“Hey, you’re the expert on burning people, you little tramp. And if you think I’m going to step aside like one of your pretty boys—”Bruce Wayne is in the front row of a Cassidy concert when the singer (Karla DeVito) is attacked by her jilted pyrotechnician Garfield Lynns (Mark Rolston). Lynns’s obsession runs deep, driving him into pyromania as Gotham’s latest rogue, Firefly. Batman and Batgirl shadow Cassidy, fearing that her old flame will turn up the heat on his pursuit.
For those playing the home game, this is the tenth episode of twenty-four on The New Batman Adventures, but it’s only the first time that the show has introduced a new villain from the comics, instead revisiting familiar faces from Batman: The Animated Series. (Next week, we’ll meet a villain created, mostly, for the show. Stay tuned!) I’ve lost count, however, on the different iterations of Firefly that have existed since his debut in 1952; Wikipedia tells me three, but that seems low, even just considering his variable appearances in video games and television shows. Indeed, I’d hazard an unsubstantiated guess that Firefly has had more costume changes than most other Bat-rogues (aside, perhaps, from Two-Face, who can rock a mean half-tartan when he needs).
Here, Firefly has a pretty slick look, encased in silver with giant red bug-eyes. With his sleek wings sweeping behind his back and a subtle antenna atop his head, he almost looks like a twisted inversion of Batman – which is always good territory for a villain to inhabit. In fact, can we take a moment to acknowledge how good this episode looks overall? As much as fans tend to dunk on TNBA for its stripped-down animation style, this is one of the better episodes, visually speaking; it’s set almost entirely at night, so the blacks and reds really pop. What’s more, the fire sequences are pretty intense, often stripping away the colors to give everything a sepia tone, giving Batman a real otherworldly appearance (another Bat-plus). Finally, we also get a new Batsuit, a flame-retardant black number that looks so crisply toyetic that I’d swear I had this in my box of action figures. (Merchandise spotlight: It seems, however, that one was made only recently.)
In terms of the narrative, I was more than a little surprised at how topical this episode is. I was struck, recall, at the vaguely Trumpean analogues in “Lock-Up” (the last time, incidentally, the show debuted a villain into its repertoire), but here Firefly presents as the poster villain for the #MeToo era, a hulking he-man who won’t take “no” for an answer, treats women as objects to be ogled and possessed, and will pursue Cassidy even if it means quite literally burning the entire city to the ground. He is weirdly fixated on the way she dresses and alternates manically between wanting to kill her and trying to abduct her. He’s not a foaming caricature, but this episode manages to take a costume that is slightly derpy and turn it into something rather terrifying when we consider the motives and mindset of the man inside the suit.
However, “Torch Song” shoots itself in the foot by – and I know I sound like a broken record here – weaving in what appears to be romantic jealousy leavened in the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon. Perhaps this is just a natural outgrowth of living in a post-Killing Joke world, but there’s something less than innocent in the moments Bruce and Barbara share at the concert, where she’s almost put out that he’s with another woman – and where he seems to long to be with her instead. (Never mind his condescending “Good girl!” when Batgirl initially saves Cassidy.) And if you think I’m reading too much into this, consider the moment when Bruce asks Barbara, in an unnecessarily flirtatious line-reading from Kevin Conroy, “What are you doing tonight?” Barbara fobs it off with a rather clever reference to Pinky and the Brain – “Same thing we do every night, Pinky” – but I can’t be the only one in the room who reads their dynamic duet as something shellacked over with amorous intent. It makes me want to vomit.
I’m also unclear why the episode ends with a sadistic epilogue that seems to punish Cassidy, of all people. In a coda that feels largely plagiarized from Stephen King’s Misery (or, at least, the Rob Reiner film version from 1990), we see that Cassidy is unable to carry on with a normal life because her encounters with Firefly have virtually crippled her with pyrophobia. As compelling as the episode’s rejection of toxic masculinity began, it’s a bizarre (if sadly plausible) finale to see the woman bearing the sole emotional pain of the story. One could imagine instead the grim irony of learning that Firefly has been covered in burn scars, or that he’s fixated by a flickering candle just out of reach. Or maybe he teams up with Killer Moth and the two of them just fly into a giant light bulb. Put another way, of all the people on whom the episode could have the last laugh, why choose the victim?
I’m relitigating, however, two of about twenty minutes in an otherwise solid episode. Just when it seemed that the show was satisfied to retread its own content, revisiting ground it had already paved, “Torch Song” is a different kind of return to form – a classical story introducing a new villain with a believable (if broadly unsympathetic) motivation. It’s a good opportunity for the animators to strut their stuff, and – romance aside – it continues the good trend of Batman and Batgirl as mature crime-fighting partners. We could ask for little more from a solid middle-of-the-road episode.
Writer: Rich Fogel
Director: Curt Geda
Villain: Firefly (Mark Rolston)
Next episode: “The Ultimate Thrill,” in which it’s neither a bird nor a plane, but she is a new Bat-villain.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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