Batman: TAS, episode #48: What is Reality?

Virtual reality was a huge thing back in the early 90s and became either an aspect or the central premise of any number of TV shows and films and BTAS was no exception with this episode. Instead of going back to the typical approach of The Riddler (crimes and deathtraps that can only be solved by working through his riddles) in the real world, writers Marty Isenberg and Robert Skir decided to maintain the approach taken with the villain's first appearance (If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?) and stay in the electronic realm, as former programmer Edward Nygma decided to enter what was then the future-present in What is Reality? Now, it's fair to argue that my disdain for The Penguin, rooted in his lack of menace and general triviality, could easily be applied to The Riddler, as well, given that the whole identity of the latter is essentially a gimmick. But it's the nature of the obsession that makes the character more interesting than the odd bird. It's not quite as dire as Two-Face, but it's still present and The Riddler is perhaps the case example of the entire rogues' gallery's desire to match wits with the super-sleuth who is our hero. The fact that this story was borderline stereotypical for the time, in films like Disclosure and The Lawnmower Man (the latter coming from a Stephen King story that had precisely zero to do with virtual reality) makes one's teeth grit a little bit, but it is difficult to take what is, again, a largely gimmick villain and make him into a threat without retreading the same ground over and over, so this was the difference at hand.

One point of innovation, however, was the attempt by Nygma to erase the rest of his identity, not only from electronic records, but also from his usual physical realm. I think it's fair to question just how effective that would've been, since there were so many people who knew his identity after he was first captured with the self-given nom de guerre, but he was clearly attempting to solve at least a major part of that issue by eliminating Commissioner Gordon, along with those paper files. This is part of his transition to being just The Riddler, which was brought to even greater fruition in later series like Gotham. But one interesting aspect to the presentation of the whole story was the use of the color red. That's the chromatic opposite of the color usually representing the villain (green) and the latter is also the typical color associated with computers. This is a call back to those of us who remember monochrome monitors, which were almost always green. Of course, in most visual presentations in the Western world, red is the color of threat (road signs, waving the cloth in front of a bull, fire trucks, etc.) so it's understandable that it might have been considered less "dangerous" if the whole internal world of Riddler's server was his usual green. But I think the latter color is also a good example of cold/unfeeling/alien, which is a form of threat on its own, so I have to question their deviation in that respect. That color theme was carried through the whole episode, such as the point where The Batman detonates The Riddler's nitroglycerin trap and the resultant smoke is a deep shade of scarlet.

There were a lot of other cultural touchpoints in this episode, such as when Robin brags about beating "Baxter's Box" (a Rubik's Cube stand-in, which hadn't been popular for about a decade at that point) in 37 seconds and implies that he used a sledgehammer to do so. This might've been an oblique reference to the Gordian Knot, a famous ancient riddle which the direct thinking of Alexander the Great supposedly dealt with. There was also attention brought to the out-of-time nature of the whole series, in which references to modern technology are made, but the architecture and cars are clearly 1930s-era. In this case, despite citing "the computers", a "computer vandal" (known more commonly as a "hacker" even then, but maybe not to the production team), and having a plot centered around virtual reality, the Gotham stock market still showed someone reading a ticker tape which is, again, 1930s-era tech, at the latest. Even more interesting was the use of the long-hallway-of-plain-doors scene inside The Riddler's trap, which would show up much more prominently in later stories about virtual reality like The Matrix. We also had a chess battle scene as part of the overall puzzle, which was no surprise given the popularity of Battle Chess at the time. Technique-wise, it was also interesting to hear the villain refer directly back to his previous appearance, rather than treating each episode as an isolated instance, which wasn't common even among regular characters in the series. Indeed, his last riddle (and probably the best of the episode) was directed at that situation: "If the world was fair, I'd still have my old job.", which was a reference to his hideout at Gotham's World's Fair Exposition.

Next time, we center back around our main character's mental trauma in I Am the Night.