What They Say:
Bruce Wayne loses his memory after being kidnapped while working undercover.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As we talked about with the last episode, coming up with original villains is not easy since they’re one-time use things. The episodic nature of the series, with a few two-part stories here and there, means everything is self-contained and there aren’t a lot of callbacks to previous episodes. That makes it accessible to anyone just tuning in when it was being aired, which you wanted because serialized TV and especially in animation wasn’t a huge thing even in the early ‘90s. So what you end up with are characters/villains more defined by appearance or certain visual tics you can get away with, such as the massively overweight character here that leans into it in a big (and cringe-inducing) way.
Bruce works a pretty solid array of informants and ways of getting information and that means keeping close to the streets, such as a little time helping out in a shelter with meals. It’s here that he learns about a number of folks disappearing lately by the manager and that has Bruce playing up his Shadow role as he gets all done up with white hair, rough clothes, and basically looking like someone from the docks. Having him searching for clues and people that don’t fit the area to investigate becomes a fun little montage-like piece as he tries to attract someone to make a move on him. The problem is that it goes too well and he ends up getting knocked out bad enough that he gets short term amnesia. Waking up in a wild west style camp that’s run by Boss Biggis isn’t what he expected and it only gets worse as he sees he badly its run there. His sense of justice isn’t lost with memory loss.
The show spends a good bit of time showing how he deals with the situation while also giving Alfred a chance to try and mount a rescue once he realizes something isn’t right. Alfred gets some good material here but the real fun for a lot of viewers, rightly so, is watching the mental gymnastics Bruce goes through as his mind plays pieces of his past in weird disconnected ways, including his morphing into the Joker. It does give him clues to be sure but just watching the creative aspects here makes it pretty enjoyable. Overall, it is fun to watch as Bruce realizes what he’s capable of, getting into fights and working his mind to try and understand who he is while coping with this work camp, but at the same time, it just doesn’t come together as well as it should with the style or the pacing. I really loved seeing whitehaired Bruce going through all of this and the way his mind tries to handle the situation is delightful.
In Summary:
While I did delight at Alfred flying the Batplane and the quality of the animation for it as it has a good flow, a lot of what we get here is just plain awkward. The Batplane talking back to Alfred, the whole wild west element, it just doesn’t work. And Boss Biggis is just the worst type of caricature. I really enjoyed the opening moments with Bruce playing at being The Shadow for a bit – he really needed to drive a taxi – and seeing him coping with the bizarre range of memories he has is great. And it does come together well when everything clicks for him and it comes back to him in a flood. But it can’t salvage the episode as a whole unfortunately.
Grade: B-
