(9/17/09)
Paging the Crime Doctor sounds like a delicious title of a good pulp magazine. Oh what could have been! The title card alone brings back memories of early Batman comics, which basked in black-and-white confrontations and featured such ridiculous villains as Dr. Death. But alas, the temptation to aim for something meaningful with over-dependence on dialogue consumes what could have been a foray into the lurid world of pulp nostalgia.
But melodrama reigns supreme here, and it is has all the syrup and over-worded speeches of a good soap opera. It may elude you the first time, but watch it again and you may start to wonder why Rupert Thorne and his brother Matthew are telling us their life story as if it needs to be said betwixt them. We are spoon-fed information that could have been communicated through the producers’ vast assortment of visual tools, yet it results in talking, talking, and more talking.
Matthew Thorne is a man defined by his moral conflict, which makes him more of a plot device than a character. Nary do we get the chance to view him in another light. He is either mourning his situation born of immoral dealings, or he is being lectured by Leslie Thompkins, ever the ethics professor, to reconsider it. The writers are able to call attention to his gray moral status only because the rest of the characters so firmly rest on one end of the scale.
The story takes place on a single night, and it is an important night because Matthew is forced to emerge from the depths of his shady mob associations and reach out to a friend from his past life, Leslie. Thompkins. His brother is undergoing a heart attack, and there is no alternative to helping him. We gradually learn that Matthew and Leslie, along with Thomas Wayne, formed a triumvirate of sorts in medical school. A high point of the show is the gradual pace that is allowed to exist within the confines of a brief span of time. Story information is relayed slowly and deliberately, immersing us in the distinction between Matthew’s broken life and his former days of glory.
But unlike the other episode confined to a single night, Second Chance, Paging the Crime Doctor finds it must clutter up the plot with pointless scenes and extended fight sequences. It is not only the melodramatic dialogue and excess moralizing, but it is also the thugs intended to provide dramatic conflict. The bearded man fires his machine gun at Leslie and the bullets magically miss her, reminding us that danger cannot exist in an action cartoon, at the same time Batman spends a needless amount of time apprehending a scalpel-throwing doctor.
So it is an uneven affair, teetering on a synthetically designed moral conflict. The ending shoots for tear jerking and almost succeeds. If we excise the rest of the story from our memory and think in terms of Bruce finding an undiscovered key to his father’s life, there is something strangely affecting about it. The storyboarding gives Bruce a vulnerable, expressive face that oozes sincerity and profound curiosity. I said this might have been great pulp material. It could have also been a highly personal story about Bruce and a man who knew his father. At least on that level it partially succeeds.
The episode is essentially about a man in conflict. Matthew Thorne, the brother of Rupert Thorne, has always desired to be a doctor, but due to his brother’s control, he is forced to be a surgeon for the mob. I think it’s an interesting dilemma, although it’s handled with too much melodrama and coincidence to be effective, i.e. even though he’s apparently been doing this for a while, it isn’t until the hero of the series gets involved that he ends up making his big moral decision to stop being a crime doctor. Anyway, the main premise of the episode is that Rupert Thorne has been seriously injured, and Matthew is forced to kidnap Leslie Thompkins to help him, and she eventually convinces him to make the right choice.
This is the kind of story that does not need twenty-two minutes to tell its story. There are long and badly staged action scenes, scenes that have Batman doing detective work for far too long, and the whole episode spends too much time padding out the story with flashy little sequences, when the actual story centered on Matthew only needs about seven minutes. Everything else involves a badly developed plot about a powerful surgical laser and Batman’s grueling attempts to infiltrate Thorne’s base of operations to save Leslie. And without good animation work, the episode is reduced to sheer boredom. I would probably enjoy the episode if the excessive action scenes looked good, but they don’t. Frank Paur always seemed to be one of the more average directors on board the series, and this episode proves it.
Now, I said that I love the ending. Basically, Matthew was a best friend with Leslie Thompkins and Thomas Wayne back in medical school. So, at the end of the episode, after Matthew has made the big decision to stop performing illegal activities and all that, Bruce offers to help him out in exchange for stories about his father. It’s not really profound or anything, but it does a good deal to show how much Bruce cared about his father and how little he really got to know him. That combined with the music and the perfectly rendered facial expression on Bruce as he asks the question, really makes it a special moment. As I also stated before, the majority of the episode doesn’t deal much with Matthew’s relationship to Thomas Wayne. Yes, we get scenes that show Batman looking over photos and yearbook signatures and such, but the ending really does come out of left field, given that the episode primarily dealt with Thorne and his desire to redeem himself and stop performing illegal surgeries. Still, given how boring I found the episode, I’m glad it stepped a bit out of left field for the ending, which I found very heartwarming.
Expounding on the animation, I felt it looked very boring and jerky and about on par with Dong Yang’s worst work. The color scheme is surprisingly dark too, but without many truly striking visuals. Every building, corridor, street looks so generic, just with a very darkly tinted look to it. Personally the most well done visual to me is the title card, which looks very frightening and not the least bit fitting for the episode. I rather enjoyed the music. While it probably does more to cement this episode as overbearingly melodramatic than it should, it still adds a bit in some of the show’s key moments.
Overall, ‘Paging the Crime Doctor’ is a boring episode. It lacks style, substance, or excitement, and is only worth viewing for its surprisingly touching ending.
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