The Underdwellers

When Batman: The Animated Series first began, they made sure they had a couple of really good episodes to kickstart the show. Powerful episodes with Man-Bat, Joker, Scarecrow and Poison Ivy accomplished this. But then those great episodes ran out and the show went into a "finding itself" period, which produced some not-so-great stuff. "The Underdwellers" is the beginning of that era. It was the sixth episode made and 27th aired on Oct. 21, 1992.

I'll start with the good. There were some really nice scenes with Batman in the shadows in the sewer. The animation wasn't always perfect in this era, but when it was on, it was on. We also got to see a really angry Batman who almost lost his cool a couple of times, which was pretty sweet. He also got to fight some alligators, which I enjoyed a bit. I will add one point to the episode.

Now for the bad. For some reason, Batman decided to take a lost boy to Wayne Manor, hoping that the child doesn't put two and two together and discover his secret identity. He then puts the kid in Alfred's care, who complains, "But I know nothing of children!" forgetting that he practically raised Bruce and Dick himself. And then they never give the kid any new clothes or anything! This might have been cool had this kid been Jason Todd and would eventually become the second Robin, but no such things materialized. The score is back to an average 5.

I'll take another point off for the conflicting nature of this episode. They wanted to start putting kid-friendly morals in the show, which I'm not opposed to, but they kind of failed in this episode by having these morals put in a rather dark and mature episode. Telling kids not to play on moving trains or with guns is good, but doing it in an episode that has a guy kidnapping and dehumanizing children just doesn't work.

The score will finally fall to a 3 for the sheer cheesiness of it, mostly the main kid. I didn't like him pestering Alfred and I really didn't like him swinging around on ropes to save his friends. Again, it would have been fine had this boy been named Jason Todd, but he wasn't, so he shouldn't have been doing all that stuff. And then there's his only spoken line: "The light — the light!" Lame.

Final score: 3 out of 10.