Headscratchers / Beware the Batman

• When Magpie attacks Doctor Ravencroft, she claims that she can help her retrieve her memories. However, in the scene just before this, Magpie has already found a way to reverse the memory-wiping machine to put memories back in. Instead of using this machine on herself to get her memories back, she tries to use it on Batman to replace his memories. That's when Magpie goes to attack Ravencroft in the desperate hopes of regaining her memory, even though she had just demonstrated that she was aware that she already had a means of doing this. She only seems to remember that the machine can give her her memories back after Batman destroys it in a classic Bat-jerk manner. There's no explanation as to why Batman broke it, either. I only realized how little sense this entire episode made maybe three days after seeing it.
  • Magpie is a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, her thought route is bound to make very little sense. And from what I caught, Magpie was attempting to transfer Ravencroft's memories back to herself (in other words, sucking out the memories of the poor woman), so Batman, knowing the entire problem (that Magpie wasn't Ravencroft, to begin with), smashed the machine in pieces just in case Magpie managed to knock him out or something similar. Batman was relying on his Breaking Speech (and his fists, as it is later shown) to make Magpie surrender.
  • The more horrifying implication, in my opinion, was that there was that guy who was mind-wiped at the beginning of the episode. Presumably, that device could have helped him... yet Batman destroyed it. (I suppose he could have helped rebuild it when Magpie was no longer a threat, but still).
• Where is everybody? Seriously there is virtually nobody around the city.
  • It's a dangerous city invariably depicted in the middle of the night. Naturally, there aren't that many people around in the regions that Batman frequents, besides the people he targets.
    • This might make sense if it weren't for the occasional random pedestrians and other civilians who do show up and there are way fewer of them than there should be. The cab driver from the Humpty Dumpty episode is a great example. Aside from the cab driver, Batman, and the guy in the statue, there is no one else in sight and you can see ten blocks or more down the street. Gotham is supposed to be a New York-sized metropolitan city and yet it has way fewer people in it than you would expect.
    • Not all metropoli are centers of partying late in the night, some are deserted at nightfall due to the high amount of crime, particularly in the shadier areas (where Batman hangs out). It's reasonable to assume these people are just random exceptions (even in the most dangerous of cities, there will always be a few non-criminals who will be walking for one reason or the other) or these scenes take earlier in the night (as they just say "night", we don't know if it is 9 A.M or 4 A.M).
• In "Broken", Batman figures out the frequency to disarm the bomb suits but employs it using single Batarangs, apparently for forced drama when he has to hit individual suits to find Gordon and Whale. Why exactly would he not make some kind of area-of-effect emitter that could hit more than one suit at once? It's not just a "hindsight is 20/20" thing—a sonic emitter is way more likely to come to mind than making single Batarangs.
  • He's on the clock. Gordon had been kidnapped and he worked with what he had.
    • That's still hard to buy, it says that he had batarangs on hand able to transmit sonic signals that could all be set to a new frequency, and setting those up was faster/easier than say reprogramming his phone. Or that he has enough sonic batarangs on hand to use on a large number of targets but didn't consider a single device with the same purpose but a wider range.
    • To be fair, a sonic Batarang would be, in essence, purpose-made for adjustment, making it faster to recalibrate any number of them than to reprogram Batman's purpose-made cellphone. Moreover, given the size of a cellphone speaker, it would be pretty unrealistic to use that as an area-effect broadcaster, so the final result makes sense as a compromise for time.
• Also from Broken, where did Humpty Dumpty's castle come from? It looks enormous, is empty, and is apparently within driving distance from Gotham. The show doesn't even try to explain it, Batman sees the model of the castle Humpty's built in his temporary hideout and deduces that's where he's taken them, and the very next scene is the Batmobile driving up to the actual castle itself. Is the country around Gotham known for its number of large, extravagant castles?
  • I thought it was some sort of historical landmark or at least a theme building for a park.
  • "Epitaph" confirms it is both a historical landmark and also the SCU's armory.
• In toxic why do the guards shoot at Metamorpho when he's carrying Sapphire? That's their boss's daughter! He's not going to be happy if they shoot her.
  • Well Metamorpho is a large monster-like being I think it'd be pretty easy not to notice what he was carrying and just shoot out of fear.
• Here is something that has been bothering me. Each weapon has been given a Sci-Fi look but still shoots bullets and all that, but that's not the thing that bothers me. The thing that bothers me is ammunition and magazines. With the pistols and the shotgun, fine, those can easily be explained away. Except for the Machine Gun designs, there appears to be no logical way to even have a magazine in that thing. Is this just Bottomless Magazines to the max?
  • The guns had to be hastily redesigned after the Aurora shooting, so they probably didn't have time to make them all logical.
  • Besides just being a hasty redesign the machine guns made me think of the ones in Code Geass. The design is similar, and the assault rifles in Code Geass◊ have a side loading magazine◊. I don't know if that much thought went into the redesign but I thought the comparison was notable.
• In "Broken", how did Humpty Dumpty do all this planning and work by himself? With the plans he has it should have required more people to do a job like this. He kidnaps all these people, builds all these bombs suits, and sets them around Gotham without causing suspicions while doing it all in one night.
  • It's safe to assume Humpty had the logistics prepared in advance. All he had to do was stuff them in the suits and then deliver them.
  • Some Batman villains from the comics and other media I think could do all sorts of grand schemes without the aid of random mooks. The Clock King from the Batman: The Animated Series comes to mind, who in his debut episode did all sorts of crazy stuff all by himself. Humpty Dumpty probably most likely falls into the same category as those types of Batman villains.
    • Also he is an accounting genius. Who says he didn't siphon off money to pay freelance thugs to set up his equipment for him that left when the job was done?
    • As a point of comparison, consider the Boston Mooninite scare. Three people, over two days, planted 38 devices around Boston. Each device was approximately 12 inches by 18 inches and illuminated. Yet, 20 of them had been in place for over two weeks before anyone noticed them.
• Why was this show put on hiatus?
  • It's a DC cartoon on Saturday mornings in the 2010s. That's why.
• Now, I confess that I have yet to see even a single episode of this show and I really don't know much about it. But I took a peek at the characters page and I saw something very disturbing. Except for maybe Anarky (who I guess is a big deal in the comics? I confess, all my knowledge of Batman comes from adaptions, mainly Batman: TAS, Justice League, and Batman: TBAB), I don't see any A-list villains here! Where's The Joker? Where's Mister Freeze? Where's the Penguin, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Scarface, Killer Croc, Two-Face, Scarecrow, and all of the other villains that usually are the reason people get into Batman in the first place? Heck, even The Batman (a show I have mixed opinions about at best) managed to get those guys, so what the hell happened here? And if it's some kind of licensing issue, how the hell does that work when this is a DC-made show? I apologize if my tone comes across as a bit inflammatory but this is beyond my understanding without more information. I think the reason behind this, if any, should kind of be put on the front page at the top before the trope list. Kinda a big deal when a Batman cartoon doesn't have, you know, the major Batman villains.
  • Fret not, Killer Croc is set to appear.
  • The show wants to focus on C-list villains. I think it's a good idea. The well-known villains have been done to death, we've seen them so many times in cartoons and movies. Don't you think the C-listers should have the spotlight too? Don't worry, Ra's is in this series. I heard Man-Bat will make an appearance.
  • While a little less exposure for the big names sounds good on paper, it almost feels like some of the C-listers were nudged to be more like the A-listers. I haven't read far enough back to read any Anarky stories myself, but his actions in this show seem more like the Joker than the well-intentioned anti-villain suggested by his Wikipedia page. Same question as Magpie. Was the print version that friendly with Batman or did they deliberately make her a Catwoman stand-in? If Tobias Whale goes legit(-ish) and opens a themed nightclub like the Penguin, that would cinch it.
  • The problem this troper sees is that they're not using any of the good lesser-known villains! (The exceptions being Magpie and Anarky, but one is an Expy of Catwoman and the other is a completely bland In Name Only version, respectively) They could be using Hugo Strange, Killer Moth, Maxie Zeus, The Mad Monk, the Terrible Trio, Calendar Man, Ratcatcher, Zsasz, etc. Instead, we're getting guys like Professor Pyg (the poor man's Mad Hatter).
  • The more-or-less complete villain list of the entire first season is, as follows (spoilers you idiots): Pyg and Toad, Magpie, Humpty Dumpty, Tobias Whale, Anarky, Phosphorus Rex, Cypher, Silver Monkey, Lady Shiva, Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins, Man-Bat, Killer Croc, the Key, Simon Stagg, Sapphire Stagg, Harvey Dent (NOT as Two-Face, actually, except as a Sequel Hook), "The Council" and Deathstroke the Terminator. And no, Whale never tries to go legit, though Penguin gets a reference on a wanted poster.
  • According to one of the producers of the show (i forget who) said in an interview on Kevin Smith's Fat Man on Batman-podcast that they wanted to focus on the lesser-known villains first so that the A-listers would come across like a bigger deal once they introduced them. They even planted the seeds for it with the easter egg-like references to the Penguin and Harvey Dent's slow transformation into Two-Face. But since the show got canceled before that it just ended up being a show about the obscure characters.
• In the episode Reckoning, Batman frees the souls imprisoned in the Soultaker Sword, and they are seen floating around and taking revenge on Ra's before moving on. What happened to Jason and Dr. Ravencroft?
  • I assumed that if a person's body was still alive Ravencroft was probably put in a hospital coma ward and Jason Burr had only been down for about a day, but neither of them appears or are even referenced for the rest of the season despite at least eight months passing... so they're probably dead.
  • Not to mention in all instances, the bodies were in possession of the League of Assassins, who I highly doubt were gonna keep them in good condition.
• Okay, I can believe that the process Magpie went through made her immune to pain, but seriously, Wolverine Claws?
• Why did they use Katana instead of Cassandra Cain as Batman's sidekick?
  • Cassandra Cain isn’t part of the Outsiders, which is part of what the show builds up to. (That, and DC considers her a Creator's Pest)