Paging the Crime Doctor

"Paging the Crime Doctor" was the 53rd-produced and 64th-aired episode of Batman: The Animated Series, making its debut on Sept. 17, 1993. This episode has a pretty poor reputation, and I'll save my final thoughts for the end, but I will say now that the title card is a lot more sinister-looking than the actual episode is.

This episode suffered from some very weak action scenes. The opening featured a very long and rather boring chase scene. But it did have one interesting moment — when Batman used his cap to cover the car's windshield — so I won't hold this scene against the episode.

Things don't get interesting until Rupert Thorne shows up. He's one of my favorite below-the-radar characters, right up there with Harvey Bullock. Thorne just has this certain gravitas to him that makes every scene he's in intriguing. And for that, I'll give this episode a point.

I'll then raise the score to a 7 for the inclusion of Leslie Thompkins. I was a little worried they'd say she was an expert heart surgeon, but they never did — only that Matt Thorne needed her help to perform the surgery, which made sense to me. I've always loved Leslie for her tough-as-nails kindness and her role as one of Batman's most-trusted allies. I don't think there's such a thing as too much Leslie Thompkins.

Unfortunately, the inclusion of Thorne and Thompkins is not enough to make an average episode great. As I said earlier, the action here was very weak. Batman only fights a couple of low-level goons, who he normally beats in a couple of seconds. To level the playing field, they gave Batman a concussion early on to make him woozy and slow throughout the episode. That said, he still seemed to struggle a bit too much for me, and he got way too scared when a guy started throwing scalpels at him (it didn't help that this was the commercial break cliffhanger). Seriously, Batman? You're getting scared over a guy throwing small medicals instruments that aren't designed for throwing and are designed to cause a minimal amount of damage. Minus one point!

And now for the worst part of the episode, and one of the worst moments in the whole show. Matt Thorne and Leslie Thompkins, who are at least in their late 50s, jumped from one rooftop to another. Are you kidding me?! True, Leslie did fall, kind of, but only after she mostly made the jump. And Matt made the leap just fine, as if he were Batman himself. I know this episode sorely needed some action scenes, but not like this. This was just ridiculous. We're back down to an average 5.

And that's where we'll stay. The good equally balanced out the bad, and we were left with a completely average and ordinary episode. At least it had a rather heart-warming, if not schmaltzy ending.

Final score: 5