After nearly two years, Batman: Caped Crusader is back on Prime Video for Season 2, with 10 new episodes. The dark, more noir reinvention of the classic Batman: The Animated Series was a bit of a mixed bag in the first season, featuring some solid voice work and curious mysteries for The Dark Knight to solve, but sluggish pacing and odd choices for reinventing the classic Gotham City characters didn’t do co-creator Bruce Timm’s series any favors. Unfortunately, those errors get even more glaring in Season 2, which features even more big swings that don’t quite connect.
After – spoilers – last season ended with the death of Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader), you’d think there would be more of an emotional fallout. And while there is initial pickup with the first episode, which focuses on mob boss Rupert Thorne (Cedric Yarbough), new head writer Geoffrey Thorne (no relation) seems far more interested in getting past that, and instead focusing on the show’s head-scratching reinventions of classic comic book villains.
Last season gave us a grimly serious Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung), a gender-swapped Penguin, and more. And while some reinventions were more successful than others, Season 2 takes this villain ball and runs with it in decidedly the wrong direction, introducing a Riddler whose only connection to the original is him wearing a green suit, and his name (though he gets it from riddling people with bullets, not from telling riddles)… Or a Mad Hatter who is again gender-swapped, and this time merely a talk show host who wears hats (get it? She’s angry, aka mad). And that’s not even to mention the grimly, deathly serious take on The Joker (Matthew Needham). There’s reinvention, and then there’s pure invention, and based on this season Caped Crusader may not know the difference.
To be clear, these characters are far from set in stone. DC Comics’s mega-successful Absolute Universe is a great example of this, with the best-selling Absolute Batman radically reinventing everyone from the villains to Batman himself, while maintaining the core of who those characters are. The goal is to stretch and challenge them, and see how they react when thrust into new situations and new bodies, and whether they will head towards their status quo, or make decidedly different choices.
By contrast, Caped Crusader’s reinventions feel erratic and unmotivated. Some are interesting, like a proto-take on Mr. Freeze that tangentially harkens to his original appearance in the comic books, but still doesn’t add much to the narrative other than change for change’s sake. There’s a reason these characters are so enduring, and it’s not just their names.
Even less successful is how Season 2 takes the gauntlet thrown down by Season 1 in killing Dent, an event that decidedly should not happen in Batman lore, and takes it as an excuse to turn the show into a Grand Guignol. Yes, this is a darker Batman; but by killing off as many characters as they do, they’re limiting the options of the show, if it is to continue. Sounds dumb to say but you just can’t go many places with a dead character.
On the more positive, the animation is a little more fluid than the first season, which never matched the heights of Batman: The Animated Series, but often felt like it was vacillating between oddly indistinct cityscapes and the designs of Batman: TAS, with less clear faces and chunkier bodies. And the voice work is solid as usual, with Hamish Linklater providing a Bob Belcher as Batman that oddly, mostly works. Jason Watkins is also appropriately dry as Alfred Pennyworth, the rest of the cast is solid, if unspectacular. Of the new voices, Needham is completely different from his Larys Strong on House of the Dragon, and appropriately menacing as The Joker… I may not agree with the directions they take the character in, but the voice work is skin-crawling, and Needham does a good job of bringing menace to the pale baddie.
The show’s interest in the occult also provides a difference between Caped Crusader and Batman: TAS that isn’t always earned, but it is interesting. Episodes featuring a sort of zombie riff take the focus off Batman, but do provide some interesting visuals. And for those who are fans of violence, there’s plenty of that throughout the 10 episodes of the season (all were provided for review by critics), including an unnecessarily brutal scene in the first episode involving the Batmobile.
And some episodes do work, including one focusing on the character Roxy Rocket which seems like a crossover between Batman and The Rocketeer, and one bringing back Carrie (Juliet Donenfeld), the plucky orphan from last season who is the show’s stand-in for The Dark Knight Returns‘s Carrie Kelly. Both episodes feature interesting visuals, creative fights, and show a spark to them that many of the other episodes lack.
Look, I’m a huge fan of taking chances, and I appreciate that the writers of Caped Crusader are clearly throwing out a lot of “what if we did…” in the room. The issue is that with a mostly glacial pace, a lack of interest in Batman’s psychology, and some bizarre choices for villain reinventions that are vastly less interesting than the originals, and then a casual willingness to toss those same characters right into the graveyard, those chances are just not working. Perhaps it’s time for a reinvention of this particular reinvention.
Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 premieres all episodes on July 31 on Prime Video.
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