“They’re finny and funny and oh so delish / They’re joyful and jolly Jokerfish!”The Joker’s latest scheme unfolds when a trawler brings in a catch of fish bearing the Clown Prince of Crime’s patented grin, which The Joker promptly attempts to copyright. But when he’s told that copyrights don’t apply to natural resources, his fury knows no bounds, and Batman has to protect a string of patent agents until Joker can be found.
Any time you see an episode written by Paul Dini and/or directed by Bruce Timm, it’s usually a pretty safe bet that you’re in for a winner, and “The Laughing Fish” does not disappoint. In fact, it’s a little tough to review “The Laughing Fish” without just throwing my hands up and saying, “Great job, guys.” This episode is engagingly scripted, and the direction is on point for a fast-paced episode. Some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series leave you wanting more, perhaps with the hope that they’d been two-part episodes, but that’s certainly true of “The Laughing Fish” – I could watch an entire season revolving around The Joker’s giddy absence of logic and Batman’s struggle to keep up.
Dini’s script, as in the best they do, draws on classic comics, including some of Joker’s most memorable appearances. There’s “The Laughing Fish” itself (an Englehart/Rogers classic that every Bat-fan needs to read and own), the climactic shark tank from “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” (by O’Neill and Adams, the team that would give us Ra’s al Ghul), and even a plot structure from Joker’s first appearance way back in Batman #1, in which he threatened his victims on television before murdering them, daring Batman to stop him first. If that sounds ticklingly familiar, it’s the skeleton of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, as well. The Joker is at his terrifying best when he’s working from a playbook that makes sense only to himself. As ever, Mark Hamill is definitive as the sinister jester, with his infectious laugh and spot-on mannerisms proving just why this particular ghoul is Batman’s greatest adversary. (I have yet to watch a Joker episode where that laugh doesn’t carry over to my own giggles of glee. It was, you may recall, the first good thing about The Killing Joke.)
And then there’s Harley Quinn, and for this to be only her second episode, it’s remarkable how fully-formed she is. In “Joker’s Favor,” she was something of a visual gag, a harlequin-themed henchgirl with a New Jersey accent straight out of Goodfellas; here, though, she’s alternately head-over-heels in love with her “Mistah J” while also being the only one in the plot to call him out for his mad deviance. “You’re really sick, you know that, boss?” she asks after becoming the involuntary punchline to one of The Joker’s sadistic gags. The Joker’s henchmen have always been more than a little expendable, often finding themselves on the wrong end of their boss’s oversized handguns, but Harley’s already the only one who stands up to him, even if she’s by his side at the end of the day. Last episode was a spotlight on Robin and how he makes Batman a stronger character, and we can think of Harley as serving a comparable function for The Joker, clarifying his grim nature with her bubbly persona.
One of the surprise delights of going back through BtAS, which I’ve done more times than I can count, is seeing what a treat Harvey Bullock can be. Maybe it’s just seeing what Donal Logue has done with the character over on Gotham ("What's altruism?!"), but I’m hyper-attuned to how this show portrays Bullock as a gruff but capable figure with a moral shade of gray that gets the job done by any means necessary while repudiating Batman for the same. He’s a gently incompetent cop for whom we nevertheless end up rooting, and kudos to Robert Costanzo for giving Bullock an emotional center even when he snarls his preferred nickname, “Bats.”
“The Laughing Fish” is pretty airtight as episodes go, and it’s a wonderful case study for how this show has treated The Joker (and indeed most of its villains in their stronger appearances). It’s an episode that only works with The Joker because of how daftly bonkers it is, yet for all its absurdism it never loses that sense of weight that the best episodes contain. In short, it continues to cement Dini’s rightful place as one of the top Bat-scribes of the last twenty-five years.
Writer: Paul Dini
Director: Bruce Timm
Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)
Next episode: “Night of the Ninja,” in which the thing I never liked about Daredevil comes to Gotham.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
No comments:
Post a Comment