It’s poker night in Gotham City, and gathered around the table are those rogues who’ve managed to evade capture – The Joker’s dealing, with Poison Ivy joining Two-Face, Killer Croc, and the Penguin. Between hands of cards, each villain shares an “almost got ’im” story about how Batman slipped through their deathtraps. Joker saves the best – his own – for last, but he’ll be surprised to learn who’s holding the winning hand when the night is up.
“Almost Got ’Im” is handily the second greatest episode of the show (between this and “Mad Love,” at least, it’s a dead heat), and one can almost hear Paul Dini crack his knuckles over the title card, getting ready to show us how it’s done. “Almost Got ’Im” is full of sizzling dialogue, with recognizable giddiness emanating from Dini’s typewriter. “I find your petty machinations mildly diverting,” Penguin interjects at one point, “but for sheer criminal genius, none surpasses my latest ornothologically-inspired entoilment.” Dini takes Penguin’s self-aggrandizing sophistication to the nth degree, feeding the patrician Penguin a thesaurus to console him over his losses against Batman. Of course, the episode has also been remembered as the source of Killer Croc’s famously proud declaration, “I threw a rock at him!” and the many layers on which that joke operates are a testament to Dini’s creative dexterity.
“Almost Got ’Im” masterfully mashes up everything that works about Batman: The Animated Series, putting the show into an anthology format similar to “P.O.V.” (BtAS would go this route at least twice more, with “Holiday Knights” and “Legends of the Dark Knight,” the latter an homage to previous interpretations of Batman, while the former stands as a Christmas tradition for all respectable households.) Here, Dini takes these individual segments to give us the third acts of episodes we didn’t get to see – Poison Ivy’s Halloween bombing spree, Two-Face’s $2 million heist, and Penguin’s aviary of doom – and they’re great moments of storytelling because they juxtapose each villain’s idiosyncrasies with Batman’s (largely silent) relentless pursuit of justice.
As most Dini episodes do, “Almost Got ’Im” ends up becoming a Joker episode, and it’s mad alchemy when Dini and Mark Hamill get together under these circumstances. From Joker’s stint as a talk show host – “Living proof that you don’t have to be crazy to host this show, but it helps!” – to his perpetual cheating at cards, right down to the zany perfection of every giggle and guffaw, “Almost Got ’Im” bottles the anything-goes unpredictability of The Joker and rides it into a topsy-turvy sunset where villains are heroes, heroes are villains, and the phone book is the funniest thing around. As “the man who puts a smile on your face whether you want it or not,” Hamill’s Joker is irrepressible, darkly comedic in a way that’s both infectiously funny and downright uncomfortable (as in the best he ought to be), and watching this episode on Hamill’s birthday felt like a special way to pay tribute to the definitive screen Joker.
And speaking of definitive, can we take a moment to acknowledge that this is far and away the best Catwoman episode? Dini dispenses with all that animal rights activism and lycanthropic claptrap, instead portraying Catwoman as a seductive partner to Batman, just shy of the right side of the law. Her chief contributions to the episode include rescuing Batman and coyly flirting with him on a rooftop – the latter of which is surprisingly reciprocated, as only Batman can, with a terse but emotionally loaded “Maybe.” It’s wise of Dini to dismiss what had been done with/to Catwoman up to this point, and it’s notable that much of where Catwoman has been in the last twenty-five years is neatly encapsulated in this sequence. (Hush and Tom King’s current interpretation of Catwoman, I’ll argue, owe much to this scene.)
Before watching this episode for the umpteenth time, I was musing about the villains who didn’t make the cut, but I quickly realized that Dini carefully constructed his cast of characters such that any other villain wouldn’t fit; it is, to push the pun, a perfect hand. The Riddler would have been too smart for the crowd and would have seen through Batman’s trap quite quickly; conversely, Clayface would have overlapped with Killer Croc’s less than cerebral nature. Mr. Freeze hardly seems the sort to play cards, while I’d forgotten entirely that Mad Hatter’s off-screen capture is the inciting action here. (We haven’t met Ra’s al Ghul yet; see “Mr. Freeze” above.) No, Dini’s done it well; The Joker is a natural for the dealer, and Penguin’s a perfect foil for the dimwitted Croc; moreover, it’s a real continuity tickler to see Two-Face and Poison Ivy on-screen together given their tumultuous romantic history from her debut (and Dini’s), “Pretty Poison.” The union of Batman villains in “The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne” felt almost obligatory and perfunctory compared to the smart craft Dini shows here.
Usually when I come across an episode this good, I struggle to find something to say beyond “Great episode, go watch it.” But I could go on about “Almost Got ’Im” for hours. Maybe it’ll be the inaugural edition of “Two @ a Time,” a theoretical feature which dissects cartoons two minutes at a time. There’s so much genius at play in this episode – the visual revelation of Batman’s place in the Stacked Deck bar, the decision to play Joker’s story in black-and-white – that we could be here all day. “Heart of Ice” may be the show’s finest hour, but “Almost Got ’Im” is easily the most fun, a veritable playground for the rogues gallery.
Writer: Paul Dini
Director: Eric Radomski
Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill), Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), Two-Face (Richard Moll), Killer Croc (Aron Kincaid), The Penguin (Paul Williams), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), and Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau)
Next episode: “Birds of a Feather,” in which a fowl fiend flies straight, finds love, and learns a cruel lesson.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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