“When the muscle starts thinkin’ it’s the brains, then it’s time ta amputate!”Arnold Wesker (George Dzundza) has been cured of his Scarface persona, and after six months without an episode he’s released from Arkham Asylum. His rehabilitation is going well until he starts to hear that familiar voice again, even as his old gang pressures him to lead them once more. Desperate never to become the Ventriloquist again, Wesker tells himself it’s all in his head – until the dummy calls him up on the phone and eludes a pursuing Batman.
Batman: The Animated Series frequently, though not exclusively, lived or died on the strength of its villain, and the same is widely true for The New Batman Adventures. Last week, I lamented that the series was leaning on the trope of “bad guy wants to destroy the city.” There’s only so much emotional investment to be wrung from seeing the same third act over and over again, and so with “Double Talk” it’s almost as though the show was listening to me, bringing back one of my favorite underrated villains in the process. “Double Talk” takes a deep dive into the psyche of The Ventriloquist amid a very compelling rehabilitation arc.
In a way, “Double Talk” reminds one of “Harley’s Holiday,” in which Harley Quinn’s furlough from Arkham Asylum went awry after she lost her temper and fell into an escalating series of misunderstandings, spiraling toward madness. Here, Arnold Wesker faces a Gotham that doesn’t believe he can reform, even as he himself remains uncertain that he’s mentally sound enough to be on his own. There’s a wonderful aura in this episode, as if Hitchcock directed an episode of The Twilight Zone, where the audience is kept in suspense as the episode draws out its main question. Has Scarface come to life, or is it all in Arnold’s head? Or is it something else altogether? I won’t spoil it here, but I’ll say that “Double Talk” plays with this question in interesting ways, even leaving a little room for interpretation.
We also get to see an underappreciated side of Bruce Wayne in this episode as we learn that he’s practically bankrolling Wesker’s rehabilitation; Wesker is staying at a Wayne-sponsored halfway house, and he’s in a work program at the mailroom of Wayne Enterprises. Bruce even greets him by name and shakes his hand, proof positive that Batman is invested in saving his city through more methods than just vigilantism. I don’t get the feeling, however, that he’s keeping Wesker nearby in case of recidivism; I think he’s genuinely invested in seeing a mentally ill criminal find inner peace. But he’s equally deft with the over-the-shoulder punch perfected by Michael Keaton in Batman ’89, which he whips out in a real crowd-pleaser of a moment.
Even as the episode revolves around whether or not Wesker can truly be free of the Scarface aspect of his personality, “Double Talk” plays it coy about how independent Scarface truly is. The episode is empirically clear about how the Scarface dummy manages to walk independently (and it involves, surprisingly enough, a guest role by none other than Billy Barty), but like their debut in “Read My Lips,” The Ventriloquist and Scarface seem to have a give-and-take relationship as to who is the more powerful, the more real personality. This is, alas, the final Ventriloquist episode, giving him a pretty good trilogy and concluding his story in a refreshingly optimistic way. It’s the kind of optimism that needs to remain at the core of Batman – that one good man can make a difference, that evil (even the evil within us) doesn’t have to win.
Writer: Robert Goodman
Director: Curt Geda
Villain: Scarface and The Ventriloquist (George Dzundza)
Next episode: “You Scratch My Back,” in which a cat seizes the night(wing).
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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