Those “top ten,” though, were notable for their significant exclusions. Not only did they not contain the unequivocal best two episodes of the series, the list altogether lacked the work of Paul Dini, arguably the show’s greatest writer, a man who fully understands Batman and his world, who can craft tales therein unlike nearly anyone else. (And for those keeping score, eight of these ten are Joker episodes or at least Joker-adjacent.) There’s a reason the DC Animated Universe is sometimes called “the Diniverse,” so important was one man’s vision to the success of the whole shared playground.
For this reason, then, we conclude our tripartite postmortem with “The Top 10 Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (As Written by Paul Dini)!”
Paul Dini’s love affair with Zatanna extends to marrying a professional magician, and he’s able to funnel that passion into an episode that introduces DC’s premier prestidigitator with infectious enthusiasm. Though neither Zatanna nor her father became the recurring guest stars they could have been, this episode includes a fascinating flashback into the ways that Bruce Wayne learned to incorporate stage magic into his nightly war on crime.
This episode makes the list if only for the unforgettable fact – which only gets funnier each time I think about it – that the doors of Arkham Asylum are quite literally not locked. The rest of the episode lives up to that absurdist gag, as The Joker pursues a greedy hotelier who’s aped his image for a new casino. One senses that Dini would have been just at home working on Joker: The Animated Series.
... and if he couldn’t get a Joker standalone, Paul Dini could have written the dickens out of a Harley Quinn series, as evidenced by this, the third of a stellar trilogy of Harley-centric episodes tracking her efforts to reform and play on the right side of the law. It may be Harley’s last episode, but it won’t be her last appearance on this list.
In some ways, this episode serves as a trial run for #3 on this list, as a deep dive into Gotham’s underworld and the acute terror evoked by the presence of The Joker. Ed Begley Jr.’s guest role as clammy accountant Charlie Collins is a fine example o the first-rate voice talent this show could recruit, even for bit parts (lest we forget, Mark Hamill played the smarmy Ferris Boyle before taking on the role of The Joker). As with most Dini episodes, this one’s got a doozy of a punchline, and its historical value for introducing Harley Quinn ought not go unacknowledged.
As we round the corner toward the Top Five of this list, the gaps between the rankings is increasingly narrow, and we enter into the territory of the perfect episode. While the show introduced Harley Quinn in “Joker’s Favor,” it redefined her in this episode by pairing her with Poison Ivy as an ersatz mother figure. You’d be forgiven for forgetting Batman is even in this issue – I certainly did!
Some of the best episodes of BtAS should have been two-parters, but in the case of “Trial,” I’d have loved to have seen it as the direct-to-video feature film it was intended to be. The episode behaves like a best-of reel, with each of the show’s unforgettable characters saying their piece about Batman, but it goes beyond resting on its laurels to say something profoundly touching about the very nature of Batman.
Where “Harley’s Holiday” saw her try to go straight after an inexplicable pardon, here’s a stronger take on that plot in which Batman drafts Harley to stop The Joker from nuking Gotham City. You’re never quite sure where Harley’s allegiance lies, but playing her against the straightfaced Batman as the embodiment of anarchy is a stroke of genius.
“The episode reaches a crescendo with Joker’s ersatz funeral for the dearly departed Dark Knight, a two-minute tour de force through all the power of Dini’s alliterative prose wedded to Hamill’s wild oscillation between blind fury and dark comedy.”
When I want to hook someone on this show, I present this episode (or any of the Top Three) as a case study in how smart the writing of the show can be. Case in point: Batman barely appears in this episode, but the episode is so engaging that you don’t even have time to think about the fact that Batman surely isn’t dead. His ostensible funeral, though, is as fine a sendoff as Hamill’s Joker can provide, and it’s worth the price of admission just to hear Joker’s eulogy.
It’s a breezy episode, and on any other show it’d be handily best in show. Like a condensed crystalline “Trial,” it’s four of a kind as Batman’s finest villains swap stories of close encounters. There are so many gems in this episode, so much good giddy fun, that Dini never strikes a false note; it’s a fine example of finer writing beyond the narrow box of “good Batman stories.” It’s a great story, full stop.
It should come as no surprise – I called it back in March 2017 – but “Heart of Ice” is a phenomenal episode that does more in twenty minutes than many franchises manage across years of storytelling. Dini rescued the aimless Mr. Freeze from comic book limbo (literally, if Grant Morrison’s Animal Man is to be believed), gave him a new and definitive origin, and managed to tell a bang-up Batman story in the process as the Caped Crusader faces a nasty head cold. It’s not just Paul Dini’s best work on the show; it’s the best work of the entire run.
We’ll revisit these lists in twenty-four weeks to see how The New Batman Adventures can shake up the calculus. Next week, though, we resume our regularly-scheduled program with “Holiday Knights,” in which the cray-cray go shopping, the gooey go shoplifiting, and we ring in a new year with a smile.
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