Batman: The Animated Series - "Dreams in Darkness"

“‘There’s always time to heal,’ the doctor told me, but he was wrong. There was no time left. Not for me, not for him, and not for Gotham City.”

Batman finds himself incarcerated in Arkham Asylum in this noir-narrated episode. Exposed to Scarecrow’s fear toxin, Batman grapples with his own sanity while trying to convince a well-meaning dunderhead of a doctor both that he’s compos mentis and that the clock is ticking on Scarecrow’s latest scheme. But has Batman finally snapped? After all, the good doctor knows that The Scarecrow hasn’t left Arkham...

“Dreams in Darkness” is the third appearance of The Scarecrow, but it’s the first one where I felt that Batman: The Animated Series really made him a compelling adversary for Batman. (Tragically, it’s also his last major appearance until The New Batman Adventures.) In the past, I’ve lamented the way that series reduced Scarecrow to the level of a common criminal who uses his remarkable intellect and terrifying chemical abilities to grab up some cash and maybe squeeze in a bit of revenge on the side. Here, though, writers Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens remember that Scarecrow is also the noted academic psychologist Jonathan Crane, and so his big scheme this time around is to douse Gotham City with fear toxin in order to study its effects. What I love about this plot is that it’s finally a Scarecrow-specific story, one into which you can’t readily swap another villain, with an endgame that only makes sense for The Scarecrow. (Imagine: The Riddler bombards Gotham with questions to see how they’ll react? Two-Face sends every citizen a silver dollar to test the city’s odds?)

This episode introduces a feature that is somewhat unique in the world of Batman: The Animated Series – voiceover narration. I mentioned above that it feels noir-esque to have Batman narrate an episode, especially one with a mysterious hook like “Batman’s locked up in Arkham.” (“I’ve Got Batman in my Arkham”?) However cool Kevin Conroy’s foreboding voiceover can be, though, it does undercut the initial mystery of Batman’s sanity; that is, despite what we see on screen, we’ve got a Batman in our ear telling us that all is not what it seems. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I know that I may be asking for a bit more psychological sophistication than possible from what is at the end of the day a children’s cartoon, but we’re two episodes away from “Perchance to Dream,” which is one of the show’s finest (half-)hours and delves into very similar themes with less willingness to hold the audience’s hand through the valleys of Batman’s psyche.

Appropriately, this is the second Scarecrow episode that takes Batman into the bowels of Arkham, and the idea that Batman’s nightly quest for justice might have broken him – even if the episode never takes it seriously – is a fascinating one, and I greatly appreciate that Arkham psychiatrist Dr. Bartholomew (Richard Dysart) isn’t an opportunistic glory hound out to make a name for himself. Instead, he’s genuinely saddened by Batman’s apparent fall from sanity and has the utmost faith in his institution’s curative properties. Unfortunately for Dr. Bartholomew, he’s an employee at Arkham Asylum, which renders laughable his straight-faced protestations that no villain could have possibly escaped. (Light spoilers: then again, Scarecrow hasn’t technically escaped Arkham, with a plot point that feels as if Batman Begins might have sat up and taken notice.)

Where “Fear of Victory” featured a memorable moment of Batman pacing the halls of Arkham, the leering faces of his foes following his every footfall, “Dreams in Darkness” moves those figures into a nightmarish sequence in which Batman is confronted by funhouse mirror incarnations of his foes, his friends, his parents, and the gun that changed his life that one fateful night. While Batman: The Animated Series has always been a little gun-shy (no pun intended) about the particular circumstances of Batman’s origin, gesturing obliquely and sporadically toward jigsaw pieces of the whole puzzle, it’s intriguing that this episode hangs its climax on the things that Batman fears the most. Strikingly, though, losing his identity as Batman is never on that list.

Original Air Date: November 3, 1992

Writers: Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Director: Dick Sebast

Villains: The Scarecrow (Henry Polic II)

Next episode: “Eternal Youth,” in which Alfred finds a lady-friend who can’t see the forest for the trees.

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