Over the Edge is in some ways the DCAU’s most horrific nightmare, because even as a dream it permanently taints how we perceive our heroes in their own reality. It is the fallout of an inevitable collision between two factions unable to coexist, the most perverse effacement of Batman and what he stands for, and the ultimate vision of apocalypse made manifest in any superhero cartoon.
It takes but one misstep in embedding a flashback into its dream narrative in order to open the show with the total destabilization of the established Batman mythos, Gordon and Batman locked in violent pursuit interspersed with the obliteration of several series touchstones before the Bat Cave as a whole is left a ravaged wasteland. The purpose of this opening, in addition to its throat-grabbing shock value, is that it almost dryly states outright that the conflict is irresolvable, and that there can only be a progression toward cataclysm, not reconciliation. In this sense, the only-a-dream structure is forgivable, because perceptive viewers are alerted outright that there is no other logical way out. And yet in depicting the dream in conventional narrative mode without a surplus of egregious surrealist techniques makes us buy into the reality of the dream world, so that what we take seriously what it has to say about our characters and observe how the truths presented bleed over into the real world.
After this fireworks opening is a momentary relapse into flashback, where we see Barbara Gordon knocked off of a skyscraper into the Gotham abyss, a sly cut across to her unsuspecting father in a squad car, and the inevitable, and all too symbolically pertinent, collision. Gordon sits in the street with Batman overlooking, inviting a reading of the scene as a mirror inverse of the Wayne tragedy, a depiction of a father with his dead daughter in his arms. Just as Batman turned his personal vendetta against his parents’ killer into a war on crime, so does Gordon immediately direct his rage-filled eyes toward vigilantism. Yet unlike the breadth and anonymity of the underworld, Batman towers above the city as the vigilante, the indisputable fosterer and propagator of all masked heroes who dwell in Gotham.
At the center of this dualistic reading is the reality of Batman’s culpability. At the helm of TNBA is a grim Batman whose cold-heartedness the writers often dubiously employ as an attractive benchmark of cool, anti-hero behavior. There is nothing to smile about as this streak in Batman that we often implicitly take for granted becomes grounds for his arrest, his having spent years coolly betraying his most trusted companion inside the law by systematically preparing his daughter for combat missions. Of the three comrades that Batman has taken under his wing, Dick and Tim were in need of a father figure because their parents were taken from them. Examining his relationship to Barbara under a similar lens, the situational ethics are less clear-cut, Batman’s assumption of the role of surrogate father housing the subliminal action of wresting her away from her real father. By the time we learn of Bruce’s romantic tryst with Barbara later in DCAU history, the morality becomes even more mystified.
With Gordon going the obsessive route of Batman, and in the process casting a dark shadow on our hero’s own ‘noble’ quest, Over the Edge soon enters into apocalyptic territory, with Bane, now infinitely more intimidating than in his debut, as the foreboding harbinger of destruction. The climax, a metaphorically overstuffed three-way fight to the death, is less shocking than it is visceral, an apotheosis of everything the TMS animators ever learned about fight animation. Beginning with an eerie dual-purpose funeral, proceeding to turn the Bat Signal from a beacon into a searchlight, and even throwing in a surprisingly suiting Vertigo homage, this reckless but fastidious third act is as full of buried stakes and rampant symbolism as any action climax I’ve seen in either film or television.
And then Barbara wakes up. This is a character who has been relegated to quips and comic relief since the beginning of TNBA, and one might criticize her objectification in Over the Edge as well, a mere catalyst who sparks a dramatic reshuffling of Batman’s and James Gordon’s relationship without any observance of her own character. The scene that follows her awakening defuses these criticisms and also initiates a rethinking of the events witnessed in the dream. If the credulousness of the portrayals of Batman as a manipulator of the young and Gordon as going too far in his rabid initiative for vengeance is horrific, then Barbara’s scene with her father makes us reconsider this horror as born of our own marginalization of her character, as the war waged between her two guardians is one that largely factors out the reality of her own choices. As Barbara comes forward with her confession, she takes on the burden of responsibility implicitly placed on Batman, and as Gordon accepts and respects the freedom she has been granted as an adult, we learn that a future in which he might revoke the trust he has put in Batman and be driven to madness is an impossibility.
This dream episode winds up telling more about our heroes than most episodes do. If Over the Edge is already a masterwork, albeit a disturbing one, for its tendency to throw our idealistic images of Batman and Gordon into flux, then the new image offered of Barbara in the last minutes, as a character every bit as tortured as these two men and as a master of her own destiny, elevates it to an even higher status, ameliorating our fears without eradicating them and forever changing the way we think about this series.
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