Batman: TAS: episode #53: Paging the Crime Doctor

This episode is a great example of how some of the best stories have nothing to do with the rogues' gallery. Interestingly, most of those good stories usually involve Dr. Leslie Thompkins (Diana Muldaur), from the Wayne Clinic and Paging the Crime Doctor is no exception. She's a hallmark for Bruce Wayne's past, since she was close friends with Thomas Wayne, his father. That gives the writers room to delve into his primary motivation- avenging the death of his parents -without constantly citing that event in Crime Alley. Unlike many of the other Leslie stories, though, this one managed to embed the surrounding shell firmly in the Batman mythos, as well, since the situation involves another close friend of Thomas' in Matthew Thorne (Joseph Campanella) and his brother, the far better known Rupert Thorne (John "The Voice" Vernon.) Involving Thorne means it's about The Batman, but leaving out standards like The Joker and Two-Face means that it remains on that human level that could have made it a Dashiell Hammett pot-boiler. The semi-tragic ending simply seals that as, instead of ending with the "... and all was well" Hollywood approach, we circle back to our primary motivation, as the only request that Bruce makes of Matthew, already weary of the corruption and glad-handing that is his brother's world, is to have a conversation: "Tell me about my father." That's a human note that everyone watching can relate to.

To fit that less-fantastical level, our hero has to be scaled down a bit, too. Without a super-villain to distract him, most of Thorne's typical thugs aren't going to be a challenge. But if the Darknight Detective is running around with a concussion, that's an extra layer that reduces him to mere human, as opposed to the figments of imagination (and years of training) that make him far more than that, in reality as well as in the minds of his enemies. Of course, there was one beat of modernity added, when a surgical laser somehow becomes a ready weapon that can fire lethal blasts of energy. I suppose the tommy gun animations do get a bit tired after a while. Speaking of animation, whichever studio they used was heavy on frames for many of the sequences. There was constant flow to static structures and "motion lines" attached to the activity of both people and vehicles. That gave it a bit of an old-school feel, which was helped by the full engagement of those noir elements in the visuals, as the use of shadow around both our hero and many other characters was omnipresent and impossible to miss. Indeed, the most fantasy-like element of the entire episode outside the laser was probably the throw of a gas/smoke grenade that one of Thorne's thugs made into the window of an armored car from another moving vehicle.

The Batman stayed in that gas theme later, when trying to deal with one of those tommy guns pinning him in an elevator, as he chose to use a gas grenade to try to overpower the thug, rather than a Batarang to simply disarm him. Another aspect to the concussion, perhaps affecting his aim? Or a director's choice paced on pacing and frames? And, interestingly, despite all of the detachment from the usual cast of opponents, the "Crime Doctor" was an occasional adversary in the comics, first appearing in Detective Comics #77 in 1943. I don't recall any of those stories from my 25 years of reading said comics, but I'm betting that most of them weren't up to the quality level of this one (story by Mike W. Barr and Lauren Bright, incidentally.) Next time, we arc right back to the fantasy, with an appearance by a DC regular.