Charlie and Steve Watch Stuff

[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to Charlie and Steve. Watch stuff, the show where two friends like to talk about the stuff that they watch. What a novel concept. My name's Steve Snick and joining me today, he just got done claiming this podcast for Spain. It's Charlie Peppers. How you doing friend?

I'm doing well, friend. What's going on?

Oh, you know, just here with one of my besties about to talk about a, a cartoon that we're watching as two very mature adults who have real lives and responsibilities. But dammit, we find the time for this,

Oh, if you're an adult that's not watching cartoons, you're not doing it right. We're we're setting the template, the blueprint, if you would.

We're gonna jump right into Batman, the animated series.

The two episodes that we're gonna be covering today are POV and The Forgotten, and we're gonna start out with POV. It was released on September 18th, 1992, directed by Kevin Al Terry, and Story by Mitch Bryan. The episode's plot is after a failed bust. Harvey Bullock, [00:01:00] Renee Montoya, and a rookie Wilkes are put under investigation. Each one of them offers up a story on what really happened during their failure, but their different points of view, see what they did there seem to conflict and Bullock thinks Batman is responsible. Now, the opening of this episode shows the rookie Wilkes and Officer Renee Montoya rushing to the scene of a sting operation where they kind of established very early, like they're on time, but they're still rushing.

They, it's kind of established that they don't really trust that Bullock's gonna wait for them. He's like, they know that he's the impatient bull that's gonna run in Then they show up to the crime scene and everything's on fire, and Bullock is knocked out on the side and he sees Batman flying away as the scene kind of fades out.

And I think you can kind of see his wheels already turning, like, how am I gonna blame this on Batman? And so we immediately move into the interrogation scene where we see via flashbacks that Harvey Bullock is a dirty liar.

He's not a dirty cop,

He's [00:02:00] not a dirty, you're being too hard on

he's just a dirty, well, it's, I mean, he strikes

me as like

the older brother that gets away with lying all the time

he does.

this is how it happened.

Even though it's exactly how it not, it didn't happen.

It's so funny, and I will forever be a Bullock apologist. I just, I love that we have a character in this show who is so, he's on the right side of the law, but in some ways he is a lovable piece of shit and a dope like. I don't hate him. I just, I love to shake, shake my head at him, just a bullock.

That's mostly my reaction to him.

the moment where he was like, something made a noise as he tripped over the can and he was like, must've been Batman it was just like the moment of him, like hitting the ground, as he said, must've been Batman, was, a master stroke and fibbing to your heart's content. That said, we [00:03:00] never really know why he lies about this stuff.

Well, I guess we know why, like, but we don't know why he, like, he went in and he didn't wait. Like they

didn't really dive into that.

it's insecurity. It's also, and I'm gonna go deeper into your show notes. You brought up a good point that there was supposed to be a flashback where Bullock's dad told him that teamwork was worthless and that he should claim it all for himself. He has a scarcity mindset. He doesn't think he'll be seen as a hero if he leans on his group and other people, which makes him insufferable.

And I am simultaneously annoyed by him, but I also like what he adds to the show, so I have space for it. The most deplorable things that he says and does are in relationship with his disdain and his jealousy of Batman. He's okay. He's all right So far.

It is okay for a pig

He's okay for a pig. He is [00:04:00] okay for a pig

I was like, bacon every time he comes on screen. Well, you know what? sure we can give him disgrace for now and just to keep pushing the story forward, we can also learn through all of these flashbacks, parsed against what Bullock is saying, that he technically is the reason why the warehouse burnt down. He was fighting the goons. There was an ax involved, honestly, like a very superhero moment where my guy like Samurai catches an ax flying at his face like it's a Ronan sword and fights it off of this goon, but it flies into an electrical box and it sparks and blows up and building lights on fire. And that's how we get to present day. And the goons were obviously super happy to let him just kind of burn up in the building, but who comes in and saves him,

Batman.

Mr. Batman himself. So it's funny that he wants to kind of blame his shortcomings on Batman, but he's immediately contradicted. He's immediately contradicted by the next two accounts that [00:05:00] come forward. And I wanna park on Wilkes for a second because I think that a, this starts to set us in the path of like, here's what really happened. Because these two people actually tell the truth and they don't have an ego about what is going on. And it also, I think, does a really good job of showing what the current public perception of Batman is.

Like the way that he described Batman so fantastically the way that all of his gadgets that he described him, essentially like magic, like they were lasers coming out of his fingers. The way that he got from one place to another so quickly. Like it was very fantastical. It was very, to lack of a better term, superhuman. What did you think about how Wils kind of viewed Batman in, in that those moments?

Oh, it landed, it landed for me. It also builds up the mystique of Batman. The fact that he is somebody who was trained by ninjas and knows how to hide in darkness. He was trained by the League of [00:06:00] Shadows, so I like that Batman moves a lot more quickly than we think he does. And for the animation in 1992, I don't know if we're at a point in the early nineties where the animation can capture exactly how Agile Batman is.

And this is something that becomes a little bit more obvious when we get to the Superman cartoon and we see Superman flying so, so, so slowly. I think the animation doesn't do him justice all the time, but seeing snippets of him in action as told through the POV of Wilkes really does it for me.

It really did it for me as well. I really liked that moment. And then we move on to Officer Renee Montoya. I'm calling her the good cop. She's obviously like. Got a boner for the law and doing the right thing and justice and all that good stuff. Very much so in Batman's Lane. And she just keeps giving more truth.

She's the one that pursued the bad guys into the burning building. shE SAEs Bullock [00:07:00] a little bit here and his like clear lies. He was, because Bullock was like, oh yeah, it took all of my strength to drag Batman out of there. He actually held me up in the burning building when it was actually Batman who saved his ass. And so Renee was like, oh yeah, Batman must have recovered his strength real quick to, to come in here and

and help

he was in rare form. He was in a rare form.

Rare form. So yeah, another, another instance of a, people know who this guy is. B they know what he can do. And I think this actually like, because we're eventually gonna get to the point where Batman's just showing up in Gordon's office and there's a more direct relationship between him and the police. And I think before when he was. This adversarial person that they were chasing down because they didn't understand him. I think they're also starting to lay the groundwork here for like this is going to become an ally to the police force. This is gonna be someone that the police force calls on via the bat signal when there's trouble, rather than like him being this mystical figure that he is right now to them.

So I [00:08:00] just think that's a really cool like stamp of where we are it with the knowledge of where we're going.

And something that they touch on in the show that redeems a lot of the propaganda that's happening right now is rooting out corrupt police officers in the forest. We haven't seen it yet, and we see it a lot more in the Batman books like Batman, year one. where Commissioner Gordon isn't Commissioner Gordon yet, and we're really dealing with deep, deep corruption in the police force.

And Batman's helping Gordon suss out who was corrupt and who's not. I love that version of the police force and Gotham a bit more. I love the version of the police force and the Matt Reeves, the Batman movie where you don't know who you can trust and they lampshade a lot of the duplicity of police officers.

This show can get a little black and white sometimes [00:09:00] about how the cops are, which is why I like a character like Bullock, who you would think is corrupt, but is honestly just an asshole. But I, I really like the groundwork being laid here and how we have like some figures that are like for Batman, some that are for themselves, and some that are just all about just shady shit. .

Let's move on to Renee on the train. First of all, this little piece of shit, Lieutenant suspends them all. This guy was like super agro, which I know was on purpose,

I think he was just as a agro, as the guy on the Scarecrow episode that was all. Your father would be so disappointed in you. I think the writers just like making their gas characters super agro for the plot.

For the plot.

Hashtag for the plot.

I

the plot.

Montoya not acting like she's suspended. She is, I mean, borderline obsessed with what's going on here. She's got her clues, [00:10:00] she's got the words that she heard through all of the different things that happened, and she's trying to put these context clues together. And while riding the train, she eventually figures out that something is going down at the docks. Why don't you jump in here because you have, you put a little note here about how, how you took this scene. So go ahead and, and jump in on how Renee's presented here.

I really like how Renee is presented as the every woman in this scene. I like how she is writing on a notepad and she's writes the word doc. Then she pieces together. Oh, the docs. And I like her. Oh my God. When she and Batman are grappling up through the air, I really, I fuck with Renee montoya. I, I, I fucked with this character. I really, really appreciate her.

I do too. I hope we see more of her as we go, which I assume we will, but who knows. I could be wrong. Do we see

more of her? Charlie, do you know that?

[00:11:00] Oh, we see much more

We definitely see more of her. Okay, great. See. This is, this is the part

of the joy of watching this series as freshly as a, as a man as opposed to a boy. Yeah, I, I really loved her arc in general throughout this whole thing. And she eventually finds her way to the dock and where trouble is, and she finds a captured Batman. And I know this doesn't really come through on an audio podcast medium, but I just used heavy air quotes for a, a captured Batman. He pretty much just tricks the bad guys into saying where the boss is so he could once again, like pull out his little pocket knife in his sleeve and cut through the rope and come down and start beating the crap out of everybody. And there's just a big long action scene here that you get Batman beaten up bad guys.

You get Renee Montoya basically becoming, she Hulk for a second and throw, like, if you go back and watch that scene, she throws that man no less than 15 feet and he hits that crate so hard that he hits it full bore and slides down it. That's like. A [00:12:00] lot of man to throw that far .

That's like a, that was a fun moment of like, oh, okay, so Renee Montoya is also like on like super soldier serum for a second.

Give us the spin off Renee as Captain America.

I do think it's interesting to see Batman do his team up thing with someone that isn't one of his like posse. Like we already got him working with Robin in Christmas with the Joker, and you saw that working relationship there. This is like, okay, I'm gonna have to use this person. I don't know what they can do or what they're like.

Eventually he's just like, okay, keep your head down. And she doesn't listen to him. But it was interesting to see him 'cause Batman's adaptable. We know that he adapts to a situation, he gets himself outta tight spots, but we haven't necessarily seen him be adaptable with people and utilizing the skills that other people can bring to the table.

I say wait till season three to see what becomes of this relationship and what becomes of how Batman treats his partners. You're gonna, [00:13:00] you're gonna have a lot of shit to say, Steven. You're gonna have a lot of shit to say.

Well, let's, let's earmark that for now. The two things I wanna talk about here are one, we get another iconic Batman imagery moment where the, the goon is shooting his machine gun up at them at the crane tower. and Batman does his like, long dive, let me like get my cape wide and catch the air. And you get this sick, like closeup of his face as he's descending in on this guy. And then boom, he just takes 'em straight out. Iconic Batman shit, man. And kind of, kind of the stuff that we're here for. That's, that's what fills the seats, you know, getting

those iconic Batman moments. The other thing I wanna talk about after Montoya drops the crate on the boat and sinks it so they can't escape and Batman takes down the boss. It's kind of all we get. We don't know who the boss is, we don't know what he wants, what they were really doing. There's no like villain background. What do you, what [00:14:00] do you make of all of this?

I am okay with that. I didn't mind because I enjoyed being in the POV of those three characters so much

Hmm.

that I cared more about how they perceived Batman and about each one of them getting more and more close to who the truth of Batman is, more than who the villain was.

I'm glad that the villain was a write-off because if this villain were a joker or a poison ivy, we wouldn't have room to do what we did here.

I couldn't agree with you more. That's, it would've been distracting even if it was like a seamless character, I feel like, because then you're right. The show would've had to have spent time putting work into the villain rather than spending time putting work into the point of view of the other characters, which is literally the title of the episode.

And I just want to, just to kick off the finale of the episode, I just fucking loved it. When Gordon casually assaulted the lieutenant, just picked him up by his shirt collar and grabbed the badges out of his pocket and was [00:15:00] basically like, go fuck yourself.

This is over. Like, we took down the bad guy. What do you want from us here? So, good on, good on Gordon assaulting coworkers for the good of his police force

Sometimes you gotta assault a coworker.

sometimes. And we do not condone this. You have to assault a coworker. All right. Well, let's talk about Batman for a second now that we've rolled through the plot of the episode.

And I just want to settle on the lack of first person focus on Batman in this episode

it's great. I like that we're building up the public perception of him. We're really seeing the mythos that Batman is building around himself because he is a human man. At the very end of the day, Batman's a human dude. So if he doesn't have the mystique and the clout around him, he is just a rich boy in a costume.

So keeping that sense of being untouchable and being larger than life is what helps Batman move the way that he does. So [00:16:00] this really supports. all that Batman is and what Batman does. I, I honestly, I think this would've been in some ways a cooler opening than on leather wings. I liked on leather wings because of how it juxtaposed Batman with man bat.

But I think what's happening in POV is what they were trying to do in on leather wings, and this landed way more solidly for me

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Really, really well done from start to finish and how this episode was executed. I just wanna run through some of the Riddler trophies that I found while researching this episode. The first one we chat chatted about a little bit while we were talking about Detective Harvey Bullock. But according to Kevin Terri, there were two scenes that were cut that lent more background motivation to both Officer Montoya with flashbacks of her being called a liar as a child, which I'm sure would scar you for life, obviously,

and Harvey Bullock and his dad telling him to be a hero and to never trust teamwork and to just [00:17:00] always be the one who runs in first, which, you know, probably would've given us a little bit more credence to why that dude ran in without waiting for his teammates to show up.

So The next Ridler trophy that we found is this is the first ever voice acting credit of Ron Perlman. Ever heard of him?

Oh my God. Hell boy.

Dr. The driller in this episode. So he's the, the big cleft chin guy with the drill that in the black leather jacket that Batman beats up a couple times. Not only is Ron Perlman known for his role as Hellboy and as Clay Morrow on Sons of Anarchy, he actually had a really, really prolific voice acting career which included the Fallout games.

He's actually the opening speech narrator of every single one of those games that war, war Never Changes Moment. That's always Ron Pearlman. He's the, the news anchor in the beginning of Fallout four, when everything goes as shit. So, and later on, Ron Pearlman will appear again, more meaningfully in the DC animated universe as the one clay face.

So we will be looking forward [00:18:00] to the vocal stylings of Ron Perlman for pretty much the rest of this series, and as long as we're talking about the DC extended animated universe. So we're pretty excited about that. Shout out to you, Ron Perlman, come on the podcast. Moving on. This is the first episode where Batman does not appear out of costume. So we get nothing but Batman. No sign of Bruce Wayne in this episode, which, you know, makes sense. There's nowhere really for Bruce Wayne to be in this one, but I do think it's interesting that we get a, a Batman only episode for the first time. And the final Riddler trophy that I was able to uncover is that the Danny Elfman Batman theme plays very briefly as Batman is driving the forklift across the dock towards the bad guys.

So if you want to go back and catch that little musical moment of the Danny Elfman theme, you can catch that for yourself.

I did not catch that. That's very cool.

Yeah, super fun. Well shout out to the DC animated universe wiki that I continue to use for this half-assed internet research to find the Riddler trophies. But I'm having a lot of fun with it and I learn something every time, so that's pretty cool. [00:19:00] So, last but not least for this episode, Charlie, we have to give it a battering rating. As always, I'd like you to go first. How many batter rings are you giving POV.

I am gonna give POV batter rings. Four out of five bat rings, like pretty poison. This is a great episode. not quite a masterpiece, like something like almost got him or Heart of Ice is gonna be that we've yet to cover. But POV is a underrated gem. Also, I was a total bitch going into this viewing 'cause I didn't think it was gonna be as good as it was.

I don't remember it being this great. But it's a, it's a great Batman story.

You talk shit. I was there. You

I talk shit. I talk shit 'cause I care. It's outta love Steve.

'cause I care. amazing. I am just behind you on this one. I'm giving this one, three and a half batter rings. I [00:20:00] agree that it's probably better than I was expecting it to be. I do like how they split into the three perspectives and the world building that they did with Batman. Now this is my own, I'm essentially building the world of my scaling system as we go here. So when we build our own worlds, we kind of also get to create our own rules along the way. And when I, and spoiler, I did see that Charlie was gonna give this four battering. So this is what made me think about it a little bit more. And I'm essentially reserving four and above for episodes that I consider bangers. They don't have to be perfect, but I think that they have to be bangers. And I think that this episode falls just slightly short of being a banger

I like the overall direction of it. But yeah, it falls just short of banger status for me, so it's gonna hit three and a half for me.

That's fair. That's very fair.

Thanks for affirming me, buddy. All right. Moving on to our second episode titled The Forgotten. The forgotten aired [00:21:00] on October 8th, 1992. It was directed by Boyd Kirkland and written by Jules Dennis. The plot of the episode is when unhoused people start disappearing from the Bowery, Bruce goes undercover as Lowlife gaff Morgan to investigate. He soon ends up as an amnesia victim, forced to work with other kidnapped men in a treacherous and remote mining camp. So we opened up the episode with Bruce hanging out at a, at the Bowery. And the Bowery is in some form or another, a a soup kitchen. A kitchen that serves un unhoused people, maybe folks that need a meal, whatever.

They don't really just define it exactly, but we open up with Bruce talking to a man who seems to be running this place. And this man's voicing some concerns that people are disappearing, regulars of his people that he used to see all the time. And they're just nowhere to be found, doesn't see them. And these are people that were coming on a pretty regular schedule.

So he seems pretty worried about it. And he states pretty clearly that the police aren't really interested and looking [00:22:00] into scenarios with unhoused people. How fucking 2023 does that sound, Charlie? How

sad is it that this was 21 goddamn years ago? This issue could drink

still, still a problem. Still a massive problem.

It's still a massive problem. So Bruce obviously takes it upon his own shoulders to start to figure out what's going on. And I'm on the fence about how good of a strategy this is. He ds his hair white, he puts on some ratty clothes. He wears this like, Hey, what you got a job for me friend? Like, some like he's fucking rocky and essentially goes undercover as an unhoused person in the Bowery area of Gotham. Why is he not Batman for this

hmm. How can I wrap my, okay. What was Bruce thinking? I'm wondering, maybe Bruce was thinking that he was gonna find dead bodies, but then again, if he was gonna find dead bodies, [00:23:00] it would would've been better to be Batman. Or maybe he, okay, I'm gonna give him some credit here. Maybe the point of Batman is to scare

Mm-Hmm.

and to intimidate criminals.

And Bruce might've been a little bit more mindful that he was going into a community. that was already very vulnerable, that didn't do anything wrong. So he wanted to just get information to satisfy his hunch to see if something was going on or not, so that people would trust him enough to say something to him.

So I think that Bruce was being a little bit cognizant of the fact that he did not need to go and scare the shit out of the unhoused community and to just put on his scary Batman voice. I think he wanted to just come as someone familiar. That's how I can wrap my head around him just coming in a disguise, if you would.

Yeah, [00:24:00] 'cause I think we would be preconditioned to think that he's gonna wait in the shadows until he sees something like that going down, and then he would come in and rescue the person that's being Quote unquote attacked and then interrogate the bad guys from there. But I guess I didn't consider the like, oh yeah, I can then go and use my platform as Bruce Wayne. And then when people go, well, how did you figure this out? I can tell them a way that I figured it out that isn't, I'm Batman, you know? Because like, yeah, I went, I went undercover, and now I'm this billionaire being like, Hey, there are people in the unhoused community being captured

Also I, something that bumps me. I don't get why he didn't bring a couple of gadgets with him.

Well, do you think that that would tip people off?

Oh, he can hide them though. He can hide a gadget or a battering or something

I'm

saying if he uses them, if he uses them with no mask.

Mm.[00:25:00]

People are just gonna go, oh, yeah, B Bruce Wayne just happens to have a, a grapple hook.

But then again, but then again, he is dressed like somebody that isn't Bruce Wayne, I could wrap my head around him getting away with, especially because he is trained, he was trained by the Leah shadows. He could make himself obscure through a battering to make something fall down, then pop back.

Or not even a smoke bomb or,

right, you're right. There are ways that he could get around it, and I feel like we could argue these angles to the cows come home and I guess that's just uh, good riding. Well, whatever, but

we'll, we'll go with the

we're nerds.

which is a, I mean, that is literally the point, right? But what does happen is Bruce gets run up on by a few big old thugs, and they originally are like, oh yeah, we got a job opportunity for you. And then Bruce, of course, plays the part really well, keeps his hands in his pocket and just casually starts beating the living crap out of these guys. buT somehow gets, it was funny.

[00:26:00] It was really, really fun. And I think that was really his plan. He is like, if guys are getting snatched up, I want them to think that I'm helpless and then I'm gonna very much so not be helpless and I'm gonna get the information that way. And again, I think you're right in being like, I'm also not gonna scare this population that is already probably having enough issues today. But he doesn't go to plan. My guy gets a club to the back of the head, gets knocked out, and apparently gets hit so hard. He doesn't even remember who he goddamn is. Wakes up in the middle of Arizona. It's the middle, it looks like the middle of Arizona, where at this camp you can't, you can't disagree with me there.

Do you disagree that it looks like just a totally

different desert place that

It really does.

It doesn't look like Gotham at all.

They, they've covered a distance. I mean, I guess we'll get to it later, but it just, it doesn't seem close, which is kind of funny.

But anyway, we meet, we meet two of his new coworkers, salvo and Riley. Obviously these are gonna be his mining BFFs. They get him orientated on where he [00:27:00] is. We also meet the bad guy, another big bad boss with no real name or backstory or anything else that's ever gonna be done for him. So I actually think it's really interesting that we get two of those back to back. But yeah, they kind of run him through where they are. What happened they have like kind of different degrees of how they got there. Salvo seemed to have volunteered to go there where Riley was just straight up, jumped and captured like Bruce was. And, and maybe that shows some progression of, they were maybe starting with advantage of vulnerable people and then they needed more people.

So they started getting a little bit more forceful about it and.

This is essentially going to be their undoing by the end. I think the, the only thing that the boss really does here is establish what I'm referring to as Chekhov's hot Box, because he just like establishes his dominance by throwing some random minor in a hot box to bake.

And like everyone who's ever watched television or a movie before is like, okay, well that's gonna happen to Batman later.

Mm-Hmm.

And you had a take on who this bad [00:28:00] guy reminded you of. Why don't you fill in the audience of that

Oh, totally reminds me of Governor John Radcliffe from Pocahontas, the Disney version

The, wait, what other version is there?

Wait, is he a real historical figure?

I mean, technically they all are right.

I don't remember why, but I remember watching Pocahontas as a young child and fucking hating it like every goddamn second of it and being like, I'm never gonna watch that movie again. So I don't think I've watched it since I was maybe like 10

Okay. He's real. He's real

Yeah.

a real piece of shit. So

in real life they are very much so. Real pieces of

all of them. All of them, including John Smith,

Oh yeah.

We don't have to talk about it, but fuck the colonizers is

fuck

what we're gonna leave it at. God bless America.

My God

bless America.

Anyway, that's who the bad guy reminded us of. So no sympathy for our guy today.

Yeah, totally, totally. Just eating a chicken, a Turkey leg or a chicken leg. I [00:29:00] don't know what the fuck he was munching on, but must've been good 'cause he was throwing people in the hot box left and right. hE just had no skills. He wasn't physically intimidating. He didn't know how to fight. He didn't even, this dude didn't even have a weapon.

He was just pointing at people. I'm like, why does he have minions? I was very thrown by why he

I have to imagine, and maybe it was because of the way he was dressed, maybe it was because of the way he was dressed up, is he maybe just had deep pockets, or he was working for somebody with deep pockets, and so everyone was getting paid really well to have to listen to this guy. That's the only reason I could think of for why he would be in charge, because of course, the episode doesn't really do anything to tell us why, other than just telling us that he's in charge and you better deal with it.

We're gonna roll back to Gotham. and talk about Alfred for a second. 'cause our guy Alfred, is back in action after not really s seeing him at all. In the last episode, and I [00:30:00] just wanna talk about this really quickly. Did you ever establish a system with your friends, your parents, your family members of a, if you don't hear from me by X time or if I don't hear from you by X time, I'm gonna essentially like send out the dogs to go find you.

If I go hook up with a rando, sure.

Yeah, sure. Great. That's a perfectly acceptable example of this. If you go and hook up with a rando from, from, you know, whatever medium that you go and find it on, you have a system where you're like, Hey, I'm going to see this person. If you don't hear from me by X time, like, come, come find me. it doesn't really seem like offered a Batman had that established.

Mm-Hmm. But Bruce is too. Bruce is over confident in these streets. He's like, I was trained by ninjas. I don't need an SOS.

My dude's not worried. He's not even really thinking about it. And he's not thinking that anything's wrong until Bruce is missing appointments [00:31:00] because somehow that is something that Bruce doesn't let happen.

He always holds up his Bruce Wayne side. So that is the thing where Alfred's like, okay. Okay, let's figure this out. And then he sees that one of the cars is missing. He's the tracker for one of the cars. And then turns into, oh, oh, fucking Alfred does like this stealth. And we're kind of jumping, I, I'm sticking with Alfred through, 'cause they kind of jump around here a little bit between the prison camp and, and what Alfred does. But just to kind of close the book on Alfred before he goes and finds Bruce, he does this like crazy ninja move and it's, and we'll talk about this a little bit later when he's gonna find Bruce.

But getting back to The the prison and the prison. I'm calling it just the, the mind camp, wherever the hell Bruce is. He's having a dream. And I didn't totally get this, and the first time I was watching it, I was also cooking breakfast at the same time. So I was actually at a moment where I was looking away and he is like, okay, he's in a dream. He is like, it's [00:32:00] gonna tell us something. And I look away and I hear the joker's voice and I'm like, wait, what that I had to like stop and turn around and like actually rewind 20 seconds and be like, how did we get here? And so I guess it's like his subconscious telling him that he's Batman and that Joker is his antagonist or whatever, and this is who he is. Like this struggle. But it's felt, I don't know, it felt outta place.

I, I think that it's like a dream where something random will happen and your brain will make a snap association. I think he just saw himself in the mirror and he immediately went to, oh, why are you dressed like that? You know, you're rich. And his reflection started laughing at him in this weird way, and his brain made the association of laughing, oh, the Joker, the jokers here.

And I think that led to that, and him seeing people who are, . Unhoused and [00:33:00] him handing out money, but then more people appearing and him feeling that he can never do enough and we know that he has an insecurity of not living up to his dad's name. So that coming to the surface,

yeah, so essentially as promised Bruce and Riley land themselves in the hot box because they decided to fight back on the guards because they were protecting our, our lovely boy salvo from getting tossed into the box himself. And while they're roasting and melting and salvos, essentially lamenting the fact that he's never gonna see his family again.

That is the thing that triggers him, remembering that. He is Batman. He's Bruce Wayne. And essentially that kicks his super strength in too. 'cause he just kicks the fucking wall right off of that thing. And my guy is off in the Arizona desert running away from all of the guards. All right, so we're back on Alfred, who is very much so no longer double o Alfred, apparently putting him in the cockpit of a plane. [00:34:00] All of his druthers just flies straight away from him. And my guy's freaking out as he goes through the Beggars Canyon run.

Not to make another Star Wars reference, but it's just like shooting Whopper rats back home. And it, it's funny 'cause they kind of, the intubation makes you feel like he's flying the plane, but at other moments he's not. And so I think the plane is maybe like giving him the illusion that he's flying it, where he, the plane's actually smart enough to be like, no, I actually got this. And we can tell that the plant is literally smart enough to just take over the controls for itself because it's SAS is Alfred, it sa just straight up SAS is him. He is basically like you, bucket of bolts, put this thing down right now and the ship just goes, you're funeral, but then lands.

This was a Ridler trophy that I ended up not using because I, and I don't know how you feel about this, but we can talk about inconsistencies in the show if you ever want to. But one inconsistency that they pointed out here is that the, the bat wing is constantly shown landing and taking off vertically. And so [00:35:00] like, they kind of like hand wave it by being like, maybe Alfred wasn't as talented of a pilot and couldn't figure out how to do the vertical landing rather than the horizontal, normal landing. But that was an interesting note that I saw on that. Do you have any thoughts about the, the, the batwing landing?

I liked it in theory. I just, for some reason, the voice acting didn't do it for me, like the performance, it was very, uh, maybe I missed Clive in this regard too. I don't know if my ear is as sharp as yours and just noting the difference between them. It just, I didn't believe that he was as panicked as he was.

It felt a little too goofy for my liking. It felt I, it didn't land for me. It felt very, mm, what are we doing here?

He seems he's too Bruce Wayne voice

Really?

to me, he's too Bruce Wayne voice, and he doesn't need to be more Batman voice, [00:36:00] but I thought Clive had a good, for lack of a better term, he just had a better butler voice or a better Alfred voice. In my mind, like, I don't know, I just need you to be more Michael Kane than fucking like Peewee Herman.

I don't know, that's obviously like a,

That's brutal.

but like I would just like it to be like, I still think that you can show panic and lack of control flying a bat wing without sounding like a clown,

Mm-Hmm.

and we already have a clown who's trying to sound like a clown. So anyway, I miss Clive. That's my opinion that I'm gonna continue to champion until. I feel like Alfred's back in a spot. And then yes, of course he says the line that we hate, which is, I claim this land for Spain, and once again, fuck the colonizers. So that's a, a, a rare moment of an L for Alfred. But the good thing is Batman's back. All right, that is back in his suit. He's backed the fuck shit up. He does another feat of Superhuman [00:37:00] strength, where he literally takes two men by the collars and fully throws them at full speed at somebody

and actually gets them to fly more than two inches, which is again, incredible being able to throw grown ass humans like baseballs.

very true.

that's, that's the strength of a billionaire right there. And then obviously guns get involved and they have to run into the mine shaft to hide. And this, and I'll let you take it from here, is probably my favorite action sequence of the series so far.

Hmm.

So Batman picks off the Goons one by one. It reminded me of the Acum series. It also reminded me of Christian Bale taking out Falconi and his goons and Batman begins. And I believe he did that at the shipping yard or the docks or what have you, and Batman begins. But it was a very cool way to use the space to show that Batman is an intellectual fighter.

I, [00:38:00] I love it more, more injected into my veins,

yeah. We both love scenes like this, where it's a, a lot of guys in a small confined space, preferably with darkness involved, first of all, I can't even call it hubris. It's just straight up stupidity to be like, yeah, let's turn the lights off. Someone named Batman isn't gonna be able to see in the dark. someone who's so technologically advanced that they had a fucking jet fly into a canyon basically on autopilot. Definitely not gonna have night vision.

right?

That sounds like a great idea. Anyway, bad guys are stupid, which is, I guess why they're bad guys. 'cause they're not smart enough to do anything else with their lives. Anyway, he takes out all the bad guys. He takes out the big bad guy, saves him from his own death, which is just another solid tenet of Batman saving people who don't deserve to be saved. And he gets these people home and Salvo iss gonna stay with Riley for a little bit, which I thought was super cute. And Riley just, you know, I, I think it's, [00:39:00] it's a low key moment, but I think it's very true. Oftentimes the people with the least, are the most generous with what they have in

Mm

other people.

mm-Hmm.

And I think that's shown very well here with Riley, where he's like, I, I don't know how much space we got for you, but you're welcome to stay here until you figure something out.

Like. That's not a kindness that wealthy people often extend to people less fortunate than them. So I, I think they did a really good job of showing the heart of that. And I think another attempt at addressing the unhoused population problem in this episode was like lightly touched upon this little final ending sequence where Bruce reveals that he's Bruce fucking Wayne and has a billion dollars, and was basically like, I'll offer you a job that might be able to help you out, which I know you kind of had a problem with.

So I'll let you take on on here. Why?

I get, okay, there's two sides of it. I'm gonna give the team some credit. I get the reveal of a [00:40:00] limo pulling up so that they see that Bruce is more than meets the eye. I get that part. , but the delivery of the line of like, oh, yeah, I can offer you a job as he walks to his limo.

As the door shuts, if I were to rewrite that scene, I would've had it to where Bruce makes the offer before the limo pulls up, Bruce makes the offer.

It's like, I want you to come work for me. It's like, come work for me. Doing what it's like, but I, I, I don't know, am I qualified? It's like, don't worry about it. I'll take care of any, everything you need. I'll take care of your family. I got you. And, and they're like, what do you mean? Then the limo pulls up.

I

and he goes like, Bruce Wayne, nice to meet you.

yes.

'cause everyone knows who Bruce Wayne is.

Yeah, that would've been cool. That would've been better. I think that scene, that script needed one more pass just to make the order [00:41:00] of . His offering and his generosity land a bit more like it's there. It's not horrible, but it, it feels a little, eh, it feels like he's flexing on them a bit.

Which is a common problem we've come across with Billion Air Bruce so far is that it, see, and potentially it's the writing, but I think we've seen multiple moments of him not quite figuring out how to be a human to other humans rather than being like a billionaire amongst other people who aren't quite on that same level as him.

He definitely has a little bit of rich kid syndrome. At least that's how the writers seem to be presenting it to us.

That's how the writers are presenting it to us. Yes. And the writers, like so many people in America just revere rich people, you know? So I think we're seeing that bleed through the writing. They're like, it's so cool that Batman's rich, you know, look, isn't it so cool that he has a butler? And he has. So I think

Yeah. What

a power move of

[00:42:00] Yeah, what a power move. I think that the writers are showing their colors of how they view wealth a little bit. I'm not saying that it's malicious, but I think some blind spots are showing through in the writing.

Bad guy. Put away, day saved. Batman's done it again. I wanna touch on one thing about Batman and one thing about Alfred before we head into our Riddler trophies and close up the episode for today. And we didn't talk about this much throughout the episode, so I want to give its moment right now, and that's the voice work of Kevin Conroy and how it was kind of utilized throughout this entire episode. I think it was flexed beyond just Batman in Bruce Wayne. We obviously had the voice of Gaff Morgan, who sounded not like a Jedi, but like an Italian lobster who is ready to do some dirty work. do have the Bruce, when he has amnesia, which you know, theoretically is the most pure Bruce voice we're ever gonna get because this is Bruce [00:43:00] only being himself with no knowledge of who he is beyond that. So you would have to think that the voice that he's using and all the mannerisms he uses are just the ones that naturally come to him and then when you have the big moment inside of the hot box where Bruce flashes back to the memory of his dad tossing him in the air with his mother watching and he remembers who he is, that like growl that he lets out to ri now that he's back in Batman voice and he is like, pull it together, ri oh, it's so good.

It made me wanna run through a wall. And then he proceeded to kick through a wall. So I guess that totally tracks.

Agreed. I don't have much more to add other than the point to Kevin Conroy being the goat, just the absolute best voice that at least in our generation, will hear as Batman. He can't be touched. He's so fantastic. I miss him so much.

He the goat for sure. And then just finally to land around on Alfred. I just can't wait for the show to do more with him [00:44:00] because he's such an important part of the show. And don't know, I just feel like It just screams they haven't figured him out yet.

Mm-Hmm.

like from, he just feels so inconsistent and I know that there's a lot of really good stuff to come with him. And maybe I, I mean, we're probably being too harsh on the new voice on Ephraim. I'm sure he's trying to find his way as he gets thrust into this new role as well, since he was like a mid-season replacement and stuff like that. But what do you, what do you see from Alfred so far versus like, what are you looking forward to seeing from him?

tHey're definitely, they're leaning on Alfred a lot

Mm-Hmm.

in these episodes. They're 70% there. I don't think that they quite know his humor yet, but I think they have his heart, Alfred's heart, they're getting right. He caress about Bruce. He cares about Bruce's wellbeing. He doesn't quite understand.

Why Bruce [00:45:00] is going about this mission, the way he's going about it, but he supports him. I think that Alfred has a dry witt that the writers haven't quite learned to capitalize on. Sometimes they get it, but when they get it, it feels accidental. And when they take a broad swing with his humor, it's more like Wwo wa,

Yeah.

They'll nail it.

And I think Alfred shines when he says less and when he points out and observation of what Batman's doing, and he highlights the absurdity of it.

Let's move on to those ridler trophies before we give that final battering rating and, and get ourselves outta here. So we, we kind of Tiptoed around this a little bit, but Bruce, Tim is actually quoted saying that he originally didn't want to do this episode. He didn't feel that it gave proper play to addressing the problem of the unhoused population. Rather, it used more [00:46:00] of the, that situation as like an exploitive background to push the story forward, which I think you can definitely make a case it does. The scenes involving Bruce dreaming that he doesn't have enough money for everyone, and the end where he offers the two other folks a job, were actually attempts to place a bandaid. Over the fact that the team didn't feel like that they had properly addressed that issue to use it as more as just like background dressing. Obviously we don't think it went all the way there effectively enough, but it is nice to hear that at least, that they were thinking about it. And the, the portion that I pulled this through actually did go on to say that there is an episode later on in, in this series that tries to readdress this issue of the unhoused population again and does it a little bit more effectively.

So we'll look forward to seeing something like that in the future. iNteresting note from b, s and P standards and practices, the thing that makes shows less fun 'cause they make you take out all of the fun things like swears and, and body parts. So b, s and P refused to let the [00:47:00] show have anyone that was experiencing homelessness not be depicted as anything other than an adult male. The opening scene where Bruce was walking through that alleyway of, you saw a bunch of unhoused men or theoretically unhoused men, was actually originally animated to show families, women and children, all that stuff.

And BSP was like, yeah, that's not gonna fly with us. They can

ooh.

be depicted as men. So that was super interesting, especially because obviously that's not the case. But it was something that standard in practices was very uncomfortable with in 1992.

Oh

as progressive as things can be, 1992, still arrears its ugly head every now and again. My final Riddler trophy for this episode is that this is the first episode to feature Alfred outside of Wayne Manor. So our guy, Alfred at least got to walk outside and experience some of that harsh Arizona desert Sunshine

Hmm.

I'm just gonna keep calling it Arizona because it just looked so

It looks like it. It looks like it.

It does those rock towers, man. It just, maybe Utah, [00:48:00] something like that. States that are not theoretically close to Gotham City. Just a short jet flight away. Anyway, let's move on to the battery ENG grading as we normally do, Charlie, you went first, so I'm gonna go ahead and take my first swing at this one. I'm going to give this one, two and a half battering straight down the middle. I consider a two and a half battering rating as an episode that I didn't mind watching all the way through to the end, but one that I'm probably never going to purposely return to. That's kind of where my, my two and a half rating sits for me these days.

So it was cool. It was interesting. I actually thought I was gonna like it less than I did. I, I kind of go into episodes like this, especially like amnesia, prison breakout episodes and superhero stories. Like, don't really do it for me.

But I didn't mind this one.

It's two and a half bat rings for me as well. I mean, that . Villain was just so pathetic. I don't understand why he was in charged, and even [00:49:00] when Batman confronted him, he was like, no. While still having the chicken wing in his hand. It was just so pathetic. But maybe they meant it to be pathetic, and

well, so that's interesting and I'll jump in on that quickly. There was another Riddler Trophy that I left out where, because essentially I don't, I just think it's aged poorly, is that the point of that villain was essentially to be a fat slob, for lack of a better term. Like they purposefully tried to design him to be overweight and gross, and it's incredibly fat phobic.

And again, something that we used to do in the nineties that we try not to do today, which is like a equate. someone's size being larger to them being a bad person or a

Hmm.

not to be respected as much, or someone that's just has no redeeming qualities about them. I just think all of that is rested very heavily in fat phobia. And that the nineties were rested very heavily in fatphobia. So I think that kind of tracks. I say the nineties, like it's still not a thing today, but whatever. [00:50:00] We

don't have to stand on our soapbox for too long about it. But yeah, so I guess the voice actor who did this character was actually eating while recording, so

those sounds of slobbering and whatever were actually him, like getting down on his chow and stuff like that.

Hmm.

So they did it on purpose. Don't think it works, but yeah, I guess they did it on purpose

two and a half batter rings from both of us. we gotta get a sound effect of like the batter rings hitting each other because

We do

them at the same place. So just pretend like we've inserted that in here.

Anyway, do you have any final thoughts about these episodes before we, we head outta here?

POV is, in my opinion, a great episode, the forgotten. It's okay. It's okay. I don't hate it. I don't hate it,

hear that.

but I, I think that they're still in the process of trying to find the balance in their stories. I appreciate how many swings the animated series took at doing [00:51:00] Bruce Wayne's stories where he is the star, them taking so many confidence swings, pays off later when they start knocking it out of the park more consistently.

And Steve, I can't wait for us to get there. we're seeing a lot of their trial and error in most of the episodes we've covered so far.

I'm very excited for the bangers to come. I think we maybe have a couple of them coming sooner rather than later, which is also very exciting. But this is gonna do it for this episode of Charlie and Steve. Watch stuff. We covered POV and we covered the forgotten in the Batman Animated Series. Next time we come back, we're gonna be doing things a little bit differently.

We're only going to be covering one episode. Of the next Batman, the animated series episode coming up, it's going to be be a Clown. And so what are we possibly gonna do with all that extra time? Well, true to what, you know, this podcast is called Charlie and Steve Watch stuff. So we thought we would just kind of sit down and have a little discussion about the things that we're watching right now. So

this is our [00:52:00] little opportunity to take a break from Batman. Not that we wanna take a break from Batman, but it, it's just working out that we have a two-parter coming up and we just have this one episode left before that two-parter comes here. So we're just gonna, you know, put some credence to the name and, and talk about some stuff that we've been watching lately.

So be ready for that. And be sure to rate us on wherever you're getting your podcast. Five star ratings are always appreciated. Your reviews and your feedback is always appreciated. And we just love that you're here on the journey with us and keep sharing the show with your friends and all of that good jazz.

So for myself, Steve Selick and my friend Charlie Peppers, we will see you on the next watch session.

Bye.

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