“May heaven have mercy on your souls, Two-Face – both of them.”Gotham’s new vigilante, The Judge (Malachi Throne), takes a harder line on crime when he violently attacks The Penguin. Egged on by corrupt city councilman J. Carroll Corcoran (Steven Weber), The Judge works his way down a list of Gotham’s most wanted. While Two-Face (Richard Moll) scrambles to avoid facing the vigilante’s death sentence, Batman discovers that something far worse than a murderer lurks beneath The Judge’s robes. (Note: I’ll have to spoil the reveal below to discuss this episode fully.)
It’s a strange position to review “Judgment Day” as a series finale. It was the last episode produced but not the last one to air – that honor belongs to the masterful “Mad Love.” I’ve never been clear on how quickly the creators had to change course, though in Vulture’s oral history Bruce Timm suggests a fairly quick turnaround between The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond. (In that same history, Paul Dini notes, “we could have gone another two or three years on just Batman stories alone, because we also liked where we were taking the relationships.” If only!) So it seems partially fair to treat “Judgment Day” like a series finale, but we also have to acknowledge that it was more of a full stop than a proper conclusion.
As a finale, “Judgment Day” ties a bow on one of the animated programs’ longest running arcs – the fragile sanity of Harvey Dent, who debuted in the show’s fifth episode before the series’s first two-part episode depicted his fall from grace in an accident that scarred him physically and shattered him mentally. It’s both perplexing and fitting, then, that this episode introduces a third personality – that of The Judge – to accompany Harvey Dent and Two-Face (the erstwhile “Big Bad Harv”). Giving Two-Face a third personality is perhaps a bridge too far for a villain so obsessed with doubles and duality, but it compounds the tragedy of Harvey Dent and doubles-down, so to speak, on this Batman’s first and perhaps only great failure. Batman’s concluding monologue, reminiscent of a similar closing speech from Psycho, is perhaps a little too pat in explaining the narrative twist, and another pass might have helped draw out the long connection Batman and Two-Face, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, have shared.
When Councilman Corcoran volunteers to help The Judge, he does so by observing, “I figure if Gordon can have his hero, why can’t I have mine?” This comparison is a fascinating one, and it’s something that, in another world, might have made for an excellent two-parter or even a season-long subplot. Positing The Judge – and, by extension, Two-Face – as Batman’s dark opposite number raises fascinating questions about which lines are important for Gotham’s vigilantes to draw, and the fact that only Corcoran notices is a bit disappointing. Along the same vein, The New Batman Adventures has prided itself on deepening the Bat-bench with Nightwing, a new Robin, and an expanded role for Batgirl, yet none of the Bat-family appears, save for a brief Alfred cameo. Batman himself doesn’t appear for nearly seven minutes while The Judge makes the rounds with Gotham’s villains. It’s a treat, to be sure, to see many of these foes again, even if Killer Croc isn’t voiced by Aron Kincaid, or if The Riddler is relegated to a news clip in his only non-hallucination appearance on TNBA. But one can’t help but feel this episode might have been fuller had someone other than Batman had a word about The Judge – especially Tim Drake, on whom Two-Face had a rather significant impact back in “Sins of the Father.”
On one point of order, “Judgment Day” is a striking series finale because of the way it invokes one of the animated project’s finest hours. Between his swooping robes, booming voice, and operatic score, it cannot be an accident that The Judge is extremely evocative of The Phantasm, the eponymous antagonist of Batman’s first and best animated film – to say nothing of the fact that Alan Burnett wrote both this episode and Phantasm’s story. Harley Quinn certainly looms largest among the pantheon of original animated creations, but there has always been something primal about The Phantasm, who never quite made the jump to the comics the way Harley did. (The Phantasm would resurface in an episode of Justice League Unlimited and a few Batman Beyond comics; when I met the writer of those comics, he speculated that the rights might have been handled differently at the time since Phantasm was released theatrically.) Nevertheless, The Phantasm has become a kind of hypostatic metaphor for the entire Batman animated project – an example of its fine visual flair, its ingenious creative writing, and its gut-level “cool” factor.
Moreover, The Phantasm represents the key conceit that Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures always kept in mind: no matter how relentlessly cool his villains might be, Batman is the star of his own show, and every well-crafted story has to feed into exploring his specific psyche, his need for justice, and the personal connection he shares with his enemies –many of whom he may have had an accidental hand in creating. It’s also always been about the belief that one man can make a difference, that the city is a better place for this one figure standing between it and total lawlessness. We see it with The Phantasm, with Simon Trent and the redemption of his soul, even with Harley Quinn and her loony halfhearted reforms. And we see it with Harvey Dent, on whom Batman has never given up. This episode works very well as a thematic sequel to “Second Chance,” in which Harvey Dent found himself abducted by a Two-Face unwilling to accept that his better half might genuinely express contrition for his crimes. Back then, I wrote words that sum up my overall sense of the Batman animated project, words on which it may be wise to end:
We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.
Writers: Rich Fogel and Alan Burnett
Director: Curt Geda
Villains: The Judge (Malachi Throne), Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner), and The Riddler (John Glover)
Next episode: “The Lost Episode,” in which everything old is new again.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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