B:TAS reviews: Joker's Wild

(8/28/09)

In all Joker episodes, the man seems like something of an abstraction.  He does not seem human, the way he evades the most disastrous of threats, laughs in the face of crippling defeat, and inflicts homicidal chaos with a big grin on his face.  He is a manipulator, who wins even when he loses, and who doesn’t seem capable of being toyed with.

But in Joker’s Wild, he is our protagonist.  The story begins with him and ends with him.  It is his reaction to an outside interference that motivates his actions, not a spontaneous desire to disrupt the city or provoke Batman.  Here, his emotions are toyed with and he is fooled into blowing up a casino so that owner Cameron Kaiser can collect the insurance. Even Bruce Wayne gets in on the action, as he slyly mocks the Clown Prince of Crime when there is nothing he can do to retaliate.  Batman takes a backseat here, almost serving as a distraction for the Joker as he attempts to blow up the casino.  Writers these days put so much stock in that archetypal dead-serious opposition between Batman and the Joker that fun stories like this seem to no longer have a place in the mythos.

Paul Dini, the master of the Joker narrative, writes a Joker who is perturbed, but who still retains his sinister edge.  On a whim he escapes Arkham, and he is elusive and crafty as ever.  He is under the illusion of control, that his revenge will be perfectly enacted and that Kaiser won’t know what hit him.  When he learns that he is playing into a trap, how torturous for his ego.  Note what he says to Kaiser in the helicopter, that he realized it would do better for him to run the show himself.  Watch his malevolent grin and intentness on murder that rarely manifests itself so non-ironically.  He is clearly not happy with the prospect of being toyed with.  Rarely do we see a Joker with such emotional vulnerability.

What I further love is that the generic Gotham cityscape is not the arena for the action.  It is a casino district, where Kaiser’s Joker’s Wild, is the talk of the town.  When the locale becomes specific, the background design becomes that much more elaborate, and the entertainment value rises immensely.  And naturally with casinos and casino owners, there accompanies hidden cameras, master plans, and customers who become peons in the villain’s grand design.  We love that Joker, despite his motives, stays a while to have a little fun with the casino-goers.  Yet if he knew he was being studied as a bug under a microscope, just like all the other people he so strongly detests, how would he feel about it?

I love this episode.  I love it because it has car chases and desktop buttons that emit electric shocks.  I love it because it takes the fun of a Joker story and paints over it a coat of character deconstruction.  I love it because it is one of the few jobs by AKOM that don’t put a knife to my eyes.  I am not claiming greatness for it, nor am I comparing it to Two-Face or Beware the Gray Ghost.  But I am praising it for its simplistically appealing plot that demonstrates surprising adeptness in characterization and storytelling.

He ends up back in Arkham, his goal unfulfilled and the other inmates deriding him as he sits with a big frown on his face.  Not even the Joker can win ‘em all.

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The Joker seems like a character that can’t be outsmarted.  Even in defeat, it feels like a victory for him.  Every time he gets beaten it’s as if he expects it.  How enjoyable it is watching an episode that features a more vulnerable Joker.  Instead of preplanning a scheme for fun, someone genuinely enrages him.  Instead of starting the episode off with a team of henchman and a base of operations, he starts off here in Arkham Asylum.  It’s one of the few episodes of the series that focuses on the Joker and only on the Joker; no Harley, no goons, no nothing.  And it’s a whole lot of fun to watch. 

Again, the episode begins in Arkham, and the Joker, even locked up and surrounded by a bunch of criminals who hate his guts, is happy, annoying Ivy in particular with his irritating retorts and eagerness to watch cartoons.  As soon as a special about a new casino called Joker’s Wild appears onscreen, Joker suddenly gets angry.  It’s interesting to watch, because usually the Joker isn’t angry; he’s laughing and joking.  And even in ‘The Laughing Fish’ when he expresses his rage at Francis the pen pusher, there’s still a sense that Francis’ actions were expected and that Joker still has total control. 

Here, however, he’s really upset, and for good reason too.  He feels insulted that something like a casino would leech off of the unique image he’s created for himself in order to draw a crowd and make a profit.  As he quickly breaks out of Arkham and goes to blow up the casino in a fit of anger, Bruce Wayne investigates, aware that there is something wrong.  After a hilarious exchange between Bruce Wayne and the Joker and a solid chase scene between him and Batman, the episode gets even better. 

Kaiser, the man who owns the casino, actually hoped for the Joker to blow up his casino for insurance money, after having spent too much on building fees.  Kaiser not only infuriated the Joker, but the Joker played right into his hands.  The twist is a great one and the portrait of the Joker we get here is one of the most human, as he loses the edge that makes him seem almost invincible and succumbs to the most basic of human emotions.  As the episode ends, Batman not only takes down Kaiser, but prevents the Joker from killing him, leaving the Joker back in Arkham where the rest of the inmates take glee in watching the televised story on the Joker’s capture, in a perfect full-circle ending. 

The only thing that really keeps this episode from being great, aside from minor gripes like the fact that Kaiser would install an electric floor in his suite, is the animation.  I know I harp on AKOM all the time, and while this isn’t its worst episode, the inconsistencies are abundant and really undercut a lot of the fun of the episode.  Scenes like the reveal of Joker’s face as Batman awakens after being tied to the roulette wheel are some of the most unappealing in the series.  Without such sloppy animation, the episode may have reached near-perfection. 

While it’s not my favorite Joker episode, it is still very good.  Paul Dini’s Joker stories rarely falter, and ‘Joker’s Wild’ is no exception.