P.O.V.

Continuing our trek through the early, not-so-good Batman episodes brings us to "P.O.V.", or Point of View, the seventh produced episode and 13th aired on Sept. 18, 1992.

Harvey Bullock is one of my favorite characters in Batman: The Animated Series, and this episode features him prominently. We see that he is a slob and a liar, but really a good cop at the end of the day. And even though he's kind of chubby, he is pretty buff and can take down bad guys with the best of them. Any episode that shows Bullock fighting this much definitely deserves a point.

The score will go to a 7 for the rookie cop's story. This was his first encounter with Batman, and in the dark, he couldn't really see what he was doing. This was a good way to bring back that wonder and amazement that normal people should have whenever Batman is doing his thing. As the audience, we sometimes get used to Batman's heroics, so it's good to be reminded that he is extraordinary and almost a little supernatural.

While this episode did have a few nice things going for it, it was pretty sloppy in some parts, especially during Montoya's story. The bad guys pull a bag of $2 million out of a safe, Montoya tells them to freeze, and they throw the bag of money at her. It does knock her down, but that was the whole reason they went in there. Then one of the guys decides to attack her with a drill. Why don't these crappy mobsters have guns? I have to take a point off for that.

I'll bring the score back to the starting 5 for the ambiguous bad guy. He doesn't have a name, we never see his face, and we never see him again. There are tons of bad guys and mobsters in the DC Universe, pick one of them! Also, he captured Batman at the beginning of the episode, tied him up and left him hanging for probably a couple of hours. The only thing they really did to Batman was take off his utility belt and try to open it. What kind of a sad excuse for bad guys are these people?

This was a kind of cheesy episode, but it was nice to have Batman mostly in the background with supporting characters like Bullock and Montoya taking the lead. For being in the not-so-good era, this one wasn't half bad.

Final score: 5 out of 10.