I found the show to be very flat in its writing and execution. Good animation. I like the retro style setting. I liked the general pulpy golden of Detective Comics vibe.
I found Batman to be generally unlikable. I get what they were going for. Batman is still dealing with his trauma and he hasn't fully come to understand it yet. He's not ready to let in Alfred. He doesn't view Alfred as a father figure. He barely even views him as a friend or ally.
Batman felt sort of unimportant to the show, almost like a background character, and he seems to do very little.
What the show was really missing was having a competent storyteller like a Paul Dini or other alum writers of the DCAU to really elevate the stories and make them more cohesive.
Hamish Linklater, no offense, was not a good Batman. I like that he differed his inflection for Batman and Bruce Wayne. They were different. However, his Batman was far too monotone and one-note. It didn't feel like he was really acting or found his way with the character.
It was hard to care about Harvey Dent when the show generally depicts him as an unrepentant scumbag for most of the series.
Totally agree about the writing.
I mentioned this in a previous post, but the series is very Manichean. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, essentially.
I love what they've done with “Two-Face”, but I think it loses some of its power because up to his transformation, as you said, Dent is just too one-note and unlikable.
Here we have a more tragic, tortured version of the character, but it's finally hard to feel moved because the groundwork was too poorly laid and all the nuances are coming too late.
It's the same thing with characters like Bullock. At one point, when Flass pushes him to really get his hands dirty with Firebug, I imagined this would lead to a separation between the two or create something... but no. Throughout the season, they just remain two simple dirty cops and nothing substantial is really created with them. There's just no surprises.
I'm all for hearing that the second season could end up play those cards, but I really think this first season has strayed too far from its potential to remain a little too superficial.
Oswalda and Harley are also good examples of that to me: their reinventions are very well introduced and promising, but ultimately remain completely unexploited.
Replace Oswalda's sons with random henchmen and you get the same thing. The betrayal of one of her sons and Thorne's manipulation of her to kill the one who had remained loyal to her, making her increasingly enraged, could have created a very good character arc. Here, it's all wasted on a rather unconvincing
(for me, anyway) display of cruelty.
Harley Quinn is very cleverly reintroduced as a twisted psychiatrist, but the only thing she ended up doing was giving Batman some lobotomized punching bags when we could have already been shown her playing with his head a bit....Anyway.
I realize that these are not the same writers of the BTAS era, but I'm still very surprised by this lack of
ingenuity.
The show has its charm and I enjoyed watching it overall, but in the end, I kind of have the feeling of a lack of vision behind it...
I still think it's nothing that can't be fixed in the future though. I remain optimistic!
I had some real pleasure watching it, and not only by nostalgia
