TNBA reviews: You Scratch My Back

With You Scratch My Back, Timm and company take the opportunity to undo the damage done to the Catwoman character by Sean Catherine Derek by making her a seductive thief and leaving her at that, no silly animal rights activism to be had. Her former persona was an uneasy coexistence of infantile play and grown-up responsibility that failed to mix. You Scratch My Back strives to be playful, relying on Catwoman as the agent that can make it happen, but doesn’t quite break free of the shackles of murky Bat-Family drama.

The second appearance of Dick Grayson in TNBA, following his cameo at the end of Sins of the Father, obfuscates more than it clarifies. The twist of You Scratch My Back is that Nightwing was in cahoots with Batman and Batgirl all along, a double-cross to match Catwoman’s own backstabbing. Rethinking the episode’s prior events, how much are we to take with a grain of salt? If the twist is any indication, much of Nightwing’s apparent begrudging towards Batman is only play-acting. The endings of both episodes place Dick on good terms with his former allies, leaving us confused as to the authenticity of his assertions of independence. An odd scene between Dick and Barbara, who in this series has so far come across as a vacuous sidekick, is particularly cloudy.

Though Nightwing is a more viable sucker for Catwoman’s seductions, their relationship is never as fun as that between her and Batman, whose square-jawed humorlessness and broad physical girth contrasted wonderfully with Catwoman’s petite sensuality. Our inability to read him as a character due to the prolongation of his back story, a move whose only benefit is that it makes that revelatory episode a treat once it finally rolls around, leaves Nightwing out in the cold as a slick action hero without an ounce of discernable character. A theoretically whimsical tale of shifting allegiances and compounding surprises doubles as a puzzling, pseudo-serious character introduction that is unfortunately unable to serve two masters.

But fortunately enough, the opening unfolds before we have the chance to think about such incongruities, during which we are treated to the apotheosis of all that Timm and Murakami hoped to achieve by their lean character redesigns. Nightwing launches an assault on a gang of South American smugglers and Dan Riba seems to channel the character’s flair for showmanship in his directorial gymnastics, detailing extreme gestures coupled with camera movements so erratic that the analytical cuts that highlight the impact of such gestures feel like fluid transitions as opposed to abrupt, disorienting reconfigurations of space.

These literal and figurative acrobatics reach an excitement lacking in the story, Riba making up for its destabilization by proving how adept he is at regulating his technique. In Batman’s fight against Enrique El Gancho, the closest thing the episode has to a set piece, Riba tones down long shot martial arts displays for close-in shots that absorb the two characters’ voluminous figures—low angles and medium shots abound. Riba pulls the camera with the weight of his characters, instilling in the viewer a comprehension of their physical exertion as they spar with one another. If that isn’t evidence enough of Riba’s achievements, he also employs a soft lighting effect to reflect the nighttime fog of the shipyard, a lovely glaze that does wonders to enhance the atmosphere.