The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne

As a kid, my favorite episodes were always the ones where all the villains get to come together. This is such an episode. Unfortunately, it didn't quite live up to my old memories. It still isn't too bad, though. "The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne" was the 37th episode produced and 29th aired on Oct. 29, 1992.

One thing that bugged me right at the start was an off-hand comment by Batman, saying that Dr. Strange's resort is owned by a Daggett company. But Batman never interrogates Roland Daggett and he's never mentioned again throughout the whole episode. We just barely had a Daggett episode in "Cat Scratch Fever," so why can't he be here? (It would have been nice to see him redeem himself after that lame episode.) And if you're not going to use him, then why mention him at all? I know this is nit-picky, but I'm still going to take a point off for this. Batman knows Daggett is evil, so he should have gone to him first.

But I'll bring the score back up to a 5 for the exciting plot point in this episode, namely, that someone finally discovered Batman's secret identity! This is the first time a villain learned this most-guarded secret and it was quite thrilling to watch Batman try to figure out a way to get out of this mess. Sadly, Hugo Strange never does anything significant again until the Arkham City game, but he was pretty awesome in that, and pretty fun here.

I'll add another point for the Joker's answering machine. "Boy, did you get the wrong number! Leave your message at the sound of the shriek!" This line is too perfect and too funny to make you think about the absurdity of Joker having an answering machine in the first place.

Now, for the best part of the episode, the Joker, the Penguin and Two-Face all on the screen together and all with speaking roles! We've had a couple of episodes where we've seen all these villains, but they never said anything. That's because it's a lot easier to draw somebody than have a voice actor come in. But in this episode, we see three of the top villains come together, bicker a bit amongst themselves, but mostly work well together. And they very nearly learned Batman's secret identity, which surely would have spelt doom for the Caped Crusader. The score's up to a 7.

However, even though I liked watching the villains come together, I still can't help but wonder why they initially agreed to pay Strange more than $53 million for that tape. Why didn't they just skip that step and pull out their guns on him like they did when they saw the tape was fake. They should have had Penguin suggest to combine their resources, have Joker say, "I have a better idea, why don't we not pay him anything?" then have Two-Face flip his coin, agree, and pull out his guns. Then you have a cowering Strange play the tape to get them to put the guns away and then the rest of the episode could play like normal. But sadly, that's not what happened, and for that, I'll have to take off a point.

Final score: 6