Batman: The Animated Series - "It's Never Too Late"

“I seen it. Like a dark angel snatching the guy from the fires of Hades, man.”

While the criminal empire of Arnold Stromwell (Eugene Roche) begins to collapse, the man who owned Gotham City faces the prospect of conceding his town to Rupert Thorne (John Vernon), even amid his suspicion that Thorne has kidnapped his son. It falls to Batman to turn Stromwell’s abdication to the cause of justice, in the hopes that Stromwell’s knowledge might prove useful in dissolving the mob’s hold on Gotham.

On the surface, this sounds like a fantastic episode, a worthy successor to the supervillain noir of last week’s phenomenal “Two-Face” two-parter. Having seen the destructive influence the mob had on Harvey Dent, we’re primed for an episode about the internecine conflicts within the mob, even as Batman: The Animated Series has always maintained a somewhat loose continuity between individual episodes. That is, the sequence of the episodes is somewhat less essential than the world they build, with any given episode standing more or less on its own while existing in the same world as the rest of the bunch.

A standalone episode, then, on the order of “It’s Never Too Late” ought to have been a microcosm of Gotham’s criminal underworld, a passing of the guard from Stromwell’s regime to Thorne. (Sidebar: how hilarious is it that the gray-haired Thorne is described as the “younger rival” on the criminal scene?) Instead of the Batman equivalent of Goodfellas, we have something much more in the vein of Angels With Dirty Faces meets A Christmas Carol, and Gotham City has certainly done better by Dickens than here (see, for one, the “Ghosts” comic by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, from Batman: Haunted Knight).

For one, there’s a tonal clash here between the gritty crime drama of the episode’s first half and its preachy morality play in the second, one that never really reconciles with the episode’s full potential. The idea of an eleventh-hour repentance spurred by the memory of a childhood trauma – one which involves a man who grows up to be a priest, no less – seems too maudlin by half, particularly in a show which has already demonstrated how comfortable it is with psychological complexity. The fact that we’ve never heard of Stromwell before – or since, for that matter – doesn’t aid the audience in rallying behind the urgency behind Batman’s quest to convert the criminal.

That’s maybe the worst part of this episode – Batman is reduced to a supporting character in a story that frankly doesn’t require him. The above quotation suggests that Batman is seen as a grim figure of vengeance, some hellish unforgiving beast loosed on the city’s seedy underbelly. Instead, he’s barely a guardian angel, standing near Stromwell and imploring him to repent like something closer to Frank Capra than Frank Miller. If Batman had lived up to the promise of that imagery and the, truthfully, badass moment when he beats a mobster with another mobster, I might be looking more forgivingly on this episode.

Director Boyd Kirkland does some interesting things with the imagery of light, juxtaposing a train’s lamp with squad cars and a little shadowplay against building walls, but a visual flourish isn’t enough to redeem an episode. I had said last week that I didn’t remember this episode at all, and now I know why. “It’s Never Too Late” is a little like a general anesthetic – you know something happened, and you have a vague sense of who was around, but you won’t remember much until you see the recording. Even then, it might actually be too late.

Original Air Date: September 10, 1992

Writer: Tom Ruegger & Garin Wolf

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: Rupert Thorne (John Vernon) & Arnold Stromwell (Eugene Roche)

Next episode: “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement,” in which Batman’s wings are clipped by a certain fowl foe.

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