NOTE: This article obviously contains SPOILERS. Proceed at your own risk!
Official Summary
After her multi-millionaire father goes to prison, leaving her strapped for cash, thrill-seeking dilettante Selina Kyle turns to a life of crime as the daring Catwoman, evading the law at every turn. Batman hatches a plan to end her crime spree while two renegade police detectives intend to see that she uses up all her nine lives in one fell swoop.
My Summary
Following a pair of encounters at the Gotham Museum, Bruce Wayne finds himself facing off against two female opponents: Dr. Harleen Quinzel, as part of plea deal thanks to a felony assault conviction, and cash-strapped socialite Selina Kyle, who is now stepping out at night as the safecracking thief Catwoman. Despite his claims to the contrary, his weekly sessions begin dredging up memories of the past, particularly the night of his parents’ murder. Meanwhile, Detectives Arnold Flass and Harvey Bullock, embarrassed by Kyle getting released after their collar, seek to end her crime spree permanently.
Voice Cast
Hamish Linklater as Batman / Bruce Wayne
Christina Ricci as Catwoman / Selina Kyle
Diedrich Bader as Harvey Dent
Krystal Joy Brown as Barbara Gordon
John DiMaggio as Detective Harvey Bullock
Jason Watkins as Alfred Pennyworth
Gary Anthony Williams as Detective Arnold Flass
Santino Barnard as Young Bruce Wayne
Jeff Bennett as Detective, Police Officer, Reporter
Jamie Chung as Dr. Harleen Quinzel
Grey Delisle as Newscaster, Radio Operator
Jackie Hoffman as Greta, Museum Director
Tom Kenny as Eel O‘Brian, Doorman
Yuri Lowenthal as Detective Cohen
Commentary
Aside from Batman himself, in the run up to Caped Crusader’s debut on Prime Video, the characters to receive the most press attention (prior to San Diego Comic-Con) were Catwoman and Harley Quinn. The most popular female characters to be reinterpreted through Bruce Timm’s noir lens, the forms these incarnations would take were scrutinized in the press, as people celebrated or challenged the changes made to these iconic women. Going into the series, we knew that they would both be important, but little did we know that the Dark Knight would be forced to face off against both characters in the same episode.
Returning to her cat burglar (and brunette) roots, this Catwoman was frequently referred to in the promotional materials as a “screwball comedy character,” in relation to both her personality and her connection to Batman (Breznican; Spry). For the benefit of non-film buffs, here is a definition of the genre, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Screwball comedy is a film subgenre of the romantic comedy genre that became popular during the Great Depression, beginning in the early 1930s and thriving until the early 1950s, that satirizes the traditional love story. It has secondary characteristics similar to film noir, distinguished by a female character who dominates the relationship with the male central character, whose masculinity is challenged, and the two engage in a humorous battle of the sexes.
The genre also featured romantic attachments between members of different social classes, as in It Happened One Night (1934) and My Man Godfrey (1936). […] Other elements of the screwball comedy include fast-paced, overlapping repartee; farcical situations, escapist themes, physical battle of the sexes, disguise and masquerade, and plot lines involving courtship and marriage. (“Screwball”)
Based on the above definition, one can definitely see the screwball comedy aspects of their duel in “Kiss of the Catwoman.” At the beginning of the episode, we have a meeting between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle that features two people from differing social classes (as Kyle is slipping out of the elite due to her theft and dire financial straits). Eyeing the Wayne family jewelry and seeing Bruce as a potential meal ticket, Ms. Kyle practically throws herself at the wary billionaire, literally daring him to ask her out. Keeping her at arm’s length, Selina presses further, daring to compare their circumstances and referring to them both as “orphans,” leading to him venting his anger on a reporter who questions his mother’s decision to wear that type of jewelry in that part of town the night of her death. This is textbook screwball.
Later, they meet again, this time as Batman and Catwoman, thus fulfilling the “disguise and masquerade” aspect of the genre (as well as escapist themes). Nonplussed by his dismissal of her desires, they turn to conflict and—after he quickly nabs her with a pair of thrown bolas—one-upmanship, as she quickly acquires toys and vehicles in an attempt to match the man she identifies as her costumed inspiration. After initial burglary charges are dismissed, Batman has to figure out a way to make her next arrest stick.
The “screwball comedy” metric falls apart, however, because the end result (the two characters reconciling and falling in love) is impossible, and while other Batmen often have romantic feelings towards their Catwomen, this particular incarnation is the least likely to feel—let alone express—those impulses. The creative team made a big deal about how this Catwoman would get under Batman’s skin, with them suggesting that—on a chemical, pheromonal level—this emotionally disconnected Dark Knight is thrown off by her very presence (Breznican). However, much like the reviewer from Serum Lake, I really didn’t get a sense of any attraction on Batman’s end. I suspect that, at best, he sees Catwoman as the hot mess that possesses so many red flags that, despite her attractiveness, it makes you want to stay far, far away from her. To him, she is nothing but an annoyance.
By comparison, the real threat in this episode is the one that we don’t fully realize at first. As punishment for his felony assault against the reporter, Bruce Wayne gets a slap on the wrist in the form of counseling sessions from Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who we “fully” meet two episodes later. Described as a reversal of the original Harley Quinn, Timm stated in a May 2024 Entertainment Weekly article that “[w]hen she’s Dr. Quinzel, she’s a little bit more whimsical and fun, and then when she’s Harley Quinn, she’s scary” (qtd. in Holub). Later, in a June 2024 Vanity Fair interview, he expanded on her backstory:
We figured, as a psychiatrist, her clientele are some of the richest, most powerful men in Gotham City, and they dump all of their crap on her. It’s driving her crazy. She hears all this stuff, but because of psychiatrist-client privilege, she can’t do anything about it. She can’t tell anybody. We figured some of these guys have probably confessed some really horrible things to her, and she’s just like, “Well, I can’t just turn this guy loose out on the streets, but I can’t turn him into the cops either.” (qtd. in Breznican)
As we discover in “The Strength of Her Regard,” her coping mechanism takes the form of Dr. Quinzel literally kidnapping her clients—the wealthy ones that she sees as unrepentantly wicked—and torturing them until they agree to give away all their possessions. With that in mind, what initially appears to be Bruce Wayne blocking Dr. Quinzel from getting into his head and protecting his secret identity becomes a predatory psychiatrist seeing a rich façade and attempting to dig into him to find the monster during repeat viewings.
During their sessions, one can tell that Dr. Quinzel is feeling Wayne out. She leaves a fake copy of his medical file on the table in her office as bait, and he steals it. He refuses to discuss the night of his parents’ murder, and he passes off his lack of emotional connection with the women he dates as simply playing the field. Harleen knows there’s something lurking behind the “cardboard cutout” of a rich playboy that he pretends to be, but she can’t prove it, and Bruce isn’t giving her anything. At the end of their court-appointed sessions, Dr. Quinzel claims to give up—saying that she doesn’t see him as “a danger to [himself] or anyone else”—but then she tries to lure him into becoming a regular patient. He politely declines.
Man, did Bruce Wayne dodge a bullet. Had circumstances been different, he might have ended up in her Playpen with Fletcher Demming and Emerson Collins.
However, while unsuccessful in breaking down his barriers, Bruce Wayne’s visits to Dr. Quinzel do stir bad memories within him, leading to the episode being punctuated by flashbacks to that fateful night in the alley. Frankly, it is chilling to see the trauma in young Bruce’s eyes as he attempts to process what has happened, as is the barely-concealed rage when he decides on his course of action. As Harleen suspected, this is a man with significant emotional scarring, a reality that Alfred knows all to well. You can see it every time the butler attempts to reach out to Bruce, but—for now, at least—it’s impossible. Much like Harvey Dent’s darker personality, the Batman is fully in control.
Finally, this episode gives us more on Detectives Flass and Bullock, who are—along with Rupert Thorne—the overarching villains of the season. By this episode, we already know that they are corrupt (taking bribes from gangsters) and criminally negligent (Bullock leaving a woman handcuffed to his desk during an evacuation of police headquarters; both of them leaving Montoya to hang following a request for backup), but their actions pale in comparison to this episode. Embarrassed by the courts dropping their charges against Selina Kyle (especially after she initially evaded arrest and raked Bullock across the face with her freakishly sharp fingernails), Flass has no compunction attempting to kill Catwoman as payback.
It’s a chilling scene, with Flass obviously using excessive force in an attempt to flat-out murder an unarmed suspect. Even after previously speculating that such content could be fair game on streaming, it was still a shock to see this sequence unfold … just as it was a relief when Batman beat them both down to save a life.
In the end, “Kiss of the Catwoman” did, in fact, feature elements of “screwball comedy” in the debut of Catwoman, but it also contained elements of psychological thriller and gritty police drama in equal measures. It also set the stage for the following two episodes, with the assembly of the Batman Task Force, created in response to the Caped Crusader’s “reaction” to police brutality, as well as the debut of a darker, more sinister Harley Quinn.
Stray Observations
In Batman: Caped Crusader, Selina Kyle’s unnamed father is in prison for tax fraud. However, In the comics, there are two contradictory options for her backstory. The first, Post-Crisis narrative was introduced in Catwoman #81 (June 2000), and it states that she is the daughter of Brian and Maria Kyle, the former an alcoholic who drank himself to death and the latter a woman who committed suicide. The second story, introduced in the Batman: Dark Victory miniseries (1999-2000), reveals that Selina suspects that she is the illegitimate daughter of crime boss Carmine “The Roman” Falcone. The second of these was adopted for the 2022 film The Batman.
When asked about potential models for Selina Kyle’s design, Bruce Timm revealed in an August 18th post on Anime Superhero that she “has some Paulette Goddard DNA in her” (b.t.). A noted actor and socialite, Paulette Goddard not only starred in The Cat and the Canary (1939) and Kitty (1945), but her second husband was actor Burgess Meredith, who would later play the Penguin on the ‘60s Batman series.
Also, in the aforementioned Entertainment Weekly article, James Tucker compared Catwoman to “Barbara Stanwyck's performance as the title character in The Lady Eve [1941]” (Holub).
Personally speaking, I think she physically resembles actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr, an observation apparently shared with Catwoman co-creator Bob Kane.
The photographer from the Gotham Gazette is Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, known in the mainstream DC Comics as the alter ego of Plastic Man. While he is unlikely to gain powers in this continuity, it is worth noting that O’Brian is voiced by Tom Kenny, who also voiced Plastic Man on Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
In the interest of noting how Caped Crusader differs from the original Batman: The Animated Series, it’s worth noting here that one of the stipulations of BTAS was that they were not to do stories related to Batman’s origins. In fact, it was spelled out in the original Series Bible:
We’ll say it here first—in the run of our series, we will do NO STORIES ABOUT BATMAN’S ORIGIN. Nothing about his parents’ murder, the film they saw at the movies before they were shot, the theatre usherette who happened to see them go into Crime Alley seconds before the gun went off, etc., etc. [I]f you’re thinking up stories along those lines, flush them. Granted, there’s a tremendous history in Batman’s early years, but that’s been done to death in the comics, and it’s not the Batman series we’re doing TODAY. (1)
A version of the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne was shown in the Justice League Unlimited episode “For the Man Who Has Everything,” when Batman was possessed by the Black Mercy.
In response to rumors of a Kevin Conroy appearance on Batman: Caped Crusader, Bruce Timm replied how “[w]e were hoping to have him do a voice for the new show (and he was eager to do it), but sadly he passed away before we could make it happen” (b.t.). Call it a hunch, but I strongly suspect that this would have been the episode, and Kevin Conroy would have voiced Thomas Wayne. Consider how Conroy has played Thomas Wayne before on BTAS (“Beware the Gray Ghost” and “Perchance to Dream”) and how former Batman actors have voiced the late fathers of characters in the past (Adam West as Thomas Wayne in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode “Chill of the Night,” Conroy himself as Robin’s father, John Grayson, in The Batman episode “A Matter of Family”). Again, only a theory, but I hypothesize that the episode was adjusted following Conroy’s death to remove appearances by Bruce Wayne’s parents.
When Bruce Wayne flips through the file he stole from Dr. Quinzel’s office, he finds a cheeky note that reads “See you next Tuesday, Bruce.” The phrase “see you next Tuesday” is a euphemistic backronym for a word I would rather not repeat here.
Selina Kyle’s Catwoman costume strongly resembles her design from Batman: The Brave and the Bold (both were designed by artist and executive producer James Tucker). This costume first appeared in Batman #35 (June 1946).
Considering how she raked Detective Bullock across the face and cut glass without clawed gloves, I wonder how sharp Catwoman's fingernails actually are.
According to an August 3rd post on Anime Superhero, Bruce Timm revealed that all of the cats in the episode—excluding the panther, I presume—were based on real-life felines owned by the show’s crew members (b.t.). In the same post, Timm revealed that the cat taken from the home of one of Catwoman’s targets was Miss Kitty, a “beautiful neighborhood stray who adopted my wife and me six years ago” (b.t.). Also, in an August 8th post on Instagram, series artist Kat Hudson revealed that the cat standing by Selina Kyle’s mirror was her cat, Tater Tot (kathudsonart).
Speaking of which, based on Miss Kitty’s clipped right ear, it appears that she has been spayed.
Catwoman’s leitmotifs (the short, recognizable musical phrases within a larger piece) in Caped Crusader’s musical compositions—specifically “Beautiful Stray,” “Claws of a Thief,” and “Bad Bad Kitty” on the soundtrack—feature a string accompaniment reminiscent of Danny Elfman’s Catwoman-themed tracks on the Batman Returns soundtrack (particularly “Selina Transforms” and “Cat Suite”).
The reporter on the television during Bruce’s boxing session somewhat resembles Summer Gleeson, the resident Gotham reporter from BTAS.
Considering the animation and the musical accompaniment in this scene, I can only surmise that the creative team had a grand old time creating Batman’s and Catwoman’s chase across the rooftops of Gotham. Considering the difficulties they had adapting Selina Kyle in the past, it’s like Bruce Timm had waited thirty years to make this sequence.
Speaking of which, I had no idea what “Clowder Industries” meant until I googled it, realizing that “clowder” referred to a group of cats, much like a “school of fish” or a “pride of lions.” Yep, I’m dumb.
Referred to alternately as the Catmobile or the Kitty Car, Catwoman’s customized vehicle first appeared in Detective Comics #122 (April 1947).
The scene with Catwoman using a panther to rob the museum is reminiscent of a Catwoman promotional image from BTAS.
The image of Batman bandaging Catwoman’s leg is reminiscent of a scene from “The Cat,” the story that was Catwoman’s first appearance in Batman #1 (March 1940).
Considering that Detective Flass almost murdered Catwoman, Batman is certainly taking a risk leaving her cuffed to a table in the museum.
It’s interesting how Batman’s line from the sizzle reel, “now they’ll all know I’m coming for them,” specifically referred to the corrupt Gotham cops.
The shot of Pennyworth rushing into the alley after hearing gunshots reminds us that Bruce wasn’t the only one who was a victim of trauma that night. Alfred may also feel guilt and shame, like he failed the Waynes as well as young Bruce. Perhaps that has something to do with the “secret” he was withholding from Batman and the Gentleman Ghost in the episode “Night Ride.”
Works Cited
Breznican, Anthony. “Meet the New Voices of Batman, Harley Quinn, and Catwoman: Exclusive.” Vanity Fair. Condé Nast. 20 Jun. 2024. Web. 20 Jun. 2024. <https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/batman-caped-crusader-voices>.
b.t. Comment on “’Batman: Caped Crusader (Amazon Prime)’ Animated Series News & Discussion Part 2 (Spoilers).” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 31 Jan. 2024. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/batman-caped-crusader-amazon-prime-animated-series-news-discussion-part-2-spoilers.5797216/page-3#post-87927385>. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
---. Comment on “’Batman: Caped Crusader’ Season One Talkback (Spoilers).” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 3 Aug. 2024. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/batman-caped-crusader-season-one-talkback-spoilers.5799833/post-87961147>. Accessed 16 Aug. 2024.
---. Comment on “’Batman: Caped Crusader’ Season One Talkback (Spoilers).” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 18 Aug. 2024. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/batman-caped-crusader-season-one-talkback-spoilers.5799833/page-12#post-87964578>. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
Holub, Christian. “Batman: Caped Crusader First Look Reveals Asian American Harley Quinn and ‘Really Weird’ Dark Knight.” Entertainment Weekly. Dotdash Meredith. 9 May 2024. Web. 21 Jun. 2024. <https://ew.com/batman-caped-crusader-exclusive-first-look-asian-american-harley-quinn-8645683>.
@kathudsonart. “When you design on @capedcrusaderbataman and they need cats for Catwoman—you draw your fur baby Tater Tot.” Instagram. 8 Aug. 2024. <https://www.instagram.com/p/C-a1eFSSf84/>. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
“Screwball Comedy.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. 15 Aug. 2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screwball_comedy>. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Spry, Jeff. “Holy Noirish Comeback, Batman! Bruce Timm and James Tucker Life the Cowl Over ‘Batman: Caped Crusader.’” Animation Magazine. Animation Magazine. 19 Jul. 2024. Web. 21 Jul. 2024. <https://www.animationmagazine.net/2024/07/holy-noirish-comeback-batman-bruce-timm-and-james-tucker-lift-the-cowl-over-batman-caped-crusader/>.
Timm, Bruce W. et al. Batman: The Animated Series—Series Writer’s Bible. 28 Nov. 1990. Print.
Images courtesy of Prime Video, Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, and DC Comics.
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