TNBA reviews: Animal Act

The Mad Hatter makes for such a sinisterly self-assured crime lord that it is some shock that he had his roots as an awkward, submissive, sympathetic little man who espoused love instead of greed. Even after plunging into the depths of madness, he sought after a platonic fantasyland, acting on desires not criminal but childlike in nature. He was an oxymoronic fusion between scientific prowess and fantastical illogic, his great technological achievement directed towards wafting away reality in favor of his own imagination.

Alas, he took the first misstep in The Worry Men, a passable yarn that proceeded too mechanically to reflect the mind of Jervis Tetch. Though his intention was ultimately to achieve the isolated utopia of self-indulgence that has always been his goal, he did so through common thievery, as if his deliriously warped mind could fashion no more creative a scheme. In Animal Act, the limits of his creativity extend only to clownery, and the mind control that has symbolized his compulsion to shape the world in his image is reduced to villainous gimmickry. How ironic, too, that the Hatter’s devolution as a character corresponds to a redesign that renders him even more socially debilitative—hunched over and sickly pale with ghastly yellow eyes. As a visual specimen he cries out for interpretation, answered by the writers with second-rate circus tricks.

Animal Act’s structure matches each act to a set piece, beginning with a gorilla chase, progressing forward to a skirmish with two bears, and culminating in a circus tent spectacle where all the carnival misfits congregate to do battle with our heroes. Each set piece is buffered by an appearance by the incognito Mad Hatter, poorly disguised as one of the clowns at Haley’s Circus. As a whodunit mystery, the episode lacks the jazzy spontaneity and red herring freewheeling of A Bullet for Bullock, preferring instead a pre-written rubric that telegraphs the answers from the beginning.

If screenwriter Hilary Bader does seek to counteract the more immature elements of the story, it is in the unearthing of Dick Grayson’s childhood in the presence of the still-touring Haley’s Circus. Acting on the false principle that evocations of a character’s mythological history equates to an increase in artistic legitimacy, Bader draws on the big-top community as a well of nostalgia over which Nightwing fondly reminisces. Naturally, this sense of longing is nothing more than a way to convolute the mystery by establishing a suspect with emotional ties to one of the detectives. Batman implicates Miranda as the likeliest culprit; Nightwing defends her on the merits of childhood friendship.

Once the mystery is solved, this manufactured tension all but evaporates, leaving Bruce and Dick with nothing else to do but amicably pay a visit to the circus as spectators. It is quick-fix episodes like Animal Act that make one wonder how any character, from the Mad Hatter to Nightwing, keeps hold of his character-defining traumas and disturbances for too long. Such ruses make the belittling moniker of ‘action cartoon’ an acceptable label for a series that should strive for something greater.