Outsiders and misfits are impelled to cling together, even if the basis for the affiliation is little more than the surface trait of being different. Baby-Doll, now a hotel clerk, finds herself drawn to Killer Croc because she mistakenly believes that, even though his murderous behavior could not be anymore apparent, he is wrongfully accused and marginalized by a conformist society, a point that the writers incredulously attempt to make plausible through the brief prejudicial asides delivered by miscellaneous pedestrians that follow Croc’s outbreak from a courthouse. This line of thinking is soon overturned when Croc’s charisma as a dockside ladies’ man negates any of his chronic inability to relate to other human beings. Baby-Doll ends up as the only one of the two who has any real claim to being an outsider and, as we soon see, the only character with any claim to being remotely developed.
Love is a Croc almost remedies Sideshow’s silly echoing of classical tragedy in its third-act plea for sympathy, having us believe he deterministically kills and thieves because it is who he is and can’t be changed. But it falls short by falling on another extreme of creating for him a profile of irrevocable, unfiltered brutality without indulging in the comic or human potential he showed when voiced by Aaron Kincaid. As a non-character, he is partially culpable for this episode’s destabilization when it was at least showing some moderate sophistication as another exploration of Baby-Doll’s regression into a romantic, television fantasy, here translated into a misfit Bonnie and Clyde duo. Croc reveals himself as so caricatured and goonish that Baby-Doll’s loneliness may as well be chalked up to her sad existence as the only developed character in a world without a capable righter to elevate plight to the level of tragedy. Without sturdy characters to situate her, she winds up shrill, pathetic and psychologically disfigured beyond all sympathy or comprehension.
Further prohibiting any fluidity or sensibleness from seeping into the story is the absence of Batman, or any of his new team, as voyeur, sympathizer, and audience stand-in, a function he tends to serve in episodes featuring villains that find themselves in dire need of emotional or psychological help. Unlike in Baby-Doll, where Batman aptly fulfilled all of these roles, here, as in many TNBA episodes, he is more stolid and strictly functional; the disparity between his appraisal of the events and our own, given shape by our exclusive access to the turmoil of Croc’s and Baby-Doll’s underground hideaway, becomes too large for us to identify with him, which, in effect, prevents us from adequately identifying with anyone. Batgirl, ever by his side, is as one-note as she’s ever been. Baby-Doll remains the protagonist, but our interest in her struggles diminishes with her troupe of stock supporting players whose job it is to generate her conflict and direct its trajectory.
Love is a Croc can only boast a surprisingly awkward pairing that seems initially exciting on the grounds of its own arbitrariness. It also exemplifies the downsides of the series’ revamp between B:TAS and TNBA. Starting with Batman’s brawl with Croc in the Gotham streets, Love is a Croc makes a show of being strung together more by its fight scenes than by its story-focused junctures, allowing every minor transgression to propel the ever-fragile state of affairs into a brainless action sequence. The worst B:TAS episodes owe their poor quality to miscalculations of character or social commentary of the most patronizing sort. Not one of them exhibits such thrill-happy, knee-jerk escalations of chaos that yield plot developments so perplexing and meaningless that it’s straining even to muster up a sympathetic response to a character’s total emotional devastation.
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