You go into the second season of Batman: Caped Crusader with a great deal of anticipation for the way the series will handle the Joker, given what transpired in the first. The retro-noir vision put forward by Matt Reeves, J.J. Abrams and Bruce Timm has established a more grounded and unrelenting tone; the Season 2 finale makes full use of it. The result is a take on Gotham’s premier villain that is at odds with most of his earlier depictions and the last few episodes are as unnerving as they set out to be.
A Joker of Silence and Dread
Throughout the season he is a creature of the margins, a methodical serial predator instead of some kind of showman. He puts in an appearance here and there in short, well-timed scenes, usually to end an episode, and in doing so instills the sort of undercurrent of tension one would find with the background killer in David Fincher’s Mindhunter. It is not without reason that there is a parallel; the procedural air of this animated Joker owes much to the same sensibility Reeves brought to his live-action The Batman, making him a presence you cannot shake rather than a spectacle.
Meanwhile, there is the matter of his not laughing. Matthew Needham (Larys Strong of House of the Dragon) brings a restraint to the role that is all the more chilling. You have a sociopath who is brilliant and driven by purpose, not the chaos Mark Hamill made of him in Batman: The Animated Series. Without the cackle to lend him some measure of theatre, he is clinical and cold. There is a spectral seriousness to him, an inevitability, and when the season does make him its focus the performance has all the more impact.
Gotham’s Outbreak
In the closing two episodes the Joker takes charge. “Dead Before Dawn” (Episode 9) sees him waylay Hattie Tettch’s television show to put in a public statement and infect the host: the mayor is to be dead before midnight and Gotham will be next by the time the sun comes up. Mayor Jessop included. This is no idle talk. The toxin soon turns ordinary people into violent grinning maniacs in a fashion that will bring to mind the city-wide ruin of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Endgame.
Batman and Alfred Pennyworth are left to put together an antidote while the streets unravel. They come to a grim realization that the mayor is gone and his body, like others taken by the infection, is reanimating and putting an airborne form of the toxin back in the air. The situation worsens when the contagion gets to Alfred, turning him into a huge and homicidal figure intent on making an end of Batman. With Barbara Gordon’s help, Batman stabilizes Alfred with a crude cure. It becomes clear the toxin has four stages to it. Alfred will see to a proper antidote for the city, but for now Batman has to find the Joker and put a stop to him.
The Rooftop Confrontation and the Joker’s True Aim
The chase ends on the highway with a confrontation on the roof. With a rocket launcher to his back, the Joker compels Batman to come out into the open for a savage encounter that spills over to the roof of a nearby skyscraper. On the rooftop of the tower the two have been at it, and now Batman is at a distinct disadvantage, riddled with knife wounds and put to the gun. It is in this position that the Joker sees fit to put his design into words. For months he has been about his business in the shadows, seeing to it that impediments like the Riddler or Rupert Thorne and the mayor’s corruption are taken care of. What he wants is not mere destruction but to take apart Gotham’s tenuous order in an orderly fashion; by pitting the city’s populace against each other he will show that what Batman is so intent on upholding is no more than a fiction.
On a more personal level the Joker says he is “awakening” him. He will call Batman “brother” over and over, making the case they are of a piece, superior in a way the rest of humanity is not. To the Joker, the lengths Batman goes to in order to save Gotham are a kind of self-inflicted bondage and in making him see the pointlessness of it he is being set free. There is no theatrics to the speech which makes it all the more disturbing.
Resolution and Lingering Doubt
Batman has not been left to his own devices. Alfred is in the air with a plane and puts a blue anti-toxin over the city in a cloud. One can see the infected put their manic smiles and strength aside as the toxin’s grip is broken and they go down. The Joker’s apocalypse of his own making comes undone before one’s eyes. When the villain attempts to flee, Batman lets fly a Batarang that is only inches from his head. It bounces off and brings down steel poles that run the Joker through the abdomen. He laughs, something unheard of in the series up to now, and then of his own volition jumps from the roof into the blue smoke.
Gordon insists the fall and the wound are enough to kill him. Not Batman. He wants Renee Montoya and Barbara Gordon and Gordon himself to retrieve the body to clear up any lingering doubt. The matter has gotten under his skin more than most. Even as the Gordons and Montoya urge him to accept the victory and let Gotham get on with it, there is a feeling of things left to do. As for whether the quiet methodical type of Joker they have faced is done for good, that is left open.
The Road Ahead for the Series
There are no overt teases or anything after the credits to mark the end of the season, so it is up to an official renewal. Geoffrey Thorne, executive producer and showrunner for Season 2, has given some indication of the direction a third season may take. He would have the series be something of a bridge between the kineticism of an old serial and straight film noir; while he does not think it has quite made that hybrid yet, another season might see to it.
Prime Video has all of Batman: Caped Crusader. And the finale puts an unsettling notion in the mind of the audience and Gotham alike: the worst of the Jokers the show has put forward could well be still around in the aftermath of the smoke, biding his time to put an end to it.