“We are speaking of the same person, are we not? Harvey
Bullock? The detective who looks like an unmade bed?”Harvey Bullock (Robert Costanzo) is no one’s favorite police detective, but one night he’s attacked in a drive-by shooting. Shaken but no worse for the wear, Bullock recruits Batman to help him identify his would-be assassin. Batman mounts a parallel investigation, but there’s no shortage of suspects – abuse from Bullock is in ample supply, including to those who would help him find the killer.
The word I keep reusing with this show is “solid.” “A Bullet for Bullock” is just one more solid episode in a show populated with winners; it doesn’t misstep, it does something new and interesting, and it proves to be roundly entertaining. Best of all, it does that quintessentially BtAS thing of turning its attention to a supporting character – Harvey Bullock – and makes him the star of an episode that makes the best use of him. He’s been at the periphery of the show, interjecting a snide remark or chomping a donut, but we get to see a little bit more of Bullock and how he ticks.
Like last week’s “Sideshow,” this episode is very much a thematic sequel to “Vendetta,” which saw Bullock framed for witness intimidation and explored his particular brand of extralegal behavior. Here, we see the consequences of Bullock’s prickly style; so numerous are the people he’s crossed that it’s literally impossible to predict which one might want to kill him. (If we hadn’t just seen Killer Croc in chains, he’d be a likely suspect.) The episode’s punchline – like the rest of the episode, adapted wholesale from Chuck Dixon’s Detective Comics #651 – nails the point about Bullock’s casual cruelty, but there remains something infectiously lovable about this crotchety cop.
When we talk about the score of Batman: The Animated Series, we usually talk about the genius opening sequence or mention how often the show invokes Danny Elfman’s theme from 1989. But the show has, even if I haven’t always acknowledged it, done really great things with its musical orchestration. From its opening moments, this episode has one of the snappiest scores in the show’s florid history. “A Bullet for Bullock” leans hard into the jazzy wails of archetypal detective stories. It’s an interesting musical approach to Bullock – who, as Alfred so aptly puts it, “looks like an unmade bed” – and it reminds one rather of the nightclub music from “Almost Got ’Im,” with Harvey R. Cohen filling in for series regular Shirley Walker on composing duties. In particular, there’s a standout moment when the main theme is remastered into a jazz-action cue that is well-suited to the moment when Bullock and Batman team up to clear a warehouse of its thugs (one of whom looks suspiciously like Lee Marvin).
We’ve seen throughout this show a slew of episodes – often among the best – devoted to Batman’s supporting cast, contextualizing what they mean to our main character and showing us what the world looks like from their vantage point. “I Am The Night” showed us what a Gotham without Gordon might look like, while way back in “P.O.V.” we saw how the police force perceived the Dark Knight. Even “The Man Who Killed Batman” ended up being as much about why The Joker personally needs a Batman as it was about the putz who thought he’d offed the Bat. Bullock’s partner Renee Montoya pops in for a few moments, and the curious friendship these two opposites have developed makes me wish that we’d gotten a Montoya-centric episode. It almost makes me wish we’d gotten a whole series about how Gotham behaves with a Batman in it. As it stands, one-and-done episodes like this one remind us how fully-realized this cartoon’s universe was, and it serves as a fine reminder of what the show can do.
Writer: Michael Reaves
Director: Frank Paur
Villains: Vincent Starkey (Gregg Berger) and Nivens (Jeffrey Jones)
Next episode: “Trial,” in which Batman finds himself on the wrong end of a kangaroo court.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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