Batman: A Horse of Another Colour

"I did a little extra-curricular crime detecting while Dick Grayson was doing his homework."

Well, that, if you forgive the lamentable lack of a cliffhanger, was rather splendid. In fact, suspiciously so. I'm now convinced that the problems we've seen this season can be laid entirely at the door of the decision to move largely to standalone single episodes. Not only, at a time when the budget has been cut, does it needlessly increase costs by demanding new costumes and sets each episode, but it takes away the main attraction of the show. Batman is awesome because of its high camp silliness, its deadpan riffs on the absurdities of its own tropes. There's not much time for all than in twenty-four minutes, but in two episodes there's penty. Because this two parter, while perhaps not quite being the best ever, has brought all the fun back again, made possible by having time to breathe.

Hence we get to enjoy Barbara Gordon being the ridiculously sensible and goody-goody librarian, and Penguin looking for a buyer for his stolen folio of parasols in the "Saturday Review of Parasols"- and failing yet again to notice "A.L. Fredd".We get some more priceless dialogue between Penguin and Lola. And we get the silliest horse race imaginable.It's all enormous fun.

But we end with a massive hint that the next (single) episode will feature the splendid King Tut- but will we have enough time in one episode to enjoy this fun character...?

Batman: The Sport of Penguins

"I pray for the day when Gotham City is safe from that mocking mountebank."

Phew. This episode is much better, and holds out some hope for this third season after its wobby start- and it manages to do this while being centred around the theme of horse racing, the most boring subject imaginable.

I still have doubts about the new format, but the fact that this is a two parter (although the fact the show is now weekly sadly seems to mean no cliffhanger, which is silly and disappointing as they still try to tease us without one) makes the whole thing less rushed and allows some of the high camp silliness which is the whole point of this series- hence we get the Caped Crusaders' surreal and ridiculously random reasoning ("holy non-sequitors!) which lead them to the glue factory, and Penguin gets lines like "If it's that priceless, I can get a good price for it on the black market", and his haggling at the glue factory is hilarious.

It's also nice that he remembers Barbara jilting him at the altar (actual continuity!), and leaves a ticking trap for her- and I love Barbara's po-faced outrage at his attempted theft in the library. We also get the amusing Ethel Merman as Lola Lasagne, a fairly small time villain with a small time scheme, but an amusing one.

On a personal note, I'm glad these two parters are more loosely connected than before; from this week onwards my weekdays are even more insanely busy than before and a short episode of Batman is something I can hopefully blog where time is absurdly short, so I'll stick to one episode at a time unless things change- on other days, I'll continue to blog Deadwood with films, as usual, at the weekend. I want to keep this blog up; it's strangely relaxing for me after these long days.