Night falls once again upon Gotham! Join us as we dive into the second half of Amazon’s Batman: The Caped Crusader. We’ve got ghosts! We’ve got corrupt cops! We’ve got missing children! But best of all, we’ve got the legend Marc Bernardin (writer for Caped Crusader, Eyes of Wakanda, and more) to join us as we navigate the supernatural, the original take on Harley Quinn, and the season’s Harvey Dent storyline.
Plus, Jason and Rosie saw the Crow! And they have a couple thoughts!
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Warning warning.
Today's episode contains spoilers for Batman, The Cape Crusader and The Crow and oh Spooky Denizens of x ray Vision. My name is Rosie Knight, and welcome back to x ray Vision, the podcast where we dive deep into your favorite shows, movies, comics and pop culture. Coming to you as always from iHeart Podcast, where we'll be bringing you two new episodes a week every Tuesday and Thursday, and sometimes you even get extra episodes. Aren't you lucky? But let's not waste any time. Jason is currently on top of the Gotham Police Department lighting up the back signal, and that means it's time to jump into the second half of Batman Cape Crusader. First, we're covering episode five, then hopping into the Batmobile to chat with Mark bernardin writer for episode six, Night Ride, and what an episode that was. And then we dive into the Batcave to discuss episodes seven to ten. Finally we watched The Crow and we have thoughts. They are not the same thoughts, they are divisive thoughts. But first, in the airlock, we're recapping episodes five to ten of The Cape Crusader with the help of Mark bernardin.
And now we're stepping out of the airlock to talk about episodes five through ten of Batman Caped Crusader, The excellent, the truly excellent Batman shockingly good. Episode five. Let's start here with the of the debut of Harley Quinn in the Caped Crusader universe. I loved this episode. Mea loved the thing changed. I love the tweaks they made to her origin story and just awesome. What did you make of it?
Yeah?
I love it.
The stress of her regard. Written by Haley Gross, directed by Matt Peters, This is maybe my favorite episode. Now, I don't know, I do think that you know, we're gonna have Mark bernardin here talking about night Ride, which I do think is up there with fantastic episodes. But you know what, I love this representation of Harley. I love how cute see she is when she's doctor quins out. I love that she is in this kind of romantic entanglement trying to date Rename and Montoya, which is really funny, the idea of like the question and Harlequin dating. I also like the version of Harlequin here, who has you know gone rogue had her breaking point moment without the Joker.
Yeah, there's an agency there, there's Yeah, it's she wasn't corrupted in this mm hm. You know, honestly a really terrible and toxic way. She is the person in the driver's seat behind her own personal mania and turned to the dark side. And I found it very, very compelling. And I found the connection between the alter ego and the ego Doctor Quinzel and Harley Quinn to be that much more engrossing.
Because and also she gets to have an alter ego, Whereas when harle and Quinzel becomes Harley Quinn in you know, whether it's Batman animated series or whether it's you know, the comic books, that becomes all of her. Whereas here we do get that duality and that cheery, funny, curvey, hilarious, cheeky Harley is there in Harleen, but she's far more dark and kind of deranged as Harley Quinn. And what I really like, I think any great Batman villain is like a mirror for Batman.
I've written a.
Lot about how in Batman Returns, Like one of my favorite things is like, you know, the Penguin is essentially like what if Batman's family didn't love him. Like he's rich, he's a son of Gotham, but he doesn't have any love for his parents. His parents abandoned him. He grew up without the trappings of what Batman has. And I really like here that Harley Quinn's journey is essentially like she does the same thing as Batman. She's trying to fix Gotham.
But she's doing it in this it's a lot worse way, like in this completely deranged, like cruel way, and it's almost like Gotham broke her the way Gotham broke Batman and made him who he is.
We get to see that here with Harlene and this kind of awful kind of torture that she's putting these villains through. And as again, just as you know, this is the kind of stuff we love.
I also love that they.
Use this episode as a way to showcase all these really outrageous old Batman villains that you would see in like sixty six Batman, like you know, King Tut and stuff like that that you wouldn't usually get to see. So yeah, I just I think this is like such a great example of what this show does well.
Next up, Night Ride written by Mark Bernardon, directed by Christopher Berkeley, and let's just go to our interview with the writer of this episode, Mark Bernardon.
Mark Bernardin is a screenwriter whose work has appeared in Vox, Macina, Castle Rock, and Masters of the Universe, among them.
Any More.
He's here today to talk about Batman, the Cape Crusader, and if we're very nice, he might even tease a little bit about Eyes of Wakanda, the new Disney animated series.
Is coming soon. But we'll see. We'll start with Batman. We'll start with Batman.
Hell, I'm good, I will tell you everything about Eyes of Wakanda.
I will tell you he.
Like, what's what's Disney gonna do?
Like, what's Marvel good? That they're really cash, They're very chill.
Yeah, it's fine. It's not coming out for another year or so.
Just tell everybody, get people excited.
What's the worst that could happen?
Mark, what's your origin story with Batman?
My origin story with Batman begins, as I imagine many old men's stories begin with the sixty six Batman with Adam West, the first time I've ever seen the character. You know, and and depending on your perspective, that is either the best way to meet Batman or the worst way to be Batman. I choose to believe it's the best way because it's a kids show for kids, and I was a kid, and it was bright and colorful and it moved and you know, And I've read those sort of reappreciations of Adam West as of late, like I think when he just when he passed, even before then, the level of commitment that he had to that bit is astonishing. Like he never breaks. He is always just right down the middle. He is always the fixed point in space and time around which the mania of Batman can revolve. And like that is not easy to do, to be a straight man with, you know, and do the batusi straight man is so hard to pull off, but he sticks the landing every time. And so like it was that when I was a kid, and then later it slowly came back around to the Dark Knight returns to Frank Miller's book, you know, and Frank it was Frank Miller really like that in Batman Year one, yeah, or my two sort of the twin poles of Batman for me, And then just became a fan and then just started buying the books every month, and then you know, like never went that far back but kept going forward. And then Batman the animated series happened, which I think blew everybody's minds wide open, like, wait, this is what I just saw this Burton movie and I thought that was cool, But what is this now? And I think that that was a huge paradigm shift in lots of people's appreciation for this character in a real way.
Yeah.
So then you know, jumping forward to Cape Crusader, was it Ed Brubaker who brought you onto the project?
Yeah, Like I'd known Ed for a while through comic book circles and comic book writing circles, and he'd been on the podcast that I do with Kevin Smith Fatman Beyond once or twice, and every now and again we would text each other and just commiserate about TV writing and sort of and Swan he just and he just like popped up on the text. He was like, hey, man, do you want to write an episode of Batman? Does it say less? Say less?
Like that's it.
I'm in all right, The answer is yes, regardless of what the rest of the information is, I will happily write an episode of Batman. He was like, well, you know, we had a writer's room, and the writer's rooms kind of disbanded, but we have these episodes and like Wreckers writing one, and like I'm writing one of course, and Bruce's and we'd love for you to come aboard and take one on. And I said yes, because again, you know, if somebody asked you if you're a god ray, you say yes. My default answer to somebody offering me a thing. And it was a phenomenal experience in that I've never written Batman before. You know, I've been working in comics for almost fifteen years twenty years at that point, and never gotten a chance to swing at Batman. But to get to write Bruce Tim's Batman, you know, to get to write Brue Baker's Batman, to get to dig under the hood of that character and that world and find the lines between. And it was always weird, even in Batman. The animals here is right, he's got a car and a cell phone, but there's dirigibles and you know, like where are we? When are we? This weird future noir thing, and like this was even more so. It's like this is definitely in like thirties and forties, you know, but again he's got a batmobile and again like he doesn't have a computer. He has to go to the library to do research, but he's still like all of the weirdness of that world took just a little bit of time to calibrate too. But I mean, nobody knows Batman like Bruce Tim knows Batman, and so to get notes from Bruce Tim on Batman was the height of surreality. Yeah, it really was. It was just it was, it was, you know, kid nerd stuff.
Let's talk about your episode, the Wonderful night Ride, episode six in the first season. Wonderful, wonderfully spooky episode with a great antagonist who I love that his bit is just he hates poor people and that endures. How'd you end up with this episode?
You know, I think it was I'm not going to say it was like random luck of the draw, but it was. I think they were specifically looking for somebody of color to handle this episode because I think getting the Lucius Fox stuff right, getting the pop and midnight stuff right, getting the kind of class warfare stuff right. They very much, you know, did not want it to be an episode about race, but it they were very much like, no, it's an episode about class, which in a big city also functions like an episode about race, because that just tends to be the way that breaks down. And so it was you know, figuring out, all right, how supernatural is he? Like is he a llegit ghost? Is he a guy pretending to be a ghost, Like how are we hiding the ball on the truth of it? You know, and just being in Batman's pov like he's investigating this thing. The audience should believe what Batman believes, you know. And then when Batman rounds that corner into like wait a minute, like I punched him and he wasn't there and my hand is cold, and this is not just a guy in a costume. This is not special effects. This is real, you know, like just figuring out how to round that story out in the season in that has no other.
Supervis Yeah, yeah, very notable, Like how.
To make that all play? And I think it was it was rooting it in Gotham story, in Gotham history. It was rooting it in sort of you know, Lucius's perspective on it, you know, and also having conversations about what do you do with all of your money? Bruce? Do you want to be involved in this charity thing. Do you want to like, what is what is the responsibility of the hyper rich in a city like this? And to whom are you responsible? And that getting to be the kind of spine of that story. You know, I'm not going to say it wrote quickly, because they never write quickly, but at least I kind of I knew kind of what it was. Yeah, and it got to mostly be a standalone, you know, other than some of the like Harvey Dent, you know, running for office stuff and the ruper Thorn stuff like the little connective tissue to the rest of the season. But otherwise it's just it's an episode of The X Files where you know, Bruce Wayne is trying to figure out what goes bump in the night.
And you, I mean, you mentioned that you've written comics, you've worked in animation before, but on a project like this where you are working with masters like Bruce Tim and what was it like to write the episode and then start to see the art come back, get to see the finished animation from this unbelievable team, Like what was that experience?
Like, I mean, the when they started showing me somebody even the character design work, like writing is always in a bit of a vacuum, yeah, where you're just like, I'm putting these words on a page and hopefully they will become a thing that functions as drama. And so it's always abstract until it isn't, you know. And it's very much like the process with comics, where it's like I wrote this thing, and I think, and then somebody starts drawing it, and like the minute you begin to get you know, those finished pages in even pencils, even inks like it suddenly it's real in a way that it wasn't, you know, getting character design stuff, you know, to look at animatics, getting to like all of it just begins to claw its way into reality and leaves and bounds because animation takes forever to do so it can be months between like getting in any information to like, oh there it is. Oh that's that's cool. Oh they kept that, Like that's always fun. But the craziest part of it was that And I don't know if this is telling tales out of school or not, but when Bruce Tim gives notes, he's he has your script, he's printed it out, he's writing his notes in a red magic marker. And then he's drawing things in the margins. It's like this scene should look like this, and he'll draw like the train sequence, you know, or at least you're like, here's what the inside of the train should look like, Here's what the sort of courtroom scene should look like, here's what this thing should be and just to have like Bruce tim drawings in the margins was the like that was the giddiest part. Was like he actually read it and it was it moved him to draw thing. Yeah, that's that's Banana's I still am trying to get in to give me the actual physical hard copy of those notes. I bet he refuses to come on, come on, you know what I want. I'm not gonna sell an eBay, like, I just want to have it just.
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The thing I love about this episode is, and you mentioned it being like a standalone is Bruce gets challenged in a way that kind of doesn't really happen in the rest of the series. Both on to your point, what he's doing with his money, and then the fact that his very can perception of what reality is is directly challenged in this episode. How did you balance like all that stuff, because you know, of course Bruce and Batman are such grounded characters, and now all of a sudden he's coming up against something that completely upends his idea of what the world is.
Like the way they described Bruce and Batman to me was a bit like mister Spock, you know, like his his level of oddness, his level of like relying on logic, Like he wasn't quite on the spectrum, but he was definitely a little to the left of typical, you know, definitely neurodiversion in some way. And so the idea that, like mister Spock, when confronted with the impossible, still begins to absorb it and push through it and just get the job done. And so like, this was never a thing that was going to alter Bruce's or Batman's worldview. This was just a this is a weird blip, This is not the job. Like, I don't have to investigate how are there suddenly ghosts in the world. I just need to know what how to solve this particular issue. So it was never like we're going to shake him to his core with the existence of you know, paranormal. It was more he will take this information on board processes and use it to solve the problem in hand, which made it an easier dramatic problem to solve because if I suddenly have to have a Batman who's like, oh my god, everybody's dead. There's ghosts everywhere, like can I find my parents or my parents?
Oh my god?
Like that is a huge can of worms that nobody wants to open. So yeah, keep him on rails, keep him on task.
Yeah, I think you did a great job with that. I think a lot about this episode.
When the Gentleman goes goes through the wall and then Batman's like grasping at the bits left behind.
What is this?
You know?
I think I think you really did that.
So when you're approaching something like this right where the the KP Crusoder is a totally new kind of vision for Gotham, but you're taking on a character like the Gentleman Ghost who's from like the four E's from a flash comic Flash Aea, Joe Cuba, Robert Canada, Like these are big things. Did you go back and look at those things, or are you just like this is a new space, Like what can I do with this character?
It was very much like a new version of an old character, and most of what had been part of that initial creation didn't apply anymore. Yeah, you know, so it was it was very much like, here's a new guy. Here's what he wants, you know, here's the obstacle to get in what he wants, you know, Like the for the longest time, it was what does he need money for?
Yeah, he's a ghost.
He's a ghost. He can't actually carry it with him, Like, so what does he need this money for? And and so figuring out like what his big issues were, what was his conflict, what was what was the thing driving him? And it was just like Gotham has turned into a sesspool, Like why all of these people who shouldn't be here, you know, we're giving them too much that we were handing out too many things, like I just need to find a way to balance the scales in favor of the aristocracy, and like that became the overriding character want and the only stuff that maintained with his backstory was the stuff that fed into that, you know, So like all right, so he's gonna be, you know, part of the Gotham like five founding families or whatever. But like the one that nobody liked, the one who was like they all got together like the Founder's club, and he was the one who sat in the corner. Yeah, it's like settle down, bro, Like, not about that life anymore. It's the new world. Yeah.
Also, like, if you're getting all this money, guess how you could make people's lives bad. Just give them the money, all the poor people often that would actually help, which I think I think is a great that's a really great kind of mirror to the Batman question that we all always have, Yeah.
That we all always have, which is, hey man, you know what Gotham really needs infrastructure, you know, like great schools, you know, maybe after school programs, you know what. It doesn't really need punching crime in the face.
That's for you, that's what you need.
Yeah, Like you do that because you just like it. It's not actually helping Gotham very much, you know, which is what Alfred says in the movies, which is like it's an arms race, Like you know, you show up and suddenly there's a guy in a mask and then it invites conflict. It's a vision speech right from Infinity War. It's like power in fights. Conflict invites challenge, creates chaos. It's like, Man, if you just stay Bruce, Wayne and invested in Gotham, this probably would be a better place.
Tell us about breaking this story. How much of the arc of the season was in place when you came to the project.
I think they knew. They knew very much what the you know, they knew where we're starting, they knew where it was ending. You know, they knew all of the episodes. They wanted to tell that story. And so when I signed on, like they sent me about a page a page and a half of like here's kind of what this episode is. It didn't have all of the beats worked out, or didn't have all of the logic stuff, Like again we had to figure out what does he want with money? Was not a problem that had been solved in the writer's room. But and then they told me like, yeah, you're gonna have Pop a Midnight Like you know, it's going on his clue path to solving it. We can incorporate this character. I was like, we're doing popa Midnight? Bat man like, Okay, all right, I see you. Let's let's go, you know, And so then it became an extraction process. It became like here's the page in half, Let's blow that up into six pages. Let's blow that up then into fifteen pages, let's blow that up into thirty pages. And with each subsequent pass, you're just adding more detail, You're adding more character, you're adding more conflict, you know, like they knew they wanted a horse on a subway car, you know, cool, like how do we get there to how do we do it? Like, you know, we knew we wanted some kind of heist in the beginning, but we weren't entirely sure who was stealing. We knew the gentleman Ghost is going to be stealing a thing, we didn't know if he was robbing other criminals, if he was robbing whatever, Like let's make it a charities thing. Like all of that just sort of came out in the writing. But you know, the the idea of the gentleman ghost as a classist was there for the job that, you know, and so just and figuring out ways to amplify that story and figure out ways to make Lucius be both a victim and have agency, you know, for him not to sort of be be diminished in the presence of the gentleman ghost. You know, it's like the men the ghost shows up like up go as dukes in a proper like nineteen forties your dukes, the Marquis of Queensberry rules, Let's.
Go for you when it comes.
Something that I think was really really cool about this show and definitely something me and Joelle have talked about a lot, is like this does move away from kind of the way that bodies were drawn in Batman. That animated series had this very specific look that we still see on the incredible action figures that they do.
It's kind of this inverted triangle look.
No matter who you are, you're an inverted triangle, and it's so powerful and striking. But in Kate Crusader we get some real body diversity. There are all different kinds of bodies, there are all different kinds of characters. You're someone who's fought to make stories more inclusive and stuff. What was it like to come to a project that was already naturally doing that and thinking about things like class and thinking about things like body diversity, and thinking about things like what Goffam would really.
Look like I mean, it's it was liberating, you know, because a lot of the time, you know, that fight is a fight that not many people are trying to have, you know, and some of that is just literally like and I never blame anybody for it, because it's a thing that I have personally had to divest myself of, divorce myself from, which is if you grow up, regardless of who you are, where you're from, the color of your parents, whatever it is, if you're growing up in America, you're growing up in a society that tells stories through a white lens. And for a very long time, the stories that I wrote were through a white lens because I grew up in the eighties, you know, I love action movies and like, who are my heroes going to be? If not Schwarzenigrancet alone and Bruce Willison and John Claude van Dam and like there was not a ton of like you get a call Weathers and like yeah, but otherwise, you know, or you get a Sorgeny Weaver, but otherwise the playing field is not particularly welcoming to anybody who was not that. And so teaching myself how to not default to that has been a process that I'm only now coming to, I think the end of so to come to and then every other show that I've worked on has been for the most part, you know, kind of through a white lens, which I don't blame people for because that's what America is. You know. Cassaroc was an interesting one in that, like, oh, we're telling a story about this black person who lives in a completely white town, So like is he how black is he? Like when did he connect with his own story, with his own history, with his own culture. That was part of that conversation. But to come to Cape Crusader and like, oh, yeah, no, it is. We we are reimagining what the forties could be in America. You know, we are. We are wildly diverse. We are we are incredibly you know, welcoming to everybody. And animation is better for it because, like, honestly, you want diversity of shape. You want the eye to be drawn in various different ways. Like if everybody is rare thin and whip it strong, like it's kind of boring on screen after a while. If everybody is just that inverted triangle walking on a pair of pins, it's like like we should have some larger people, we should have some shorter people, some sort of tall people, like it's it's it's it's the old Warner Brothers cartoons like we got tiny dog, we got big dog, Like that's that's the The elasticity of that is part of where you get the drama. And so to not have to to not have to like put up my dukes and try to have conversations with people about, you know, shaking off some of the rust of how we're creating a story was wonderful, like, hey, you guys already thinking about that great like let me, let me, let me help you think a bit more about, you know, ways that we can highlight how a place like Gotham is broken and how it's broken, and how incoming equality is one of the ways that that's broken, and how the gentleman goes is or of the avatar for keeping things the way they were, if not, if not making Gotham great again, like let's do it. Let's lean into it as far as we're willing to lean and and they were harberscent on board.
Let's talk about Papa Midnight was so wonderful to seem in this episode what a, what a what a great surprise. Tell us about Papa Midnight and what it was like integrating him into the context of Gotham.
I mean, Papa Midnight is an awesome character and always has been, even in in you know, the back of my head, I always hear like Jeffrey Holder's voice, you know, like the Crab from like Sepassion from the Little Mermaid, like that that very deep. Hey, what do you need from me? Like that's always what's in my head, you know. And I love John and Huntsu's performance in The Constantine, Like Batman was always going to need a clue path to follow, it was always going to need information like that's that's how detectives work. Like I don't know everything. I've got to find things, and so how can I find out information? How can I do battle with a thing that I've never done battle with before? You know, I mean it was a bit of a jump for like Alfred to be like, I know a guy, and like, what is Alfred know wizards who live in this part of the city we're moving on? And how Alfred knows Papa Midnight.
Yes, bud O pal you know, he's.
A drinking buddy, like there's a there's a pub in the in the Bowery that they hang out at. But so it was always going to be a pit stop, like you needed to have that information from somebody, and they're like, we can do Papa Midnight. I was like, that's perfect, Like and for Papa Midnight to have his own agenda, for him to have his own wants, like I will help you if you help me, here's what I need, you know. I think there there at some point was a sequence or version of a scene where where you know, and spoilers if you haven't seen this episode, but come on, we're all here, we're all we're all planning. Yeah, where where Batman gives the spirit of the Gentleman Ghost to Papa Midnight. There had been a scene where Papa Midnight then goes to the back of his store and like you see a wall vials where he's just been collecting spirits and this is the like the latest of them, you know, whether it's some kind of like you know, supernatural jail, whether it's you know, I'm just holding onto this for for for my own advantages, unclear, But I was like that's cool, and they were like, I'm sure we're not building another animated set. We're here on We're here in the in the graveyard. This is perfectly fine. We just gotta we have to, we have to pay this off. So here's your spirit. What are gonna do with it? I don't ever know. I'll see you led to Batman and all he goes into the into the distance. But he was super fun. It was super fun getting to play with the supernatural, especially from Midnight's perspective. Who for him, it's pass him. It's just like this is just another day, yep, you know, which I think helps the Batman not be so gobsmacked by there being the supernatural. If everybody treats it like it's normal, then it's normal.
Yeah, he doesn't have to worry.
There's a little button line which I thought that was perfect for doing exactly this the thing that you're talking about, where you know, Batman's like he hands over the spirit. He's like, I guess I do. I want to know what you're going to do with that, and Pabamanna, it's just like no, like, okay.
It's done, don't worry about it.
Yeah, which, which you know, ties back into the into the Lucius Fox conversation with Bruce, and it was like, there's this discretionary fund. Do I want to know what you do with this money? You probably don't. I remember like there was some early draft who was like, it's probably sex type stuff, right, You got a discretionary fund for for freaky free?
Yeah, I mean that man's pretty freaking and then he's.
Pretty freaky and like that very quickly fell out of the episode.
Making TV, making comics, making anything, it is a labor of love, and then you put it out there in the world and it exists and it doesn't belong to you anymore. What's it been like get to see how much people love this show and getting to see you know, it's the number one show on Amazon and people are responding really well to the Gentleman Ghosts. They think this is a super cool idea. They're loving the vibe of the show. What's it like to get to make something that hits with the right audience.
It is always a surprise, because for as good as you might think it is, there's a lot of great stuff that nobody watches. Yep, you know, there's a lot of good stuff that just falls through the cracks, Like there's too much stuff in the world. You know, you can't watch everything even if you try to watch everything somebody recommended to you, like, it's impossible to do. Yeah, And so the the the surprise, the joy, the gratitude of an audience who like finds the work, appreciates the work, and then tells other people about it, like, hey, you want to watch this? This is pretty good? Like that is? That is? That's the dream, you know, to be able to channel a piece of joy from your childhood and fashion it into a somewhat new form and then deliver it into an audience who seems to have been waiting for it in a way you can't know four years ago when the process begins. You know, animation just takes forever to do, and it's always an article of faith that by the time we're done with this process, there will be an audience who wants it. And it doesn't always happen that way, so when it does, it is always just a treat to be like, oh they liked it. Oh I'm so happy now.
Well, Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We really appreciate it. Where can people find your stuff? Plug whatever projects you would love to plug.
The easiest way to find me is Instagram at Mark Bernardin on Blue Sky and threads the same. I'm no longer on the hell site because life is too short. Correct, I will I will plug. I will plug two things. I will plug Eyes of Wakanda, which is coming hopefully next year if not. I'm never entirely sure what the animation schedule is in Marvel, but like the show, I think is pretty much done, so that just depends on when they want to reveal it, release it. What have you? D twenty three that that little blip was promising that they have faith enough in it to pull to pull Ryan Coogler out of his Oakland layer and come down to Anaheim to talk about it. So yeah, I can't wait till people see that it was. It was so much fun to work on and some of those stories are are powerful in ways that I don't think we expected them in the in the room to be powerful, going places and telling stories that I don't think an audience will expect. And then I'm I'm launching a Kickstarter next week called Deepest Darkest. It's an anthology film that I'm making with a bunch of other TV writers of color that I know. We're each writing and directing a chapter. This is a story about secrets, about the secrets that we that are too extreme, that are too visual, that are too heady for us to ever tell anybody, except that there is one character that sort of wheezed throughout the anthology who's a bit like Dory and that she has no short term memory. She forgets things on like ten minute cycles, which makes her a perfect confessionist to listen to your secret, absolve you of your sins, and then forget everything you told her. And so it's a bit of like a Black Mirrory kind of anthology where we just we go dark on what's the deepest, darkest secret you have and then put her on the stage. And so yeah, that's that launches next Tuesday, the twenty seventh kickstarter. It's all over everything that I've told you about where I could be and yeah, that's the thing that's exciting me the most. Cool.
Well, thank you so much, Mark it theightful.
This was a blast, gang, Thank you for the invite.
And we're back for our recap of the back half of Cape Crusader Season one on Amazon Prime Video, and we're on to episode seven Moving Target, written by Adama Ebo and Adan Ebo, directed by Christina Sada and oh Man. This is the episode that really drives home just how corrupt ends beyond redemption Gotham is.
Yeah, I think you know they're calling Matt Reeves Batman Universe. I think they're calling it something hilarious, like the epic Batman Crime Universe. I feel like you probably don't need to have epic there, but I like the implication that the Penguin, the Batman, It's all going to be this exploration of crime and corruption in Gotham, and this episode definitely feels like it's totally seated in that space, like this is Assassin's This is people trying to kill Jim Gordon, the one good person in Gotham, the one moral compass. Also outrageous weird characters here, like on a matter Payer, who was created by Kevin smithan is.
This his animated debut?
I think this may well be his animated debut and uh and yeah, I just think that, to me is what this show does so well. It can take something that's completely outrageous and is in itself a joke. Because honomatter Payer is what we call you know, the biff bang pow sound effects, and make it into something that feels completely grounded, completely serious, and I think as well, like you know, for Kevin Smith, he he did a tweet and he was like, I can't believe that this Green Arrow villain created by me, Phil Hester Andy Parks is in the new Batman Cape Crusader, Like this is it's crazy to see my bad guy and Bruce Tim's return to Gotham, and yeah, it.
Is so good.
Also, so another I love how they've kind of made Barbara her importance in this series, whether it's on the Batman side, whether it's on the Gordon side, whether it's in the crime. They know how important Barbara Gordon is to Gotham, and this episode really leans into this way to get to Gym. She's also like fearless. I love the Ebo Twins. I think they're smashing it. So I was very happy to see them writing an episode like this, which was just such a joy.
There's also the I found it so such a like trenchant commentary on like how fucked up Gotham is that? Oh yeah, that the entire scheme, which was just like a you know, they hit on Gordon spoiler you've watched it by now, I hope the Yeah, the Gordon threat was the distraction. The real person they were trying to get was Barbara. And the whole thing was said in motion because a guy wanted like a nicer prison cell. Like that's how cheap life is in Gotham.
That's how cheap it is.
Like that's and that's kind of like this interesting commentary as well on like is it just better to stay in prisons in Gotham, like rather than rehabilitate yourself and get out? Is life too expensive outside of prison where you'd rather just order a hit on someone so that you could get a little bit of a better accommodation inside as Yeah, they're doing some really cool stuff here. Years ago I wrote this piece when they announced that there would be like a GCPD series. I believe it probably would have been about twenty let's see GCPD series, but they were going to do like a Gotham CPD series based on the very beloved kind of comic book. And after the Batman, you know, I said, well, there's only one way you can do the show. Oh, this was in twenty twenty as well, so and I said, you got to a show where you're basically dismantling the Gotham CEPD because it's so corrupt. You can essentially use it as a space to explore the ideas of like abolition, or how would a city look without a police force? What use is a police force in Gotham when ninety percent of the police are corrupt. And I actually do feel like this show, again, kind of behind that guise of like it's an animated show and people think, oh, it's for kids or whatever, is actually interrogating those very same things. And this is just why I love the Matt Reeves Batman universe. I think he's doing so much of what we've all wanted our Batman stories to explore.
Up next episode eight Nocturn, written by Haley Gross, directed by Matt Peters, and oh.
It's about to start, baby, poor complex of episodes that are just gonna absolutely decimate you.
He is going through it.
A couple notable things about this episode. Of course, we get the long awaited in the context of this season turn of Harvey Dent towards his alter ego of two Face, and we maybe meet Robin potentially.
Man.
I feel really bad for Harvey. Harvey has been mostly a scumbag throughout this season.
Very interesting choice, by the way, as well, the idea that he was already corrupted rather than incorruptible until two face.
Naked ambition all the way as he is trying to gain the mayor's office. And in this episode, you know, to speaking about the corruption of Gotham City, we understood, we come to realize just how deep Harvey Dent is with that corruption and the lengths he will try to go to to get himself elected. And yet there is still that bit of spine in Harvey that at the final moment he says, no, I can't.
I'm not going to drop the charges.
I'm not gonna do it.
I have to.
This is not about it. It becomes like not about the mayor's office and not about his ambition, becomes about right and wrong. He does the right thing, and that is the thing that leads him to get acid thrown in his face and his turn to the dark side begins. I found this to via just a tragic episode in a lot of ways.
I think so too, And I think what they did here that was very very clever is you know, we got on a mat payer in the last episode, and we do have like Anton Knight and we have Natalia Knight. So that is a little bit of like Batman weirdness here because they're sucking energy from people. But generally, I feel like when this moment happened where you get dense face being you know, disfigured by the acid, it felt much more horrific and much more like we were watching something where somebody, you know, acid attacks happened, and this felt much closer to that than the kind of usual pulpy strangeness of like, oh now he's two faced. Well, actually, this Dent has been balancing that line, as Joelle like.
Perfectly put in these notes.
She said, he's been balancing that line between like greasing the wheel and actually wanting to make Gotham better this whole time.
So two face he already was.
This is just like a really tragic kind of tipping point, and I just, yeah, I felt like they went serious when they needed to go serious, and it starts off this great kind of three part finisher for this season.
We'll be right back after a.
Quick break and we're back.
Yeah.
I just love the the balance of Dent and the way you come to understand that Harvey has crossed a lot of lines.
He is.
A self promoter, a nakedly ambitious guy, and at the same time, part of what drives him is he has rationalized all of this line stepping by saying, Okay, well, let me just get into the mayor's office and then I will have the power to really change this city. Yeah, And everything that I do, all the ways that I cross into the gray zone, that I you know, blur the lines between right and wrong, all of that will be worth it when I get there, because then I can really fix this city.
Then I can do good.
And then I can do good. And you know, he's he, I think, mostly crosses the line in a way that loses sight of that promise. But then he rededicates himself to that thing right at the moment when he's asked to truly corrupt himself beyond redemption and drop the charges. And the fact again that that leads to the attack on him, and that's the thing that pushes him over the edge is really sad and just really affective storytelling.
And also as well, I think it takes away like some of the inherent ableism of like, oh, when his fate when he becomes disabled, he becomes evil. No, actually, him doing something good and sticking to his morals ended up being the reason that somebody attacked him. And now he has to deal with that duality. And also, obviously what lesson does that teach him that doing the right thing is going to be personally bad for him, And it kind of leads to these last two episodes which are just really tragic.
Yeah, let's go to the episode nine, The Killer Inside Me, written by Jase Ritchie, directed by Christopher Berkeley, and he we see Harvey Dent really just lose his grip. He had been trying to play this double game up until now, you know, doing bad things for the right reasons, with the hope that one day he could be the person who could fix the city. And he is coming to terms with the fact that in his mind it was never gonna work. It was naive of him to think that the city could ever be redeemed, and the only way now to deal with this city is by becoming the thing that the city respects, which is chaos and violence.
Yeah, it's really sad to see this journey, and again we're really getting here this kind of duality of is this another reflection of Batman, like how does Gotham impact every person who lived inside it and out? Then and Bruce our friends here, so we get that even more. And yeah, I just think this is really sad because he is again seeking that justice against those who wronged him. And you could say Batman is doing the same thing, so how different are they? But obviously Dent takes it in a much more bleak direction, and yeah, it's it's really sad. And then you know, you get the ending where he goes to Arkham. He like willingly goes to Arkham Asylum because.
He is again that good side comes out.
And he's like, I need to be I need to protect Gotham from myself.
Yeah, and I also need to be protected from myself.
And that brings us to the finale Savage Night. I should say, by the way, that Killer Inside Me that is a reference to reference.
To there's so many great Nuir nods.
Yeah, wonderful reference to the nineteen fifty two Big Jim Thompson novel The Killer Inside Me, which if you like like hard boiled pulp crime and you want fast reads, like two day, three day weekend reads, Big Jim Thompson pick up almost anything. And The Killer Inside Me is really cool because it's probably his most experimental novel where it just delves into the mind and the psychosis of a hardened killer in a really like in a way that is much more experimental than anything else that Big Jim Thompson has written.
And also Jim Thompson Savage Night is another one of his novels, so they were really leaning into it here and I love it. This is not afraid to show its love for its noir influence.
Savage Night written by Ed Bruce Baker, directed by Christina Soda.
And yeah, Ed, here, baby, you know it's going to be good. He's a noir legend.
Here.
It is the conference between Batman, between Dent, between the Dirty Cops, and all of the threads that we've seen woven through season one coming to a head here in just like an incredible finale that, to your point, is an interrogation of Batman and his methods in a lot of ways, through the Dirty Cops through Two Face. It makes you think about what Batman is doing and really ask yourself and ask Batman, what makes you the hero?
Mm hmm, what's different about that?
What's different about what you do.
What's different about what you do?
And also something that I love here is we get that moment after you know, Dent sacrifices himself once again, his goodness overcoming his kind of vengeance, right, but Batman almost loses it after that, and we get this great moment where he threatens to shoot Flass And I'm sure for a lot of viewers they were like, oh, that's so weird. One Batman doesn't kill, two why does he have a gun? But the original Golden Age, early Batman comics, he does shoot people and they do die, and he you know, hangs people out.
Of free cold baby Fred.
He was much more of that noirh hero that we were used to. So I loved that this was a throwback to that and also that ultimate conversation about you know, people say Batman doesn't kill, trust me go to ign. I wrote like a three thousand word piece on it. He does kill sometimes. So it's a very murky space. But I love that in this moment Alfred, you know, it's like what Alfred says. He says like Dent did lose his humanity, but you've still got yours, I will say.
I also, I.
Don't know if I agree with that, because I think dentse humanity is what made him sacrifice himself to save Barbara. But Batman is still able to nact is humanity. But yeah, like you said, this is a great interrogation of that, like the whole series. Really we talked to Mark about it. What does Batman do and is it useful?
Yeah?
And like is he I.
Was recently writing about the new Sailor Moon movie, which is a two part ova on Netflix called Sailor Moon Cosmos.
It's delightful.
It actually adapts the final arc of the Incredible manga. But I wrote an article for IGN that was, like, the whole two part event is about the question of what happens when you become a superhero? Do the villains come to you or do you go to the villains? And by being a superhero, do you create the villains? And so it has this really great evocative storyline about that that I feel like it answers in a much better way than a lot of comics do because it's an ending, it's a true ending, so you can really answer that question. And obviously with Sailor Moon, it's about love, it's about compassion, it's about forgiveness. But I love that we're still having these conversations because we all know that's the biggest question. If Batman didn't exist, with the Joker exists, right, you know that's what we're always asking I speaking of the Joker, here he is.
We get Little Teas season two, Loving Man season two.
Baby, So somebody has been killing a series of victims with a toxin that makes them laugh uncontrollably.
I wonder could be who kid me?
I'm so excited for that. This series has retconned almost all the characters and certainly all of the Rogues Gallery in really fascinating ways. Yeah, and I wonder what they'll do with the Joker. I am so exciting, really excited to see.
What they do with the Joker.
I honestly think this is like quite a modern masterpiece of storyteller. I feel like we're very lucky to live in an era where we can get X Men ninety seven, which is fully embraced in the nostalgia and making us feel like we're back as kids again reading X Men, picking it up off the wall, watching X Men ninety two, and then get something like this that says, well, you are the kids who watched Batman, the animated series, But what if you've grown up with it, What if you're an adult now, which we all are, what would you like to watch? And it's something completely different. I mean, to get both of these in one year is incredibly lucky.
Well, we'll be looking forward to that. Of next we're reacting to The Crow, the remake.
Of the nineteen ninety one four Wow, nineteen ninety four action film starring a little Brother Scars Guard Billy Yeah, Billy, Billy Scars.
It is uploxed, all right, Rosie the Crow twenty twenty five version.
It's out.
It's out now, directed by Rupert Sanders, starring Bill Scarsguard Fka Twiggs, and Danny Houston. Your thoughts about The Crow?
Okay, surprising nobody here.
I'm sure I actually thought this was a very enjoyable movie.
I liked the reinterpretation obviously.
Look there's a nineteen ninety four version of The Crow starring Brandon Lee, which was a movie he was making when he died because of an issue with a weapon onset that killed him.
And that movie is iconic.
It's beautiful, it's legendary, and I will say I think they should have not tried to do another version of James Obarr's The Crow, which is the comic book that it's based on, So all of that in context, I never thought this was a particularly good idea. I will say I do not think the marketing for this movie was good. I think it made it look like it was going to be a Suicide Squad esque edgy kind of nonsense fest, and actually I found it to be quite a romantic, sweet story that was also weird and then really really violent at the end.
I feel like my letterbox review was basically.
That I think it will come to be seen as like this Generation's like Queen of the Damned, so a movie where I think in the future people are gonna say I love this movie or Twilight.
You know.
This also was giving big Twilight vibes to me. It's like the movie is not a brilliantly crafted movie, though it does look rather than nice, and it is a total reinterpretation. And my favorite thing about it is that they make Shelley a main character instead of essentially just fridging her, which would which does make sense in the context of the comics, because the comic is an exploration of grief by James Obarr, So that's why it happened that way. But for me, I actually feel like this does not deserve that crazy Rotten Tomatoes review. I think people it's easy to shit on a movie like this. And if you remember when Constantine came out, it was critically dragged. When you know Twilight came out critically dragged, When Queen of the Dam came out critically dragged, all of those movies. You could have many arguments about whether or not their cinematic masterpieces. But I do believe this movie will find its audience, likely in teenagers now who will find it, think it's cool, and then in twenty years will enjoy kind of the campy nature of it.
So that's my feeling. Jason, how about you.
I thought this was a bad movie, but with some interesting things about it, and certainly not a bad movie where I'm sitting there and I'm hating my life. You know this is not gonna let there be carnage type of situation, But also neither it is. Is it a Madam Web where.
The camp that's true, it didn't go that far.
Yeah, where the camp is so dialed up that it's kind of fun.
With how bad it is.
There's certainly campy elements to this start. Of the things I liked, I liked to your point. I liked that they significantly changed the original James O. Bar story that is, you know, a classic in the genre of fridging, and they, to your point, made Shelley more of an active participant in the story. I think Bill Scarsguard is wonderful, and I think FK. Twigs is really good, and I think it looks great. And I also loved the weirder like supernatural turns. That's was actually the most compelling stuff to me was like the weird shit.
I think they should have gone weird weird could have found an audience quicker.
So this is it's like part weird, part john Wick. And my opinion is that they should have picked a ling either get a lot weirder or get a lot more john Wick. Now the stuff that was, I think they made it hard for themselves because you know, the original Crow, the Crow when he comes back just can fight, and it's you don't need to explain why he was just a guy. But when he comes back supernaturally all of a sudden, like he's got martial arts moves. Yeah, and you didn't wonder about it. In this movie, there's like this you know, he comes back, Eric comes back, and it is still just a guy and his really can just like absorb bullets, but he's not really able to fight really for the whole movie, and so you've got. What you've got is an action film in which the action is kind of just like not that compelling because it's a guy just getting shot over and over, yeah, and he doesn't know, he doesn't have like moves that.
He uses, you know.
And then at the end he just becomes incredibly proficient with the samurai saword and you get this kind of explosive anime level goal, which is another weird element of the film.
And so I thought that they made it hard for themselves in that regard, Like I think it probably I think it's a better movie if you know, fuck the fact that Eric, you know, was like a part time like delinquent who didn't really work out and probably couldn't fight, like just make it so he could fight, just make it can fight, And I think that would have made it easier for them, But not a particularly great film. I also wonder about releasing it, Like I was asking myself, like why now? Why why now?
I also was like in a world where and I love the theatrical experience, and good I did have a good theatrical experience watching this, but in a world where a movie like Prey, which was just so astonishing, ended up going straight to streaming and becoming a big hit. I feel like this, if this had gone to Netflix, it would have been the number one movie this weekend on Netflix. And sure it probably would have been because people are like, this is so bad, it's good, or you've got like watch the Crow and then you can watch the Old Crow on Netflix too, But like, this feels like it could have gone to streaming and had a more successful, less kind of like Rotten Tomatoes defined relationship, and it didn't make very much money at the movies.
At all, So this is a dub.
This is very wild to me that Lionsgate just went ahead with releasing this after Borderlands flopped.
For them, So this is like a two in a row flop.
Now, I don't feel like this deserved to flop, but it also doesn't feel like a movie that's coming out in twenty twenty four.
It feels like a movie that's coming out in twenty ten.
Yeah, the latest box office figures on a budget of fifty million is like less than eight million.
Yeah, and Lionsgate only had to make ten million dollars on this movie because that's how much they acquired it for distribution.
But they may get there. They haven't even made that, yeah, but they may get there. But they may get there.
You know.
Not a great not a great movie, but certainly one when it comes on streaming or is ratable, that I think is worth checking out.
I think people will. I think I think it will find its audience.
But I also think that this is a good lesson in like when you have something that is lightning in a bottle like the Crow, especially if somebody like an icon like Brandon Lee, yeah, passed away while making it, you know, the son of Bruce Lee. I think you just leave it be, man Like, just leave it be. Even though I enjoyed this movie, that's just my.
Advice in the future. And that's it for our episode today.
Guys, Jason had to run because he just bought himself a nice bat wing and he's taking a fight.
I hope you all enjoyed it. Thanks again to Mark Bernardin for joining us.
Stay tuned Tomorrow we are back with the Rings of Power episode. Join us for our recap of the season two premiere and an interview with All Round Legend and Rings of Power Executive producing director Charlotte Branstrom. That's all for now, bye.
X ray Vision is hosted by Jason Ncepcion and Rosie Knight and is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Our executive producers are Joelle Smith and Aaron Kaufman. Our supervising producer is a Boo Zafar. Our producers are Carmen Laurent and Mia Taylor. Our theme song is by Brian Basquez.
Special thanks to Soul Rubin and Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman and Heidi A discolled moderata