We Believe in Harvey Dent

Hefner's Note: All screencaps are either by me or have been taken from Worlds Finest Online's review and Two-Face bio page, as well as the seriously lackluster review up at ToonZone. Sadly, there are virtually no gifs from this episode floating around online, which is really disappointing. Between the lack of gifs and the superficial reviews, I can't help but feel like the episode I'm about to discuss with you today is one of the more under-appreciated ones from all of B:TAS. But you'll have to be the judge of that when all's said and done.



The third season episode Second Chance (which you can watch here) is, for all intents and purposes, the first true sequel to Harvey's origin two-parter. While Two-Face became a recurring villain throughout the series, this episode was the first since Harvey's fall, rebirth, and meltdown to specifically focus on the fractured psyche of Harvey Dent, expanding upon the few details that we already knew. Here, we finally get a good glimpse at what's going on inside the mind of Two-Face, and the findings may be worse than we'd feared.



But these elements are all secondary (hurr) to what the episode is really about, which is an exploration of friendship under pressure as examined not just between Bruce and Harvey, but also Batman and Robin. As I've noted in the past, writers have sort of unofficially given Harvey a strange status amongst the Robins, none of whom have ever quite seen eye to eye with Batman when it comes to his unyielding faith in Harvey Dent. Second Chance puts a different spin on that dynamic by setting it in a universe where Harvey was Bruce's best (only?) friend from way before Robin came along, thus creating the friendship equivalent of love-triangle between the three (or four?) protagonists.



All of this is told through a classic-style detective mystery plotted by the Pretty Poison team of Michael Reaves and Paul Dini, whose story contains loose elements of Doug Moench and Klaus Janson's Knightfall-era story Double Cross, both parts of which I've reviewed here and here. The actual teleplay is written by Gerry Conway, the comics stalwart who brought back Rupert Thorne and Hugo Strange and co-created Killer Croc and Jason Todd, a veteran who also has experience with writing Two-Face!



I have mixed feelings about Conway's story because--fun as it was--it disregarded Harvey's previous appearance where he seemed to be on the verge of redemption and reconciliation with Gilda. That was a great, moving story with a potentially happy ending, but a couple years later, Conway brought Harvey back with no mention of Gilda, and he even threw in a blond love henchgirl love interest to boot! Was Harvey's return (and subsequent disregard of the character's own events) Conway's own idea, or was it mandated by editorial who just wanted to have everyone's favorite scarred number-themed villain back with an unchanged status quo? Heck if I know!

What matters is that Conway has experience not just with writing Batman and Robin, but also with making life suck even worse for poor Harvey Dent. A noble tradition, that! Combined with a plotting team whose previous take on Harvey had him as an oblivious romantic fool who spent most of the episode in a coma, these three writers unite to tell the second best Two-Face episode of B:TAS, and one of the key stories when it comes to the conflicts that Harvey represents. Both of them.


Gif by tokomon. Sadly, this is the only gif from the episode that I've been able to find.

( You hated Harvey Dent. You would have done anything to destroy him. )

Welcome to the next installment of my three-part review series which I have dubbed "Harvey and pals!" Why? Because calling it "Harvfield and Friends" probably wouldn't have flown with anybody. That said, now the theme song is stuck in my head...

The first uniting of the Unholy Three ended, unsurprisingly, with defeat and arrest, but this doesn't prove to be the only time that Harvey, the Joker, and the Penguin decided to hang out in their downtime away from schemes and deathtraps. Maybe the events of the previous episode taught these rogues to enjoy (or at least tolerate) one another's company? To paraphrase a character from the wacky cannibal movie Ravenous, "It's lonely being a supervillain. Tough making friends." Perhaps that's what led to the scene of villainous socializing that occurred in one of B:TAS' best-ever episodes:



Wherein several of the rogues play cards and trade stories about how they each almost killed Batman, but there's more going on than meets the eye. Watch it here!

( I threw a r... well, you know the rest. )

As a bonus, I am delighted to present to you something which I found whilst scouring for rare B:TAS/Two-Face memorabilia, especially limited edition collectibles from the late, lamented Warner Brothers Studio Store chain of shops. That store would often carry animation cels, lithographs, and other cool works of Batman art, and it's so hard to find good-quality scans of them anywhere online. Thankfully, I found a fantastic scan of this, one of my very favorites:



Man, forget dogs playing poker, I want this hanging in my den whenever I play cards and smoke cigars with the boys. Not that I play cards nor smoke cigars, nor do I even have boys anymore. Whatever, I still want it anyway. That and the other WB Studio Store sericels of the Rogues:



There is not a single one of these that I don't love. There were at least two others in this particular series of character line-ups, including one of the heroes (like Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Renee Montoya, and even Harvey Dent!) and a second one for the villains! Sadly, I haven’t been able to find the first one at all, and the only scan I’ve found for the second is this grainy, teeny one here:



So yeah, if you know where I can find better quality images of these awesome works of art, let me know.

For seventeen years now, I've held a grudge against Shadow of the Bat, the two-part Batgirl origin episode of Batman: The Animated Series. Or rather, The Adventures of Batman & Robin, as the show was retitled in the wake of Batman Forever in order to capitalize on that damnable sidekick.

As you might be able to tell, I don't care much for Robin, and that apathy goes for the Bat-Family in general (save for Alfred), including Batgirl. Look, I've always liked Oracle, but I've always disliked teen heroes even when I was a teen myself. But while I've gained affection to Bat!Babs thanks to stories like the excellent Batgirl: Year One, I still never cared much for the episode, partially because it's the weakest of Two-Face's speaking appearances thus far. Besides being a one-note character, he's barely involved beyond simply being a villain, and not even the story's real villain.

But that alone isn't why I resented SotB. No, you see, back when WB first released a series of B:TAS home videos, they dedicated each tape to two episodes featuring a single villain. For the Riddler's tape, they included If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? and Riddler's Reform. The origin and his best episode, that's probably the wisest pairing you could make. For the Joker, it was Christmas with the Joker and The Laughing Fish. Okay, a classic-but-weak episode paired with one of the best, fine. You get the idea. And then, there was Two-Face's tape, which had some pretty great cover art:



Love it. So! For Two-Face, you'd think that the only obvious two episodes to include would be his two-part origin, right? That's just obvious, right? Ha ha, nope. Instead, they went with Shadow of the Bat: the Batgirl origin with Harvey as a minor supporting villain. Rassum frassum!

... Well, okay, I suppose that fifteen years is long enough to hold a petty grudge against an innocent cartoon episode with never did nobody no harm. Besides, I've come to better appreciate this story thanks to the YA novelization Dual to the Death, which combined this with Two-Face, Pts. I and II into a pretty seamless single epic: the fall of Harvey Dent, and the rise of Batgirl. What's more, combining those two episodes made me realize how even his minimal involvement here contains important continuity for his character development.

But most of all, I found myself fascinated by SotB's TRUE villain: Gil Mason, a corrupt cop who seems to be an alternate-universe counterpart to Harvey himself. Seriously, whether it's intentional or not, Gil seems to be the evil mirror-universe version of Harvey Dent, a true Two-Face who doesn't even have to get scarred. It's the parallels between Harvey and Gil which I find fascinating, all the more so because they're in cahoots.



But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's finally get to the damn review already, and maybe I'll even acknowledge Batgirl's existence along the way! No promises, though.

( Would it have made a difference, Gil? )

While I'm still not crazy about the episode on its own merits (although Babs really won me over this time around), I now enjoy it way more when I take the details and motivations of the novelization into account, so much so that I now wish I would see Harvey's reactions to learning about how he was manipulated by Gil from the very start. Even if Gil did come out of the coma, he wouldn't be long for this world now that he's on Harvey's bad side, which would resolve that plot hole rather nicely.

What I'm basically saying is that I like SotB far more for what it could have been rather than what it was, which is still a pretty mediocre Two-Face appearance. But in my own head-canon, it's a GREAT episode, and I think I can deal with that. Old VHS tape, you are forgiven.

Previous entries: Part I, and most of Part II.



Sorry for the long wait. This was the hardest post of all to write, and not just because I had to rewrite half of it from scratch. Be warned, I go really in-depth with the speculation on this one. This review will either be the culmination of all my analysis from the two previous posts, or it will be the moment when I utterly disappear up my own ass. YMMV.

Since I'm forced to give this scene its own post, we might as well take a moment to contextualize these events. By the time this episode of Batman: The Animated Series first aired, there had been two stories where Harvey Dent had been redeemed through the power of love (which is itself, as I understand it, "a curious thing"). The first resulted in a happy ending for all, while the second was uncertain but optimistic... at least, until the next writer decided to ignore it entirely.

At the center of both these stories was Harvey's fiancée/ex-wife, Gilda. She was featured in a third story from 1989 that also dealt with similar themes of redemptive love, ending on a note that was bittersweet, but not without hope amidst the tragedy. Except in that story, Gilda was renamed "Grace." All three of these stories influenced the emotional core of Two-Face, Part II, especially in the big reunion in Act 3. While Grace Lamont is a rather vapid character, she serves the same classic Gilda role of being Harvey's moral compass. As such, she's still the second most vital character to this episode, more so than even Batman himself.



Something I've neglected to mention: Grace is voiced by Murphy Cross, a TV actress so obscure that she doesn't even have her own Wikipedia page, and someone with no voice acting experience at this point. So why did B:TAS casting director Andrea Romano hire Cross for the crucial role of Harvey Dent's fiancée? My best guess, after viewing Cross' IMDB page, is because she appeared on one episode of Night Court, playing opposite Richard Moll's trademark character, "Bull" Shannon.



Naturally, being the obsessive that I am, I tracked down and watched the whole episode on YouTube. Much to my surprise, it was not only thoroughly enjoyable, but also... not entirely irrelevant to what Harvey and Grace are about to go through in their big reunion scene. I actually wrote several paragraphs dedicated to analyzing their scene, and how it relates to Harvey and Grace, but thought better of it. I've already spent way, way, WAY too long on Two-Face, Part II as it is. Adding analysis from an episode of frickin' Night Court is just ridiculous.

That said, I did save the analysis, so if anyone actually WANTS to hear my ridiculous views on the Night Court/Two-Face reading-too-much-into-things comparisons, just ask. Just don't say that I didn't try to spare you!

So without further ado, let's finally review the final act of Part II where everything comes together before falling apart, and let's see if anything can be salvaged from the wreckage.

( Chance, Grace. Chance is all there is. )

This is probably the single most overdue review I've written for this blog.

Of course, this isn't going to be a straightforward review where I discuss the highs and lows of the episode. Want the short review? Here: it's a fantastic episode, but not without its flaws, and I think the second half is a major dip in quality from the first while still ending on a powerful note. In terms of what the show was and what it set out to accomplish, Two-Face is an imperfect masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. If you haven't seen it yet, it can be watched for free at theWB.com.

But I can't just leave it at that. After all, this is me: your favorite long-winded, nit-picky Harvey Dent obsessive! No, with a Two-Face story and character this beloved, this popular, this definitive, I need to examine (read: nitpick) the hell out of every single aspect of the episode: plot, dialogue, score, design, and most of all, analysis of Harvey's character. I want to find out what makes this version of Harvey tick, what works and what doesn't, and explore the many unexplored areas of his character. Because I care, dammit.




( For those who still have dial-up, be warned: tons of pics and gifs behind the cut! )




Note: All scans either made by me, or taken from World's Finest Online and ToonZone.com. Gifs taken from the Tumblr feeds for DCAU, BigBardaFree, GhostofCheney, and FuckYearBatmanGifs, via FYearTwoFace.

While the risque Birds of Prey musical number from Batman: The Brave and the Bold has become a viral hit among comic sites (Birds of Prey + Gail Simone + dick jokes = success, apparently), the actual episode it's from, "The Mask of Matches Malone!" has still never aired in the US. This is supposedly because for some reason TV censors have some problem airing a kid's show with an entire segment devoted to dick jokes (plus a vagina joke in the opening sequence with Poison Ivy), some of which are so obvious that they're just single entendres. Go figure, right?





Personally, I don't care that much for the most part. I adore that show, but I feel like the musical number left me cold. No matter how effectively it's gotten stuck in my head (In my head right now: "Dum dum da dada, Birds of Preyyy, theoneanonly Birds of Pr--" DAMMIT! STOP THAT, BRAIN! DON'T MAKE ME PUNISH YOU WITH KE$HA!), I just kinda find it mildly irritating, less clever and more "tee-hee, we're being dirty!" As a sexy burlesque for superheroes, Red Hot Riding Hood it ain't. On top of that, I am in the extreme minority in haaaaaating every single musical number from The Brave and the Bold.

Thing is, I adore musicals, and I always wince whenever I hear somebody talk about how much they hate musicals, because while I can understand hating SPECIFIC musicals, I cannot wrap my head around someone hating an entire genre. The work of Sondheim, Rogers & Hammerstein, Webber, Kander & Ebb, Menken & Ashman, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Seth McFarlane, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog are not all the same thing, yet they're cut from the same cloth. And chances are, most everybody loves some part of that... um... musical fabric. Yeah. *cough*

I swear, I'm going to explain why all this is relevant to Two-Face. I'm getting there. Promise. I just need to rant a LITTLE bit longer about musicals.

At the same time, there are parts of that (fill in additional awkward metaphor here) which I also loathe. Webber, for one. Fuck Webber. And man oh man, I hate the musical numbers from The Brave and the Bold almost as much as I hate Webber. Maybe moreso, because at least with Webber, there's no crossover in the comics world, where most of my fellow fans are head-over-heels in love with stuff like the entire Music Meister episode. Of course, having NPH doesn't hurt, but ugh, I detested those songs, just as I detested the scene in the otherwise-great "Emperor Joker!" episode, where the Joker sang this atrocity. The fact that it's entitled "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile," makes me wish to god that they'd actually just gone ahead and had him sing the actual fucking song, which would have given the scene fifteen more layers of sadistic delightfulness. You know something is bad when The Batman actually did it BETTER.

But eh, what do I know about music? I'm the guy who thinks the beloved theme song for The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes--which has been hailed as "epic" and "metal," actual quotes--sounds like mall-punk Hot Topic Nickelback claptrap. So YMMV.

Which FINALLY brings us to the actual Two-Face-related reason I am posting the entirety of "The Mask of Matches Malone!" here, for those who haven't seen it. I'm guessing that's most of you. As we've previously seen, the Two-Face of Batman: The Brave and the Bold is awesome. It's one of the very best takes on Harvey that I have EVER seen, managing to be poignant and tragic without ever being angsty or gritty. In TMoMM!, Gail Simone gives us the second major appearance of Harvey in B:TB&TB, using him in a way which...

... well... just watch it for yourself. And do it soon, before it's taken down by WB.







If this were any other comics site, I'd be all about discussing Gail, the Birds, the Bat/Cat sexual tension, and/or the musical number, because that's what most fans generally care about, and I'm sure those'll come up in the comments. But here? Yeah, screw all that.

As always, let's talk about Harvey.


( Spoiler for THE MASK OF MATCHES MALONE! behind the cut )

greedyslayer just reminded me about how much I frelling ADORE Batman: The Brave and the Bold's take on Two-Face:





Here's the thing: for those who don't know, the opening "teasers" to each episode of TB&TB always features Batman teaming up with a guest hero to fight a guest villain. In this, Harvey gets to be both, which is AWESOME.

Then there's the vocal performance by 80's character heavy James Remar. If he were just doing the scratchy evil voice, I'd accuse him of being a poor man's Richard Moll (just as I think about whoever's voicing Two-Face in Arkham City, as I understand it's sadly not going to be Moll), but instead, he's the first Two-Face actor to actually balance between both the good and evil voices. And I love the good voice. He sounds calm, reasonable, understanding, and not without empathy.

greedyslayer made some great observations as well:I feel like there's a lot of subtle interesting things going on too. Like Harv and Batman are apparently speaking in a familiar code only they know with Harv's "Final requests, Bats?" and how Batman trusts him then (and makes wonder if in Brave and the Bold-verse they teamed up before--like, even before Two-Face, when he was unscarred DA and there was some crisis they had to work together). I totally agree, there's a real sense of history there, and I don't think I'm just projecting what I already know as a comic fan. That sense of trust further strengthens the idea that this Two-Face genuinely *is* half-good, which we so rarely see in comics of ANY era, even the ones to which TB&TB pay tribute.

Greedyslayer also added, Even in Brave and the Bold's usually lighter tone, I still got a small sense of Harvey's tragedy--like, it just seemed particularly sad to me to see the unconscious, unscarred half of Harvey's face, especially after his "You cheated" sounding genuinely hurt. A lot of unspoken implication of the ex-DA's sad history IMO was present in the opening. Yeah. :) You get the idea that Batman just betrayed that little bit of trust they had because... well, Harvey may be half-good, but you get to a point where you quite literally don't want to take any chances.

And then there's the Two-Face level from the B:TB&TB game for the Nintendo Wii. I've been wanting to get this game for months now (especially if I can get my DS-owning friend to come down and play Bat-Mite!), but that feels less urgent knowing that the actual level I want to see most is online. Don't be put off by the fact that it's gameplay. This video is surprisingly cinematic, almost like a mini-story:





SO. MUCH. LOVE.

That is easily the best use of Two-Face in a video game, not that there's much competition. I love how the level actually plays with heads and tails, and how Harvey is actually quite reasonable about leaving himself wide open to attack. Batman gets such wonderfully cheesy one-liners, but I love the Adam West earnestness with which he delivers them, especially the ones about how he's hopeful for Harvey's rehabilitation. Also, that's right, Dick, you'll take your lack of recognition and you'll like it.


Harvey's only made one other major appearance on the actual B:TB&TB show, in the episode "The Mask of Matches Malone!" written by Gail Simone. You may have heard of it, as it features a rather risque musical number by the Birds of Prey (and Catwoman why not), so risque in fact that the episode didn't actually air in the US! Nope, they're going to censor it, which many people are crying foul about, but not me. Penis jokes in my kid-friendly Batman? No thanks. That said, I did rather like the Two-Face appearance in the episode. Erm, I mean, the episode which I clearly haven't seen, why no, that would be impossible since it only aired outside the US, so how could I have seen it, cough cough.