“Is Batman up against a sticky wicket?”
Well, this is completely unlike any previous episode. It's utterly, utterly mad, and very silly> No, it's not going to be competing for the title of best ever, but it's a charming bit of fun.
This is, of course, both Batman coming to England and also nothing of the sort. Batman is best when having fun with the fourth wall, and so naturally he visits not London, a real city of mortgages, car insurance and other such mundanities, but Londinium, a city of fog, bobbies and aristocratic baddies in deerstalkers. This is not a representation of England, but of its tropes and stereotypes, and setting the episode in "Londinium" allows that remove from dull reality.
Hence we have "Chuckingham Palace" and "Ireland Yard". We have Superintendent Watson, named afer you-know-who, with the script delightfully nodding to the fact that his office is the same set as Commissioner Gordon's with a couple of stereotypical additions. We have larger than life baddies in the dodgily accented Lord Marmaduke Ffog and the wonderful Lady Penelope Peasoup, who run a finishing school for lady thieves and plot to steal the Crown Jewels. We have a dodgy Cockney butler, and an ersatz ex-dungeon Batcave.
It's all delightful, and I don't care if the plot advances not a jot or, this being Season Three, there's no real cliffhanger: this is fun. I love ho Batman's deductions in the Superintendent's office makes no sense, how one of the three thugs who attack the Dynamic Duo has an accent echoing Dick Van Dyke, and Lord Ffog's monocle. More please.
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