Batman: The Animated Series - "Vendetta"

“Look, Harvey Bullock is hard to work with. Even harder than I’d like, but he's a good cop, Batman. He’s clean!”

Things don’t look good for Harvey Bullock (Robert Costanzo). Several low-level convicts, set to testify against Bullock in a graft corruption case, have vanished. But Batman smells a rat – a giant man-sized crocodile of a rat, the sewer dweller known as Killer Croc (Aron Kincaid).

I think Bullock sums up this episode best when he says, “Not a bad piece of work.” I’ve never been especially enamored of Killer Croc, nor does he leave me cold. But I can honestly say I’ve never been ecstatic when I discover that I’m reading a Batman story that has Killer Croc in it. Maybe it’s just that Killer Croc has never had a “Heart of Ice” story that defines the character in an incredibly moving and effective way, and as ostensible origins go “Vendetta” is no “Heart of Ice.” Then again, that’s an incredibly unfair bar to set, and “Vendetta” certainly doesn’t do anything wrong. Put another way, it’s not a bad piece of work.

Maybe more than Killer Croc, this episode got me pretty invested in Harvey Bullock and his place in the Gotham City police department. As far back as “On Leather Wings” and “POV,” we’ve seen that Bullock is none too keen on Batman, but that’s been lost in the shuffle of late as the writers have instead opted to treat him like a donut-munching buffoon, a punching bag of a punch line to counter the more competent efforts of Renee Montoya. But with “Vendetta,” writer Michael Reaves – he who will co-write Mask of the Phantasm, for interest’s sake – returns to the gruff exterior, Bat-disdain, and do-it-myself attitude that define Bullock. In a way, it’s his “Heart of Ice.” And Robert Costanzo is a fine presence as Bullock, one of the more underrated but nevertheless definitive performances Batman: The Animated Series frequently gave us.

Speaking of buffoonish, though, it’s interesting to see just how capable Killer Croc is portrayed to be in this episode. I say that because devotees of the show likely remember Killer Croc for six words (which, if we’re being nitpicky, he never actually spoke) from an episode down the road, “Almost Got ’Im” – “I threw a rock at him!” But aside from that moment, I do recall that the show portrays Killer Croc as increasingly tragic and doltish (the former often the consequence of the latter), and so it’s refreshing to see him as clever enough to hatch a scheme like this one, with a method and motive that are actually quite sophisticated and very nearly work.

I often feel I don’t talk about the visuals enough in this review series, but there are a number of arresting frames in this episode, a good number of them having to do with eyes. There’s one scene with Bullock in the shadows where it’s not initially clear whether it’s Bullock, Batman impersonating Bullock, or Killer Croc impersonating Bullock. The voice starts to clue us in that it’s not Bullock, but the eyes aren’t the dead giveaway you’d expect. And speaking of eyes, Batman deploys a gadget which requires his eyes to use a red filter that gives him a distinctly cyborgian appearance, while the breathing mask he dons recalls the visual design of The Phantasm. Finally, there are a few shots of lightning illuminating a silhouetted figure that really just take my breath away. They don’t amount to major elements of the episode, but these are standout visuals that remind the viewer how impressive Batman: The Animated Series can be on a technical level.

Sidebar: “Vendetta” does make me wonder if the abysmal early episode “The Underdwellers” might have been better served as a Killer Croc episode. The Sewer King was underwhelming at best and mystifying at worst, and I can’t help but feel that the episode would have gone into much more interesting territory with Killer Croc, who could have lent ambiguity to whether the underdwellers were abducted or actually ran away from a surface world that scorned them. We would have lost the righteous wrath of Batman, but we would have gained a better Killer Croc story and a better episode overall with a little more depth than the Sewer King could offer.

Original Air Date: October 5, 1992

Writer: Michael Reaves

Director: Frank Paur

Villains: Killer Croc (Aron Kincaid) and Rupert Thorne (John Vernon)

Next episode: “Fear of Victory,” in which the Boy Wonder is shown fear in a handful of football games.

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