Batman: The Animated Series - "The Forgotten"

“The police have their hands full. And homeless people disappearing is not big news.”

When the law fails a community of vagrants and disadvantaged who are disappearing from the darker corners of Gotham, it falls to Batman to investigate. His undercover work (which I can’t believe doesn’t involve him using the identity of Matches Malone this time) leads him into a trap, and an amnesiac Bruce Wayne awakens in a slave labor camp with no memory of who he is or how to get out.

Like a lot of these early episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, before the creators really find their feet, there’s some good stuff and some really dull stuff in “The Forgotten” (an apt title if ever there were one – I can’t say I’d ever remember to watch this if it weren’t on the same disc as “P.O.V.”). What’s really uninspiring is the villain, a slobbering caricature of a man whose motives are either unclear or really mundane; is this whole scheme really just about mining valuable ore? And how far out from Gotham are they? If it’s as far as it seems, why come all the way to Gotham to kidnap your labor force?

While the idea of an amnesiac Batman regaining his memory sounds like a really compelling storyline, the execution isn’t as on-point as we’ll see in episodes like “Perchance to Dream” further down the pike. This might be a spoiler to say so, but the fact that his real identity only comes to him in a series of dreams is decidedly uncinematic, and even then the dreams aren’t particularly subtle. (We do, however, get to hear Kevin Conroy’s version of a Joker laugh, which is good fun.)

That idea, though, is a really intriguing one, and it follows up on what’s been a nascent thread throughout these early episodes – in this interpretation, Bruce Wayne is the false identity, and Batman is the genuine article. There is a moment at the end where we see that Bruce Wayne uses his corporate alter ego as a tool for good, providing jobs to the disenfranchised, and this is usually the tack that Batman scribes have taken, that Wayne Enterprises exists to do the kind of legitimate good that Batman performs outside of his extra-legal activities. For the most part, though, BtAS has approached Batman as the core identity. Recall in “On Leather Wings,” his performance of the Bruce voice while in costume. Remember Bruce Wayne’s disengagement with the orphan Frog in “The Underdwellers.”

And speaking of “The Underdwellers” (which no one really ever does), it’s again Alfred who steals the show in a series of bizarre interludes which find the butler in pursuit of his employer while commandeering a remarkably sassy Bat-plane in the process. It’s shamelessly slapstick in an episode which doesn’t quite know what tone it wants to set for its primary antagonist, but it’s a real bright spot nonetheless sold by the surprising juxtaposition of a clownish Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., with the dry deadpan of Richard Moll’s turn as the Bat-Computer. Ordinarily we’d expect Alfred to be the voice of droll one-liners, so the inversion ends up being the best part of “The Forgotten.”

There’s a lot about this episode that feels very one-off, since we never see Boss Biggis, his slaves, or indeed the problem of homelessness in Gotham City again. Perhaps “The Forgotten” is best left precisely as its title intends.

Original Air Date: October 8, 1992

Writer: Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller, and Sean Catherine Derek

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: Boss Biggis (George Murdock)

Next episode: “Be A Clown,” in which The Joker disguises himself as a clown.

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