THE RIBALD TALES OF ROBIN HOOD (1969)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The above lobby card asserts that this film came "from the same company that brought you THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF ZORRO." I have only a dim memory of the latter film, but as I recall that Zorro-flick was just one of many softcore comedies spawned by the liberalization of the American market re: adult films in the late 1960s. Some of these were set in some exotic historical period, like medieval Europe or the American West. I fully expected a movie with the title RIBALD TALES OF ROBIN HOOD would also be a dimwit T&A comedy set in medieval England.

Well, HOOD is no better than most of these low-grade quickie efforts, but it's peculiar in that it's not a comedy, nor an adventure in the dominant "Robin Hood" mold. There are comic moments in it, with lusty wenches baring their goods for the doubtlessly merry men of Robin Hood. Yet HOOD is unusually serious for a sex-flick. Grindhouse films of the sixties sometimes focused on modern-day people enduring lives of quiet desperation, but I've never seen a depressing medieval sex-film.

Most of the usual Robin Hood routines are in place: Robin (Ralph Jenkins) and his merry men hide in Sherwood's deep forest from the authority of King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham while robbing from the rich in order to ransom King Richard (who never actually makes it back to England here). However, whereas most Robin-iterations show Maid Marian hanging out chastely in the leader's company, these rebels have various camp-followers hanging around and, of course, hanging out of their blouses whenever possible. 

Meanwhile, King John and the Sheriff can't figure out their next move, even with assistance from John's evil sister Lady Sallyforth (Lynn Cartwright).  First, for some reason I didn't entirely follow, she and the Sheriff travel into Sherwood and get captured, but Robin releases them in order to humiliate them, bound nude back-to-back on a donkey. (Before the release, one of the bosomy camp-followers suggests she wants to mess with Sallyforth while she's tied up, only to spit on her instead. Naturally, Sallyforth gets even later.) This segue wasn't strictly necessary, because immediately afterward, secondary villain Guy of Gisborne comes up with the main plot against Robin Hood. The evildoers persuade the hero's former fiancee Maid Marian (Dee Lockwood) to enter Sherwood and talk Robin into giving up the outlaw life. Maid Marian does so, taking along a lady in waiting. Once the two women enter the Sherwood camp, neither lady has to wait very long before they start getting busy; Marian with Robin and the other girl with Little John.

All of this sounds like your typical goofy comedy. Yet though there are mildly humorous moments (two camp-girls fight with quarterstaffs upon a river-bridge), the tone is dominantly grim. Maid Marian doesn't do anything to betray her lover, but a disloyal camp follower gives away Robin's plans, and the hero is captured and imprisoned at John's castle. In addition, Tina, Little John's conquest, is raped and killed by the Sheriff. The villains, hoping to find Robin's cache of stolen gold, force Marian to interrogate him in the dungeon. He thinks she betrayed him, and slaps her a couple of times, though in the end his deep feelings for her overcome his sense of betrayal. Robin then escapes the dungeon, thanks to Marian letting him wear her heavy cloak so that the guard lets Robin out, thinking it's Marian. (Said guard also pinches "her" butt as "she" leaves.)

When the Merry Men in due course invade the castle to free Robin, they slay most of the male villains, and they also end up freeing Marian from the tender mercies of Lady Sallyforth. The villainess takes a definite sapphic delight in tormenting Marian, alluding to the "soft girl things that your traitorous Robin and his arrogant maleness couldn't possibly know"-- which is definitely the one line in the whole script worth committing to memory. In another unusually dramatic touch, Robin gives Sallyforth to his men to deal out punishment. Little John has the chance to rape (at the very least) the woman partly responsible for the demise of his beloved. Yet he demurs, clearly not willing to touch her sexually, and leaves her punishment to two other outlaws.

Though there is a lengthy fight at the end, it seems clear to me that director/co-writer Richard Kanter barely cared about these scenes next to scenes of male grief at the loss of their beloved women. The streaming version I saw also omits a traumatic moment from other versions, in which Robin as a child watches the Sheriff and his men slay Robin's father and despoil both his mother and sister. HOOD may not formally good for a "Robin Hood drama." But I give Kanter props for trying something different in a market devoted to sedulous imitation.

One of Sallyforth's torture methods constitutes a naturalistic "diabolical device:" a bed of spikes over which the victim is suspended by chains. However, this device inspires IMO only fear, not the dread that is summoned forth by the most well-known torture device in English-language fiction: Poe's uncanny combo of The Pit and the Pendulum.

THE MUNSTERS (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

The original MUNSTERS does not seem like it ought to be a difficult franchise to reboot. Standard sitcom stories, but altered to a fit a family of Transylvanian emigres who are blissfully unaware that regular Americans deem them monsters. And yet a bad series reprise, a busted TV pilot, and five movies, both theatrical and televised, have not been able to duplicate the original show's appeal. And though I hoped writer-director Rob Zombie would prove the exception-- given his express love for the series and for Classic Universal monster-movies-- the 2022 MUNSTERS rates no higher than being a failure more interesting than the others.

I'm not familiar with Zombie's entire repertoire, but based on my experience with his two HALLOWEEN reboots and his graphic novel THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO, I get that his biggest shortcoming is his fannishness-- not for other people's stories, but for his own. Zombie's a triple-threat creator-- writer, director and rock musician-- but that doesn't mean he doesn't need, like any other creator, to refine and rework raw ideas. I listened to his commentary on the MUNSTERS project he completed for Netflix, and he went into lots of detail about working with the actors, the makeup people and the set designers, and very little about the choices he made in scripting the story.

Zombie gives America's favorite family of fear something no other iteration gave them: an "origin-story," based on bits and pieces related in the teleseries. The story spends the majority of its run-time in a fantasy-version of Transylvania, where various monsters rub shoulders with common humanity. One prestigious family consists of the aristocratic bloodsucker the Count (Daniel Roebuck), his equally vampiric daughter Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), and her half-brother Lester (Tomas Boykin), who for reasons unknown is a werewolf who's always seen in his wolf-form. (Possibly Lester's a compensation for the absence of the show's "wolf-boy" Eddie Munster, whose character, like that of "cousin Marilyn," won't appear in this continuity until a later period.) Lester's a chiseler whose schemes will result in the Munsters leaving Transylvania for the U.S. of A., but the main focus of the narrative is Lily's fierce desire for a pleasing mate.

Fortuitously, mad doctor Wolfgang and his hunchbacked assistant Floop (Floop? Really, Rob?) put together the man of Lily's dreams. Disappointed in the results of his jury-rigged experiment, Wolfgang conveniently skips town, leaving Floop to dub the flat-skulled, pea-brained man-monster "Herman Munster." ("Like the cheese, you know?") Lily sees Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) on TV doing a terrible standup-act, and she's immediately besotted. This leads to a whirlwind romance and speedy nuptials, over the many protests of the Count, who's revolted by his prospective son-in-law. Not long after the marriage, Lester screws things up so that the Count loses his castle. With some convenient prodding, Herman decides he, his wife and his father-in-law will all move to the U.S., where they take up residence at the expected 1313 Mockingbird Lane-- at which the movie trails off, as if leading into a potential series with Zombie's characters.

It should be clear from this two paragraph summation that Zombie missed the boat as far as providing conflict. Now, the original TV show only had the level of conflict possible for a light-hearted sitcom, in which every tense situation is resolved in the end. But a lot of sixties episodes still allowed the characters to get irritated with one another, with the usual comical complications. Zombie establishes that the Count (the future "Grandpa") doesn't like Herman, but he doesn't do anything to shoot Herman down. Lester tricks Herman into signing away the castle-- which doesn't even sound like a legal possibility-- and Lily doesn't even get cross with her husband when he gives away her centuries-old home! The original show was no great work of comic genius, but the scripts consistently allowed the regular characters to get miffed at one another. This strength in the original template may be one of the reasons none of the later reprises proved efficacious. Their makers, like Zombie, were too busy trying to duplicate the superficial aspects of the sixties sitcom to get at the way the characters normally interacted.

Roebuck is very good as Future Grandpa, and Phillips does a decent Herman. But the weakest links are unquestionably Sheri Moon Zombie's performance and the lines her spouse wrote for her. I realize that neither of the two Zombies are required to follow every aspect of the series, and I certainly don't mind the elision of Eddie and Marilyn Munster (though both Butch Patrick and Pat Priest provide some minor voice-work). But I see no advantage in Rob and Sheri Moon changing Lily Munster into a simpering, dithery type, a little like the wife of Cosmo Topper from the 1937 TOPPER. In the series the writers reaped considerable humor from making Lily a dutiful wife who was simultaneously a highly opinionated lady, capable of shifting into Ballbuster Mode at a moment's notice. Twice in this film, Lily gets irritated and performs some sort of "vampire whammy." But in both instances her flashes of anger have no real payoff.

Rob Zombie does provide a number of shout-outs to series concepts: the dragon Spot, the Munsters' Uncle Gilbert (a reasonable facsimile of the Gill Man), and Igor the bat. He also tosses in support-cast members with genre-associations-- Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson, Catherine "Space: 1999" Schell, and Sylvester "Dr Who" McCoy-- but none of them have anything good to work with. THE MUNSTERS looks great, but it could have BEEN great if Zombie had imitated the level of sitcom conflict from the original he so admired.

SMALLVILLE 2: 16: "FEVER" (2003)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Though "Fever" is a weak episode, it's not due to simple bad writing. Rather, the story exists only to resuscitate the plot-thread about the apparent miracle-powers of the ship that brought Clark to Earth.

In the first-season episode "Tempest," Martha was exposed to radiation from the ship which cured her infertility, making possible the revelation in "Fever" that she's become pregnant with a natural child by Jonathan. In "Insurgence," Martha steals the key from Lionel, but though she handles the Kryptonian artifact in that episode, only in "Fever" does she become ill when she comes in contract with kryptonite-laced spores associated with the key. I'm betting that these spores were a make-work menace that never recur, like the parasites in "Rush."

Lex's sometime girlfriend Dr Helen Bryce returns and takes charge of Martha's case. Further, Clark begins to get sick, apparently from proximity to his infected mother, since he never handles the key here (nor did he get sick in the first-season episodes where he had custody of the artifact). In due time Clark and Jonathan conclude that the only way they can overcome their alien infections by activating the ship, which does act exactly as they desire, even though neither man is able to actually interface with the ship's computer intelligence.

In addition to setting up a new plot-thread involving the ship's nature, "Fever" functions to generate more soap opera angst as Lana and Chloe both fear for Clark's survival-- and poor Chloe, already occupying the position Lana will later occupy respective to Lois Lane, gets the short end of the stick. Bryce is given a little information that arouses her suspicions of the Kents, though as yet she isn't brought into the loop-- though her acquaintance with Lex makes her yet another threat to the Big Secret.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

First off, the title. I assume that the English subtitle "Minus One" means roughly the same as the Japanese subtitle, "Zero." Both are indicators that MINUS is a reboot of the Godzilla franchise, reworking even some aspects of the original 1954 template. The most important revision is a particular thematic element constant to every other Godzilla film ever made-- but more on that later.

The film is set both in Japan during both the last years of WWII and the early years of Japan's recovery, and focuses on the turmoil-filled life of viewpoint character Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki of GREAT YOKAI WAR fame). Koichi has been ordered to attack the Allied forces in a suicidal kamikaze plane, but he diverts from his mission and lands on a flight maintenance island. There he and his fellow soldiers have a close encounter of the worst kind with a twenty-foot-tall dinosaur, whom the local islanders have dubbed "Godzilla." Koichi has a chance to attack Godzilla (though viewers will later learn such an assault would have proven futile) but freezes, so that almost all the other soldiers perish. 

Later, like thousands of other Japanese, Koichi must attempt to eke out a living in a devastated country. He acquires by accident a family made up of two other victims of the war: Noriko, an adult the same age as Koichi, and Akiko, an infant war orphan whom Noriko rescued from death. The three of them survive, an ersatz nuclear family, thanks to Koichi getting a job as a mine-sweeper, destroying mines left in the sea by both American and Japanese forces. But while all this is going on, the American government continues to make atomic tests in the Pacific. And in just a few years, the twenty-foot terror returns, but now he's as tall as twenty stories, and gifted with atomic dragon-fire. Plus which, because he's bigger now, he wants more territory-- the very epitome of lebensraum, even for a creature that implicitly feeds mostly on fish.

While Godzilla is filled with mindless rage at the puny gnats in his path, Koichi's civilian life is filled with survivors' guilt and self recriminations over his failure to perform his military duty. The King of Monsters devastates the Ginza area where Koichi lives, and not only is the Japanese government incompetent to handle the crisis, the U.S. government refuses to intervene. (I guess in this world the U.S. never stationed any forces in defeated Japan immediately after the war.) Japan's most formidable foe can only be defeated by an allegiance of Japan's disenfranchised military men-- and Koichi gets a chance to redeem himself for his past inaction.

With the possible exception of the 1954 original, Godzilla is never more terrifying than he is here, stomping humans underfoot and reducing destroyers to scrap. But even though he gets a power upgrade from atomic radiation, he no longer seems to incarnate the horrors of nuclear power. He's also altered from a near invulnerable juggernaut, whose hide can't even be injured by missiles, to a somewhat more organic creature who can be wounded yet who can regenerate most somatic damage-- which is one of the things that gives the Japanese the chance to beat him without inventing brand new super-weapons. This Godzilla seems more like a continuation of the war's chaos, since in this iteration Japan doesn't even have the chance to rebuild itself and to be seduced by the attractions of Western society. 

Though MINUS is one of the few films in which the Big G's only foes are embattled humans-- the last one being 2016's SHIN GODZILLA-- I believe it's the only one in which the humans are not represented by scientists and military organized by the power of government(s). This is the big thematic change instituted by writer-director-effects guy Takashi Yamazaki, implying that governments are utterly impotent to deal with crises, and only the Common Man can possibly put down the menace.

In a logical sense, I reject this conceit. But it's a great idea in terms of rethinking the usual implications of most stories about Earth facing down giant monsters, aliens and the like, and even the specific generative text directed and co-written by Inoshiro Honda. Numerous critics have asserted that Honda worked anti-war messages into many of his popular movies, and there's some truth to that. But it's also not hard to discern, in the Godzilla films alone, an admiration for the power of governments to muster vast forces of technology and manpower against a monumental threat. Yamazaki never expresses any admiration for the Japanese government. He doesn't specifically condemn the WWII militarists who placed the country on the path of conquest, and in this he slightly resembles a lot of Japanese pop culture that makes similar elisions. Still, the imputations of the government's impotence stands as an overall denunciation. MINUS doesn't sing the praises of anything but the average Japanese citizen trying to live his life. 

Despite this radical take on Godzilla movies, I'm not sure Yamazaki's approach could work a second time, even though the ending of MINUS sets up yet another potential sequel. I'm glad the movie's enjoyed a strong U.S. box office, but it might not be the best model for future big-monster movies.

EROTIC GHOST STORY 2 (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

EROTIC GHOST STORY made money, so it got two sequels, though I've yet to see the third. But for GHOST 2 the former main characters, the three fairy sisters, are dropped and the story focuses more on stopping the new rampages of the sex-demon Wutung. His main foes, however, are once again a trio of characters, this time consisting of a brother, a sister, and the brother's fiancee.

There are some minor references to the events of the first film but on the whole the new director and new writers drop the fairly linear plot of GHOST 1. GHOST 2 provides only the sliver of a basic concept and then piles on even more exotic gyrations than GHOST 1 ever thought of, with the lascivious demon played this time out by fan-favorite Anthony Wong (who must have been paid by the grimace).

The plot-sliver is the assertion that at some point Wutung fell in real love with the mortal girl Hsiao-Yen. Some celestial spoilsports don't approve of this union, killing the girl, but her spirit is later reborn in another body. During her absence, though, Wutung ravages many villages, and some if not all of them sacrifice their nubile maidens to keep the sex demon at bay.

Frankly, though I just finished watching the film I couldn't say just who Wutung's three opponents are, though one of them, the fiancee I believe, is the reincarnation of Hsiao-Yen. I only know this because at the culminating battle scene (in which the sister throws a mean magical boomerang), Wutung strikes the fiancee on the shoulder. Out comes an outpouring of energy over which the face of Hsiao-Yen is superimposed. She appeals to the sex demon to choose love over lust, and such is the power of love that even a lust-demon gives in before its might-- and thus the two of them vapor off, ending Wutung's threat to humankind.

The camera-angles depicting all the sex positions are at least more imaginative than they were in GHOST 1. But the last-minute appeal to righteousness strikes a false note, given that the whole movie has been all about depicting as much lust as its makers could conceive, for an audience that wanted just that. So no, a final coda about the power of love just doesn't hold water.

EROTIC GHOST STORY (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Some online reviews compare the Hong Kong movie EROTIC GHOST STORY to the book-and-movie THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK, and I suppose this could be a partial influence. But even having only a smidgen of familiarity with Chinese literary tropes, I tend to think that the story owes a lot more to the oft-adapted Chinese story of THE LEGEND OF THE WHITE SNAKE. SNAKE is about a female snake-spirit who falls in love with a mortal man and so attempts to pass as human, only to be separated from her love by a busybody Taoist monk. 

GHOST is about three spirits-- my subtitling calls them both "foxes" and "fairies"-- who are seeking to purge themselves of lustful impulses so that they can become human. In a reversal of the SNAKE plotline, they meet a male-- only apparently a mortal-- who seduces them all and ruins their chances to become human beings. The film's references to Chinese metaphysics are the only reason I give GHOST a fair mythicity rating, since most of this Category III film consists of loads and loads of softcore sex.

The three fairies (Amy Yip, So Man and Hitomi Kudo) descend to Earth and take up residence in some Chinese city, where they're able to pass as humans with their neighbors. A busybody Taoist priest stops by to provide exposition about how the fairies need to avoid sex in order to attain humanity, and the girls all vow to stay chaste.

In no time, handsome young scholar Wu Ming (Pal Sinn) comes along and implores the women to give him shelter until he gets wherever he's going. And equally quickly, each of the sisters in turn finds some excuse to corner Ming in private and sex him up. The sisters aren't even particularly possessive, for when they find out that they've all done the scholar their next step is line up a foursome.

But Ming isn't a mortal scholar at all; he's the fertility demon Wutung, the very incarnation of the lust the sisters were attempting to avoid. This leads to a magical duel, which includes flashing CGI rays and the use of  a voodoo doll. (The scene in which Wutung writhes in pain as the three girls repeatedly stab his image is the movie's high point.) Aside from that scene, both the fight-scenes and the sex-scenes are nothing special, and the three female stars don't even get to defeat their seducer, as the Taoist comes back to deal the demon his defeat-- though oddly, Wutung gets a sequel and the fairy-girls don't.

GOTHAM, SEASON 2 (2015-16)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I have a theory about the great shift in storytelling priorities as GOTHAM went into its second season. It's not a theory for which I've done any research, but I think it's supported by many anecdotes about DC Comics-- all stating that the company is often extremely protective of even minor IP when they're being farmed out to other media for adaptation.

In Season 1, the showrunners tacitly received DC's okay for reworking the story of Bruce Wayne, many support-characters in the BATMAN franchise, and three major Bat-villains-- Catwoman, Penguin and Riddler-- all of whom receive major continuity-alterations. There are also an assortment of lesser support-characters reproduced without much alteration, like mob-boss Carmine Falcone and D.A. Harvey Dent, with Dent apparently set up for a villainous transformation that never comes to pass. For the most part, though, the writers concentrate on the warring factions of the Gotham City gangland. We see most of these conflicts between the bosses-- Falcone, Boss Maroni and Fish Mooney-- through the gimlet eye of Oswald "Penguin" Cobblepot, who essentially plays the powerful criminals against one another until the final episode of Season 1, in which he becomes, in his own words, "king of Gotham." 

One writer for the show described the first season as a "police procedural," which is nonsense. From first to last, GOTHAM was a big, splashy gangbusters-melodrama, closer to DICK TRACY than DRAGNET. But throughout Season 1, the writers largely avoided most of Batman's rogues' gallery. A single episode is devoted to a character who somewhat resembles the Joker, but seemed at the time to be an unreasonable facsimile. A comics-villain named Victor Zsasz makes a few appearances as an underworld hitman, and James Gordon starts out with a girlfriend whose first name suggests that she might somehow relate to Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon-- only to diverge, making any connections dubious. As for non-gangland villains, the scripts largely produced one-offs with names like "The Goat" and "The Balloon-Man," which suggests to me that the staff didn't have any okays about adopting even lesser Bat-villains. 

But Season 2 shifts into "villain overdrive," and I suspect that the show's respectable ratings meant that DC became less parsimonious with its properties. Gang wars between mundane thugs became a thing of the past, replaced by a surfeit of super-crooks, more in line with the beloved 1966 teleseries than any commonplace cop show. Indeed, Season 2's episodes were divided into two distinct arcs, given the respective umbrella-titles of "Rise of the Super-Villains" and "Wrath of the Super-Villains"-- though neither is a particularly apt title for describing the events.

"Rise" begins with a three-part continuity stressing the return of Jerome Velaska, acting more Joker-y than he did in his single Season 1 appearance, and leading a contingent of Arkham escapees on a murderous rampage. However, Jerome is apparently killed in the third part of this sequence by the real "Big Bad" of the arc, Theo Galavan. Both Galavan and his sister Tabitha are very freeform takes on characters not originally linked in DC Comics continuity, and as such I don't view them as true adaptations. The same goes for a smattering of characters with the same names as DC characters but no other similarities, such as "Silver St. Cloud" and "Richard Sionis" (in comics, the father of the villain Black Mask, who never appears in GOTHAM). The "Rise" storyline focuses upon Galavan's meteoric ascent to the position of Gotham's mayor and his secret allegiance to an ancient order devoted to exterminating the Wayne family-- though the evildoer's descent is just as precipitate. He makes one more appearance in the "Wrath" arc and fades from the series, though his sister goes on to multi-season appearances.

"Wrath" focuses on the long-running plotline of Arkham Asylum, which has become a birthplace of horrors since falling under control of the mad scientist Hugo Strange (B.D. Wong). Sometimes Strange either takes control of newly formed super-villains like Mister Freeze and the Firefly; other times, he creates new menaces from the bodies of the risen dead, such as altering the deceased Theo Galavan into a warrior named Azrael. But Strange doesn't seek to control Gotham in the way Penguin or Galavan do. Gotham is simply Strange's experimental laboratory, where the scientist plays God by unleashing on the city various malefic forces, including Penguin, after the latter spends a little quality time at Arkham. In contrast to "Rise," this arc goes absolutely fannish in embracing its massive "super-villain team-up," far beyond anything any other live-action Bat-adaptation had attempted.

How much of Season 2 is aesthetically pleasing? Well, though GOTHAM remains a very violent show, the injection of super-menaces forced the writers to use the violence more carefully, instead of just having Penguin kill random people for effect. The Galavan arc often drags, except for the three-parter with Valeska-Joker, which has a great resolution and sets the scene for more "quasi-Joker" stories in future seasons. "Wrath" is more devoted to pulpy goodness, like having the Firefly and Mr. Freeze engaging in a "fire and ice" battle or having a new Clayface take on the appearance of Jim Gordon. Even a resuscitated Fish Mooney is a bit more tolerable once she has super-powers. Also, the hints from Season One about the "Court of Owls" are finally given form.

There are misfires too-- the short-lived pregnancy of Lee Tompkins, for one-- but it might be argued that such miscarriages (so to speak) are practically inevitable with a series focused on so many characters. Even Jim Gordon is often treated like nothing more than a loose cannon, on whom the writers can depend to keep the plot-pot boiling. But I appreciate that they retained a good sense of the character of the future Caped Crusader. In the first season, David Mazouz's Bruce is often still a bereaved, confused child. Here, the scripts begin to imbue his character with a deeper resolve, yet not without a sense of the compassion that many comics-scribes omit from the hero's character. Even as a child, Bruce is capable of facing death or refusing temptation. And yet he's capable of showing mercy to Silver St. Cloud, even when he knows she intends to betray him. His quixotic relationship with Selina, the future Catwoman, also hits all the right notes, with Camren Bicondova consistently putting across a complementary sense of a "cat who walks by herself."