene that uncomfortably reads like Dick thinks Babs is cheating on him with Bruce.

The revelation that Batman has always already known that Barbara Gordon is Batgirl is a clever one (though The Lost Years included sequences of Batman’s process of deduction, noting how Barbara’s tennis moves matched Batgirl’s fighting style), and his compassionate admission takes some of the sting out of the fact that he’s generally an emotionless bastard for most of this episode (and the redesign writ large). Indeed, that whole sequence in the Batcave is note-perfect, from Barbara’s crimefighting gusto to Alfred’s confession that “Yes, I admit it, I am Batman.” It’s a glimpse at a perfectly functional Bat-family, but the rest of the episode, though, does not live up to the promise of that setpiece. Nor, unfortunately, can a single episode sustain the weight of anticipation that’s been building since The New Batman Adventures began.

Original Air Date: October 3, 1998

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: The Joker (Mark Hamill)

Next episode: “The Demon Within,” in which a witch boy and a demon demolish a bakery. 

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