Batman: The Ring of Wax & Give 'Em the Axe

The Ring of Wax

"What devilish sticky stuff!"

This two-parter is, really, pretty much Batman by numbers- the script is quite good but no more than that, and the collection of set pieces strung together to form a plot of sorts are entertaining enough but not enough to make this story stand out.

And yet all this is elevated into something more by the presence of Fran Gorshin as the Riddler, reminding us once more with his watchable, amusing, psychotic and genuinely menacing performance why, as Batman villains go, he's the best of a very good bunch. There are good reasons why he's the first villain to be back a third time. Even if these new writers do tend to have him say the word "dividend" every other sentence.

So forget the guff about wax and universal solvents. Focus instead on the Riddler quoting a soliloquy from Hamlet and saying that "I wrote it myself." And focus too on his fourth-wall breaking explanation for the elaborate predicament he devises for the cliffhanger as the Dynamic Duo are slowly lowered into boiling wax- "Why kill them fast when watching them die slowly is so much more entertaining?"


Give 'Em the Axe

"Crime is no fun without riddles!"

This is a deliciously convoluted cliffhanger resolution involving a shiny belt buckle and the convenient presence of both a vat of explosives and a shaft of sunlight. This resolution takes up ten minutes of screen time, leading to a fairly short succession of set pieces before the inevitable ending with a fight, the Riddler losing and this week's female baddie expressing regret too late.

We get some fun, though- the Riddler's tour of the torture implement in Gotham Museum has him wistfully longing for "the good old days". His overall plan to nick Incan gold from a sarcophagus that happens to be on loan to the museum makes, naturally, no sense whatsoever, but this is Batman. We don't care about boring old plot logic.

It's all over too soon and, although this by far the weakest of his three appearances, we're itching to see the Riddler again. And if this is perhaps the least impressive episode so far, it is nonetheless impressive that Batman, even at its relative worst, is pretty damned awesome.