The Dark Knight Saga/Headscratchers/Title Dropper

• When Dent is in the disused factory near the end with Gordon's family, how did he get his burnt suit back? (he is clearly wearing it in that scene) When he was taken into hospital it would have been cut off him and thrown away.
  • Who said it was the same suit? I assumed that he opted to burn a new one.
    • The District Attorney has enough pull to make emergency room technicians disregard standard procedure? If he refuses any sort of treatment to keep his face intact, maybe he refused their attempts to remove the suit.
    • They did cut off his suit. Like the above troper, I figured he made a new one.
  • He actually had the burned suit in every scene after the hospital, not just at the burned out building.
  • Simpler explanation: the suit jacket was removed during/shortly after Dent getting burned. He was conscious the entire time and he/Batman may have removed it since it was, you know, on fire..
• "Oh no, my girlfriend of less than a year is dead! I am become evil now! Mwahahahaha!" I can't stop being bothered by this. Here's an idea, since the actress playing Batman's slutty friend couldn't return, why not give Dent a wife? Maybe even a kid? Then have -them- die. That'd be believable. Let's face it, nobody felt bad when she died. She wasn't a very likable character, but beyond that it just doesn't make sense for someone to go from White Knight to sociopath because a girlfriend died. Not only that but he sides with the guy that -killed- his girlfriend.
  • Dent doesn't "side with the guy that killed his girlfriend." He doesn't even seem to realize that he's playing into Joker's hands when he uses a coin flip to decide whether or not to kill Joker. He just happens to think, because of what has happened to him, that Joker really does have a point about chaos being closer to fair than order in a city like Gotham. Also, the idea isn't so much that Dent losing his girlfriend was a huge change as that his personality was already an unstable equilibrium (physics analogy; think ball at the top of a hill) and that he was just barely on one side of it, and that it didn't take much to push him to the other side. Or, for another analogy, think of it as a spark in a tank of gasoline; the stress of his job was the gasoline, the loss of his girlfriend was the spark.
  • "Batman's slutty friend"? Curious how you came to that conclusion when the only person she's ever alluded to sleeping with is Dent while they're in a committed relationship. "Nobody felt bad when she died"? Have you not read the main series page which says otherwise? Seriously, tone down the hate for the character, then we'll talk, cuz right now you're just bitching about a character you don't like.
    • "Slutty" most likely because Rachel went from "I'll wait for you Bruce," to "I can't wait forever, so I mean I'll wait for you in a Friend Zone way" within only a couple months. Not really a slut in terms of sleeping around, but she back tracks on her words relatively fast and hooks up with Dent just as quickly.
    • Not really. At the end of the first movie, she definitely doesn't say she'll wait forever. In fact, she sorta implies she knows that Bruce isn't going to give up Batman. Remember, she says that the Bruce she knew never really came back. The "I can't wait forever" was at least in part because she had an awesome guy who wanted to marry her.
    • But she did make the promise that she'd wait for him, implying that she wanted "Bruce" to come back and indeed Batman was well in the process of letting normal people protect Gothan without him. But Rachel only waits, what, a couple months before changing her mind? Depending on when she met Dent between the months from the end of Batman Begins to the start of The Dark Knight, she either waited an unrealistic short time for Bruce to quit being Batman before giving up...or spent an unrealistic short time dating Harvey Dent and writing Bruce off before agreeing to marry Dent. The bottom line is that Rachel either lied to Bruce from the beginning, or she went back on her word rather quickly.
    • The Dark Knight takes place at least a year after Batman Begins. She said she'd wait for him, yes, but she doesn't really seem all that confident that "Bruce" ever really is coming back. Or maybe she didn't want to let her own life just pass her by entirely waiting for Gotham City to not need Batman any more; remember, it's not until Bruce's fundraiser for Dent that he ever tells her he feels that time is coming and even after that, she doesn't truly believe him. As to Dent, maybe, as has been mentioned before, she just really loved him. Loved him enough to realize this was a great guy she could make a great life with, without the baggage that knowing the real Bruce Wayne would entail.
  • To be fair, it is Maggie Gyllenhaal. If it had been Katie Holmes, seriously, who'd have cared?
    • Everyone.
  • But he caused her death. Had he not done what he did, Rachel would've lived. Also he was proposing to her, so he clearly loved her. Also, even if you think she's an annoying character, that doesn't mean that her death isn't going to affect the other characters. Lastly, turning to the Joker's side was his way of dealing with grief. Rather than accept the blame for causing her death, he shoved it aside by claiming that it was "chance" and he became obsessed with chance as a result.
  • Real people go on killing rampages for the same kind of reasons. Dent has a motive for his killings as well- he just takes it to the extreme.
    • -Insane- people with issues beforehand go on killings like that, yet Dent seems perfectly fine before the incident. And before anyone even brings up the "oh he was gonna risk shooting the schitzo guy", the coin was two-faced. The guy was perfectly alright, Dent was just trying to scare him.
      • It's pretty much an article of fact in the comics, and very faintly alluded to here, that Dent isn't all there to begin with.
    • I don't know, maybe he loved her? Maybe he just straight up loved her.
      • It doesn't matter if the coin was two-faced. Threatening a mentally ill person like that is still just cruel.
  • "Oh no, my girlfriend of less than a year is dead! I am become evil now! Mwahahahaha!" Massive over generalization here. Dent was dealing with a lot more than the fact that a woman he quite clearly deeply loved had died; he was dealing with having to hear her die and having to lie to her about her being alright, and then in his eyes he was betrayed by Batman and Gordon, who let Rachel die. Combine that with little things like losing half his face to hellish fiery agony and the stress and difficulty of having to fight crime in the nastiest, most corrupt city in the entire world, on top of believing the blame lay squarely on the shoulders of a man who refused to listen to your warnings and advice and a man who flagrantly violates the law. And even then, he doesn't go "evil" so much as he goes on a vengeful rampage against everyone he felt was responsible, which was a select few. And need we be reminded, Harvey had a little help in the form of the Joker in being pushed this far. For a man who had his fiance murdered, his face burned off and left in permanent searing agony, his whole world shredded around him, and seeing betrayal in every direction, insanity is expected.
  • Absolutely. I watched this film with a group, and everyone bugged me afterwards about how the moral of the story was that, "With just a little push, anyone can become evil." But, to me, that's just not a moral that applies in real life.
    • Except that the film didn't have a "little push." It had the prolonged, systematic destruction of a man's life in the most vicious and cruel manner possible. The Joker may have described what he did as "a little push," but that is, like everything else the Joker ever says, a lie.
      • It was just a little push really. Kill the wife and tell him to get revenge. Two pretty simple actions.
      • It was a little push, the Joker just never mentioned coaxing him to the edge.
      • The Joker doesn't say evil, he said madness. And he's referring to Batman too, cause he says Batman is insane too. And yeah, he says "little push", but that was more then a little push. He was just over-emphasizing his point.
    • "One bad day can change everything" is pretty much a recurring message of the Batman mythos.
  • This troper has a pet theory that Rachel was pregnant. A few clues- Dent saying to Gordon to meet him "where my family died" and when he rages at him, "You wouldn't dare justify yourself to me if you knew what I'd lost!" Given that Gordon's married and I think has a pretty good idea what it would be like to lose a wife/SO, it seems odd that Dent would say that. Assuming Dent had your stock American dream of a house with a white picket fence and a wife, kids, and Golden Retriever, losing all that has a lot more punch than "my girlfriend of a year just kicked off."
    • Wow, That adds a whole new level of Tear Jerker to something that was already heartwrenching.
  • Apparently, this is just me, but I don't see Two-Face as particularly evil or crazy. In an even more Grimdark movie, a Lawful Neutral Ubermensch like him could be a main character. Furthermore, this particular incarnation of him is closer to a good guy than he usually comes, since there's no indication he'll turn to villainy for its own sake.
  • This troper wants to echo an above troper and put this out there again, just because -- maybe he really loved her. I mean, it happens right? The expression "when you know, you know" is not just a Hollywood invention. Have movies really jaded us that badly that someone can't really care about someone they've known less than a year. Yeesh.
  • It has been stated over and over that "The Killing Joke" Was an inspiration for TDK. Jokers mantra is that the difference between sane and insane is "One bad day".
    • "Theres no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is One Bad Day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy."
  • I liked the animated series version of Harvey Dent a little better, where he had MPS, but was able to control his darker urges, until he becomes fed up with unending corruption. Of course, he does become a gangster villain, which doesn't make any more sense than the movie.
  • Harvey's entire killing spree, from what the film presented, happened THE NEXT DAY after Rachel was killed. The entire buildup of this film was showing Harvey's dealing with the Joker. This man was a rock. He handled everything from being threatened at gunpoint to the Joker blowing up cars while he sat helplessly in the back of a SWAT truck. If you look, Harvey is never really even phased until it comes to Rachel's safety. He is completely in love with her, and she is his everything. He's untouchable right up until he sees the mentally ill man wearing the tag that lists Rachel as the next victim, wherein he begins to break. He KIDNAPS an injured, mentally ill man, and threatens him at gunpoint. Whether or not he was going to shoot was irrelevant. After this point, he is shown beginning to break down. The Joker battle becomes personal, even to the point of Harvey falsely admitting to being Batman so that the Joker couldn't get the truth. Everything seems hopeful: Batman and a still-alive Gordon save him and arrest the Joker, and Harvey is on his way to see Rachel again. But then, he's captured by dirty cops, people who are supposed to be on his side. Worse than that, he finds out that, not only is he tied to a chair surrounded by oil drums getting set to blow in a matter of minutes, but he learns that Rachel is in the very same situation, and he's being forced to LISTEN to her final moments. As he's unaware that Bruce/Batman would rush to save Rachel over Dent, he assumes that he will be saved, and Rachel will not, but he can't tell her that, so he lies and says that they're coming to save her. Throughout the countdown before the explosives go off, he gets the icing on the cake: Rachel says yes to his proposal. And then Batman comes in. Harvey, despite knowing this outcome, breaks down and angrily asks why they came for him and not Rachel. He knows that this is it, and Rachel will die. Then, as he's being dragged out, still screaming, the explosives go off and ignite his face. He's just lost his fiance and his face, and from what he sees, it's all because he tried so hard to defeat the Joker. And now he's lost everything. Up until the Joker comes in, Harvey's just bitter at the world, as anyone in that situation would be. There would even be a chance at recovery for him. Therapy and counseling would help him through his grief. But he doesn't get that, he gets the Joker, who concentrates his fury on Batman, Gordon, and the mob, and says that everything is really up to chance, and that he (the Joker) is simply an agent of chaos. This sends the still intensely traumatized Harvey on a mission to get revenge on those he feels wronged him: Wuertz, the man who drove him, Ramirez, the woman he discovers picked up Rachel, and Gordon, who couldn't see that these people were criminals. Harvey's actions are completely understandable for a man who gets thrown into his very unstable condition.
    • Dude, ever heard of spoiler tags?
    • If you're on a Headscratchers page for a series, you should expect spoilers. The entire point of such a page is to discuss the plot of the film.
    • If that's the case, why do we even bother with spoiler tags in these pages? Seems like it would be best to do away with them, unless they spoil a separate work.
      • You're not supposed to use spoiler tags in these pages. Some people are just so addicted to troping they don't pay attention to that.
  • I would like to add that Harvey had all the makings for being the sort of guy who could snap and go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. In his first scene, he showed signs of arrogance, idealism, and granduer. At least be fictional standards, that screams "future villain". Notice how he strolls into the courtroom while late, engages in a childish game of chance with a flip of a trick coin, and then struts around after punching out the would-be assassin. He does all of this with a very smug look on his face. Let's also not forget the scene where he interrogates Joker's henchman. Sure, the coin was a fake but it's still a very brutal act from someone who is supposed to be a district attorney. It wouldn't be hard at all to push him in the right direction.
    • Dent is clearly not all there. He has violent mood swings even before Rachel was killed as is evidenced by his interrogation. It is mentioned that everyone he has had dealings with dislike him for one reason or another which leads to a life of extreme isolation much like both Bruce Wayne and the Joker. Cops distrust him and outright criticize him while talking about him being two-faced. Only Rachel seems to be interested in his personal well-being which he casually shrugs off as he seeks both fame and resolution to his cases. After Rachel dies, he feels completely alone and vindictive towards everyone even remotely connected to Rachel's death including Batman for saving him, Gordon for not saving Rachel, the perceived duplicity of Gordon's force and the larger police force as a whole which has long been corrupted even before Bruce became Batman. This is not a life of someone that was happy and indeed, he acknowledges that people either become villains or die. Not much of a rosy outlook or faith in humankind. Due to not much backstory, Dent isn't fully explored but everything we see in him shows that a small corruption of his nature would push him to villainy.
• Why is everyone persecuting Batman? As I recall, he saved the entire city in Batman Begins! Do all the citizens want to die at the hands of some psychotic mass murderer? Batman is the only reason they haven't... yet.
  • At the beginning of TDK, they aren't persecuting him; hell he's got imitators claiming he's an inspiration for justice. It isn't until people start getting killed because of his perceived selfishness that they start to raise complaints.
    • Yeah, but technically the police were looking to arrest Batman, even at the beginning of Dark Knight. He hasn't gotten any medals for saving the city.
      • Vigilantism is illegal and so the cops are forced to search for him. Don't forget that the city is still incredibly corrupt.
    • Yeah, they were looking real hard to arrest Batman, considering their top suspects included Abraham Lincoln and Bigfoot, and Gordon was openly operating the Bat Signal.
    • The idea is that official policy is to arrest Batman because he is an illegal vigilante, a line which would probably be declared to placate moralizers and bureaucrats.
      • The mob still has considerable influence in Gotham at this point, so it's not hard to imagine that they're pushing the commissioner to catch the guy who's beating them up all the time. Plus honest cops usually don't like the idea of someone a) making them look bad, and b) repeatedly committing crimes varying from assault and battery to destruction of public property to terrorist threats to reckless endangerment, etc, etc.
  • the persecution later on in the movie is due to simple human nature, you can save the day for a year straight but once things start going bad on your watch it is all your fault regardless of whether it is or not.
  • Especially after he gets pinned for the murder of Harvey Dent whom everyone loved and admired. Plus the Joker was killing people because he wanted to get to Batman and so they can blame him for that. Lastly, we don't know that Batman is persecuted by the populace. We only see the police chasing him and that's probably because of the government. It's likely that there's still a serious pro-Batman population in Gotham.
  • Also consider that Batman is starting to spawn imitators who aren't nearly as good or sane as he is, and possibly without his code against killing. His schtick is getting a little out of hand.
  • In further addition, consider that plenty of people in Real Life deal with terrorism by considering it a force of nature and blaming the person or people whom they perceive as having "brought it down", usually its target.
• Why is it that when The Joker tells Batman where Dent and Rachel were being held, it's necessary to only go after one of them? Couldn't the police have just as easily split up, one team going for one hostage, and another team going for the other?
  • They did split up. The police went after Harvey, and Batman went after Rachel.
    • Then why was only Harvey saved? Rachel couldn't have been too far away to be rescued, or the whole choice would have been meaningless.
      • Because Batman is just faster than the police. They were probably both the same distance away from the station. This is likely the plan: Rachel and Harvey are at two addresses, each an equal distance from the station. Both are just close enough for Batman to reach one before the explosion if he really books it, but also just too far for the police to reach in time. That way, Bats only has time to save one and it's going to be the wrong one, because the Joker told him the wrong addresses. No matter what he or the police did - and there just wasn't time to do a whole lot - Batman was going to lose someone very important to him.
    • I could have sworn that when Batman left the building, there were policemen... or at least Gordon, waiting outside. Admittedly I've only seen the movie once.
      • • Weren't they booby-trapped so that removing either victim would trigger the other bomb?
        • I've, um, seen it four times. Gordon and Batman are at different locations when the bombs go off, both at the same time. Batman just got there first.
    • Standard police procedure is to establish a perimeter around the site and wait for SWAT to arrive. That's why the police were still outside when the bombs went off. After all, they have no idea what the Joker is planning, or if he's even telling them the truth. There could have been booby traps or goons waiting to ambush and kill the cops or Batman, for all they knew.
    • Batman went after Rachel, and the police went after Dent. However, the Joker lied about who was at which location. The point of the scenario was to make Batman choose which of them to make his priority, and then perform a nasty bait-and-switch.
      • Confirmed; the addresses provided in the dialog show that the Joker lied, saying that Harvey was where Rachel was and Rachel was was Harvey was; this can be demonstrated later by the fact that Two-Face's death site has the same address that was originally given for him, yet he says "where my family died". Also, the fact that as the police rush to try and save Dent, they say the address they're going to (the address provided by the Joker for Dent) but, of course, the police see Rachel die instead.

• This bugs me about Batman in general, not just this movie... but what's with Batman's refusal to kill villains or use guns? I mean, I'm not saying that people should kill each other more, and I'm not advocating for guns in the real world here, but it's internally very inconsistent in the movies. Instead of just shooting the criminals (heck, he wouldn't even have to shoot to kill, he could try to aim to incapacitate,) he involves them in these ridiculous chases to try to force them to a standstill. Not only is there a good chance of them getting away to do more damage, but what about all the civilians who would potentially be harmed by a high-speed vehicle chase through the middle of a heavily-populated city, said chase usually being complete with fiery explosions? Why is it somehow more morally abhorrent to shoot one murderer than to allow an untold number of bystanders to be killed or injured in the apprehension of that murderer? Again, I'm not advocating for vigilante justice in the real world-- but if the premise of the movie is that he's going to be a vigilante, why place the lives of the criminals he's chasing above those of civilian bystanders? Is it only direct killing he objects to, and if so, can he not see how much room for abuse of power that allows?
  • The sad/stupid thing is that neither movie never establishes that Batman doesn't kill. They just expect you to know this, even though he takes plenty of actions where it's completely unbelievable that nobody died.
    • What? It was established, quite clearly, in The Dark Knight that Batman does not kill. Maroni taunts Batman with it when he dangles him over the side of the building. The Joker even makes it extremely explicit during the interrogation scene, when he says that Batman only has one rule, and "Tonight you're going to break your one rule."
    • And Batman Begins had a very important scene where Ducard tells Bruce to execute a criminal and Bruce refuses.
    • And before that, Rachel slapped him twice for plotting to kill the guy who killed his parents, which evidently made him contemplate about killing, although that part is off-screen.
  • It's a genre convention, for one thing, and it's been explored in other contexts. The reason why Batman in particular doesn't kill people basically boils down to this: what gives him the right? He's a hero, not an executioner. How does he decide who deserves to die? I think he'd rather leave it up to the courts. Plus once he crosses that line, how does he know he'll stop there or what he'll become if he doesn't? Bruce is a very, very angry man, and there's really not a whole lot separating him from someone like Ra's al Ghul - but some of it is the decision to kill in the name of order. That's important to him. As long as he adheres to that rule, he's Not Like Them. Yeah, it does endanger people, I think he knows that, but it's a decision he made and he's dealing with it - and it's often very hard, as the movies prove.
    • Another interpretation. If Batman kills, then he's failed in his mission, to rid the city of the evil that took his parents and prove that the ultimate approach of fear and violence isn't the only way to do it, that true justice can still work. This is part of the Joker's point; he's trying to get Batman to break his one rule, and prove to him that no convictions or morals are absolute, and that, even if they are broken in one situation, virtues and justice are worthless in the face of real adversity. If Batman kills, even once, then he proves that you have to kill and compromise yourself in order to do the right thing, that Gotham, and, by extension, the world is incapable of being uplifted from the violence and darkness it's fallen into, that it's impossible to truly bring protection from peace, and, essentially, that his entire mission is a joke.
    • Not to mention that Batman has a very specific hatred of guns due to the way his parents died. He recognizes the importance of the police having guns but he would never use one due to that traumatic occasion.
      • It's actually addressed in two shots in Batman Begins: Bruce is standing on the pier looking at the gun in his hands, and he flashes back to the gun Joe Chill used to kill his parents. In disgust/despair, he hurls the gun away, and doesn't carry a gun from that point onward.
    • None of the above sounds that bad. Sticking to morals that just don't work for the sake of your conscience doesn't sound very heroic.
      • It was summed up very nicely in Kingdom Come: When you strip everything else away from the Batman, what's left is someone who doesn't want to see anyone else die.
    • I kinda found it hard to accept that Batman has a freaking gun on his Tumbler. I guess that handguns are a no-no for him, but a couple cannons is? Though, he never hit anyone with it, I really don't think the real batman would have such irresponsible ordinance. Granted, his aim is good, and he never hit anyone directly with it.
      • • Nevermind the fact that in the comics Batman keeps and deploys thermite, C4 and hydrochloric acid amongst other things. The difference is, he doesn't use them on on people. He uses them to breach doors, disable vehicles, or even to take someone like Superman down a peg or two. Batman can have guns on the Tumbler and not kill anyone, and the Joker can kill someone with a pencil. It's not the weapon, it's the man wielding it who decides if it kills someone.
      • There's a difference between shooting up the environment to intimidate opponents and clear out obstacles and shooting people. The weapons on the Tumbler are obviously there not to be used on human beings.
      • Also remember that the Tumbler wasn't built from scratch by Batman himself like all the other bat mobiles, but was an all ready built MILITARY vehicular, the weapons were probably just standard options that it came with, not something he went out of his way to include.
  • "Aiming to incapacitate" is a lot harder than it sounds. Bullets are designed to kill people, and that's something they are very good at; hitting an opponent in the leg or shoulder runs a very strong chance of severing important arteries or permanently disabling them. Batman is better off using dedicated nonlethal weapons than actual firearms.
    • Or not, there are literally hundreds of different types of non-lethal rounds available to normal citizens, much less the Goddamn Batman
    • Which is why he never actually aims at anyone. He only ever fires at walls or vehicles.
  • And remember... his parents were shot dead right in front of him. That's gotta account for SOME gun animosity.
    • This was actually played with in Mike Mignola's "The Doom that came to Gotham", where the Waynes are killed by knife, and Batman freely uses guns.
  • In addition to everything else, the penalty for attacking someone with a weapon is greater than just using your body. Sure, Wayne money could probably buy an entire team of lawyers to get him off, but it would be nice to start off with slightly smaller charges. He's just thinking ahead.
  • In Batman Beyond, a much older Bruce Wayne finally decided to stop being Batman the day he had to resort to threatening a mook with a gun in order to win a fight. Yeah, he really hates guns. And hey, three words: Honour Before Reason.
  • Batman doesn't kill, it's that simple, he'll capture someone and beat them bloody but he'll still deliver them to the police. it's the exact same reason why police officers will get in trouble for killing the worst guy in history when they're already in handcuffs. Maybe they'll stand with their backs turned while other prisoners kill the person but they can't actually kill the person.
    • It might make a huge difference, in the book of rules. Fair enough. But supposing you know someone is about to be killed--possess the means to stop it from happening--and deliberately choose to do nothing. In ethical terms, are you better than the person who does the actual killing?
  • A lot of people will condemn Batman for not killing his opponents but there's a reason why Batman doesn't listen to them. He's a hero no matter how dark he acts, he inspires people to be good, if he killed then it would show thousands it was okay to kill someone to make justice go a bit quicker.
  • Another reason is that Batman is not legit, he's a vigilante. If he were to kill he would be nothing more than a common criminal. That's why he can't kill: It's to separate him from the criminals.
  • Most versions of Batman are significantly more competent than the Batman presented here, so he manages to save everyone even without resorting to guns. Or, to put it another way, most adaptations of Batman are more idealistic.
  • Also, and though it's not a movie source, consider Batman's philosophy on guns as expressed in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns: "A gun is a coward's weapon; a liar's weapon. We make it too easy to kill, sparing ourselves the mess and the work..."
  • Batman DOES kill criminals in the comics. And he did use guns.
    • Early on, when DC wanted an angsty action hero. It was only later on that they gave him his code of honor and hatred of guns. Characterization Marches On.
  • Batman doesn't want to use guns or kill people. Keep in mind, he's not a police officer or a soldier; he doesn't have a responsibility to protect anyone. He does it because it's what he wants to do. You may not like that he does things the way he does, but would you rather have him go back to just being an idle rich playboy?
  • In the comics it is frequently stated or implied that since Batman is just barely on this side of evil and madness to begin with, he knows himself well enough to realize that breaking the one ultimate rule he's set for himself and going as far as anyone can go would be too possibly liable to push him all the way over the edge. And believe me, a Face Heel Turn from Batman would be scary business indeed! The way he put it once in the comics is, "I [unlike the villains] can go out into the darkness and still come back."
  • This is why we have the Technical Pacifist trope. Batman refuses to kill, but he causes all sorts of pain, and half of the stuff he does would kill somebody in real life anyway. (Remember that car chase from Batman Begins? "It's a miracle no one was killed!") But frankly, it would be really hard on the writers if they had to invent ways for Batman to be effective and realistically nonlethal at the same time.
• What the HELL happened to "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you." from Batman Begins? If anything, the Joker is worse than that villain from the first movie. Why didn't Batman just let him die like he did that guy?
  • Technically speaking, the villain from the first movie could have possibly extracted himself from that situation (and might well have done so if, like Batman, he had done something rather than merely stare at approaching death and close his eyes.) The Joker, however, cannot fly, which is the only way he would have extracted himself from that predicament. Besides which, the whole point of the Joker's scheme there is to get Batman to prove he's not a hero by forcing to kill the Joker there, and damned if Batman's gonna give him the satisfaction.
  • Two possible reasons:
    • First, Ra's Al Ghul had put himself in the situation that resulted in his death. He got on the train and set off for Wayne tower knowing full well that Batman would have to try and stop the train somehow. Contrast this with TDK where Batman actually threw the Joker off the building. If Batman hadn't stopped the Joker from falling there'd be no other way of interpreting it other than Batman directly killing him.
    • Second, it's probably just a case of straight-up Character Development. In Begins, Batman was new to the game and still developing his methods and morals. In Dark Knight he has grown into his role and has fully adopted the principles that make him who he is. Some inconsistency between the two films is to be expected.
      • Which fits perfectly with the comics. In his first few appearances, Batman did kill.
        • Yeah, back in the Golden Age.
  • Killing the Joker means the Joker wins. Didn't the movie make that clear?
    • It stated it, but it never made it clear that was a correct point of view. Killing the Joker = lots of innocent people saved = good.
    • Right before he declares that he doesn't have to save him, Batman breaks a window which Ra's could easily escape through. Ra's chose not to because he had ultimately failed. The League of Shadows had been crippled, his plan to destroy Gotham was in ruins, he has no chance of ultimate escape because he would be captured within short order, and he had ultimately been proven wrong in the idea that "doing what is necessary" means having to kill. In the face of this realisation, he chooses to accept his failure (and the resultant punishment) with quiet dignity.
      • I thought he broke the window just to create a wind strong enough for him to use his hanglider-wings.
  • Other than what is stated above, there are two major aspects of the character of Ra's which have yet to be touched on in these movies, namely his daughters and the Lazarus Pits. He really had no reason to worry about dying in that incident, as either a remaining League member or one of his daughters would have gotten the body restored to life. I am not the least bit convinced that we have seen the last of Ra's yet.
    • Er....I think you sorta missed the point of the movie. What Nolan is striving for here is Batman done as realistically as possible. This is why the Tumbler was designed the way it was, the reason why all his equipment was explained in such vivid detail, and why all his villains remain to be normal guys with no superpowers. Even Killer Croc was explained in a very realistic way in Batman: Gotham Knight. Throwing in a resurrection pit in there will kinda contradict what the point of Nolan's Batman universe.
      • Yeah, that's why Dark Knight had Batman drive a motorcycle up a wall. It's all about the realism. This troper finds it easier to believe in an advanced chemistry concoction that allows resurrection than to believe the frickin' LAWS OF PHYSICS change from one cellulose frame to the next!
        • Calm down, watch a movie, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C Xvx Iy 4 Yup I
      • One could interpret the kids' stories from Gotham Knight as an illustration of all the things Nolan's Batman-series reboot is not. He's not spooky for its own sake, he's not supernatural, he's not unreasonably high-tech ... and he's not a killer. He's just a very driven, dedicated human being, as the fourth kid's actual contact with the Dark Knight proved.
  • Then again, it's not too much of a stretch to say that Ra's could have escaped through the window that Batman broke through, just waiting till Batman himself was gone.
    • The problem with this is, that Ra's literally has about two seconds after Batman jumps out the window he broke through. And even if he does manages to react in time and jump out, he's going to be falling a pretty damn far distance, which he probably wouldn't survive. There is literally no way for Ra to survive that scene.
    • He's a ninja, he could have figured out something. Given the absurdly large explosion and absurdly small amount of time, he'll be a contender for the epitome of No One Could Survive That if it turns out he's still alive.
  • I always thought that it was that Ra's put himself in that situation with no escape, where Batman pushed the Joker off the building. Therefore it would of been on his hands and it wouldn't fall into not saving him.
  • I disagree that the Joker is worse than Ra's Al Ghul, at least in the Nolan universe. True, the Joker wants to create a city gone mad, but he wants to do it to prove that it can be done, and seems only interested in Gotham. Ra's, however, makes it pretty clear that he would do this to every society in the world if he has to. If I had to kill only one of them, it would definitely be Ra's.
  • Also who's to say we're supposed to see Batman's refusal to kill as a good thing? In the comics Batman constantly wrestles with the moral implications of leaving his enemies alive and his come close to the edge so many times it's almost a cliche. Looking at Batman's no-kill code as one of the character's faults is... well interesting if nothing else.

• In the bit with the two boats leaving Gotham, it didn't occur to anyone on either boat that the Joker might have been lying, and had given each boat its own detonator after all? That argument alone would have quickly shut down any thoughts of activating the detonator without all the ethical quandaries.
  • It occurred to me, to, but this was the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Could you trust that those on the other boat would not blow the ship up if they were wrong?
  • Not exactly. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, the two can "win" by collaborating, but in the Joker's scenario they would both lose.
  • Eh, modified prisoner's dilemma, equilibrium would be the same, if you know, the boat that didn't make the choice wasn't you know, exploded.
  • I'm convinced the Joker was lying. Pushing the detonator would blow up your own ferry boat, or maybe even an orphanage somewhere, as the whole point's to corrupt people. The Joker consistently lies. He switched the clowns with the hostages and he switched the addresses of Harvey and Rachel. The Batman said he was going after Rachel but he found Harvey.
  • When it came right down to it, the people on the boats didn't choose to give up, they chose not to be killers. And they did it knowing they would die, but at least they wouldn't be responsible. The point was to corrupt them, and they essentially decided they would not be corrupted. It doesn't matter if the Joker was lying or telling the truth; either could be the case with the same outcome, and it wasn't the point at all.
    • Good point. If that's the case, that makes Harvey Dent's big turnaround all the less believable. I mean, if one clearly upstanding guy can be so easily & thoroughly corrupted, you'd think a mass of people, particularly the convicts on that one boat, would've pulled the trigger in an instant, especially when they (unlike Dent) had actual motivation. Or am I the only one who thinks this is inconsistent?
      • Not me. Frankly, the prisoners deciding not to blow up the boat makes a whole lot of sense. They knew kids were on the other boat. Most prisoners, despite their crimes, -like- kids not being hurt. This is why we have protective custody for pedos.
    • Did you listen to the big speech afterwards? 'Until their spirit breaks completely.' The Joker had spent a great deal of time and effort breaking Harvey. If you don't think your girlfriend/fiance's death, having half your face burnt off and being in horrible pain every goddamn second, all of which was caused by someone you trusted, counts as motivation to snap and go on a rampage especially considering Harvey had been shown to have something dark in him from the get go, I shudder to think what would.
      • Also, the movie implies that Dent wasn't too tightly wrapped to begin with. He was Gotham's White Knight, trying to reform the den of scum and villainy that it had become, and he felt like he was banging his head against a wall when he discovered that some of the city's finest were crooked. The Two-Face thing was just the ultimate culmination of lawful-aligned cynicism.
    • This troper thinks that the Joker wasn't lying, seeing as he'd want the sadistic boat who killed off the other to be the ones remaining. He was big on Anarchy.
  • I think that each detonator worked for both ships, e.g. either ship could push the button and both ships would blow up.
  • This is probably true. Remember: the Joker had a detonator capable of detonating both ships. The bombs were therefore on the same frequency, and a single detonator would have destroyed both. It'd also be a convenient way to kill everyone who didn't want to play by "his rules" in Gotham City. Further supported by the Joker's quote afterwards:

The Joker: You can't rely on anyone these days, you got to do everything yourself.

• • No, the Joker had two keys, not one for both.
  • Again, the simple truth is that it doesn't matter. whether the Joker would have the people blow up one boat, both boats, neither boat, or any other combination is ultimately irrelevant. The purpose of the exercise was for the Joker to force people to come down to his level, to show the rest of the city that everyone was as corruptible as anyone else. And he failed. That's the only point to it. Wondering which detonator would destroy which boat simply detracts from the more fundamental result of the exercise: no one blew anyone up.
    • Indeed. Besides, if they think of that, then they end up questioning everything endlessly, rather than concentrating on the threat at hand, and realize that no matter what they do they're screwed.
    • The kicker is that the Joker wins either way. If one of the boats presses the detonator, he proves all people can be corrupted. If they don't, he blows up both of them, proving that the only way out is to take the path of evil. The only way he loses is if neither presses the detonator, and Bats manages to stop him.
      • Except he wouldn't prove that about all people, just about a few people.
    • Between this and the other two points you put up, you're taking things far too much at their literal face value. It was symbolic, and meant to be representative of humanity. Of course he's not going to prove something is "correct" about every single person out there. Nobody can. That's why any experiment uses a representative sample.
  • Come to think of it, Is there a single instance in the entire movie that would make them think he was bluffing? This guy just blew up a friggin' hospital on a whim. And besides, he wasn't bluffing, he just got interrupted.
  • Note that, for his hospital threat, the Joker had absolutely no way of knowing whether anyone killed Reece or not. He was going to blow up the hospital anyway, regardless of whether anyone obeyed his order. So, he might not bluff, but you'd be a sucker to take him at his word.
  • Personally, the Joker lying would be pointless. The entire point of the boat exercise was showing that everyone, deep down, is as sick and twisted as the Joker. If the detonators set off both boats, he wouldn't know which one chose to set off the bomb (the optimum result would be the civilians choosing to blow up the other boat.) and if they blew up their own boat, he wouldn't be able to rub it in their face that he was right.
    • This is the third time I've had to say this on this site: there is absolutely no way of predicting for certain what The Joker is going to do, in that situation or most others. That's what makes the situation--and the character--so great.
      • WMG - The Joker himself didn't know which boat was wired to which detonator. He give the detonators and the explosive to different lackeys, with orders to not tell which boat they choose.
    • I'm fairly certain he wouldn't care one way or the other whether anything was proved by that situation; he did say he wasn't about to bet the battle for Gotham's soul on being able to outfight Batman long enough to blow up some boats. IMO, he just wanted to see the explosion and laugh at the thought of all the people he freaked out.
  • I think the whole point of the ships was that no matter what, as long as at least one boat blows up, the Joker wins. Think about it: if one boat pulled the trigger and it blew up their own boat, everyone would assume the other boat pulled the trigger, based on what the joker said. For the Joker, the means really are just a way to an end; that is, he doesn't care what he has to do to get his way, just so long as he gets it. I think that no matter what way the boats were rigged, the Joker still would have won if Batman hadn't shown up.
  • All of the above about the point of the exercise from the Joker's perspective is true; what bugged me is that it didn't have to be a moral dilemma for those actually on the boats. It could have been a merely rational one - if it had occurred to anyone that they couldn't be sure which detonator blew up which boat, there would be no question of what to do. It is true that they still wouldn't know what the other boat would choose to do, but they have no control over that either way, and they don't even know if pressing their own detonator would save them or destroy them.

• The only part that bugged me was right at the beginning. You're telling me that you can just back a schoolbus into the front door of a bank, sit there for 10 minutes, not attract any attention, then smoothly pull out into traffic with a bunch of other schoolbuses and nobody's gonna NOTICE? Like say, the bus driver right behind him, wouldn't you think the driver might think, 'hey that's weird, why is a bus pulling out of the bank trailing rubble?'
  • Given what a crappy, depressed city Gotham is depicted as, I assume they just thought it was Somebody Else's Problem. Just keeping their head down and trying to make it to the end of the day.
  • Rule of Cool Ditto the rest of the movie.
  • Also, it's totally possible that the rest of those bus drivers were on the Joker's payroll.
  • I'm more concerned about how it got the momentum for it... that street was not very wide... and there was plenty of traffic on the other side.
  • Based on the timing, as well as the gap between the buses, it's reasonable to assume a couple of things: a) the police didn't see the bus pull out of the bank (or smash into it, for that matter), and b) the other buses are driven by Joker's lackeys, considering the absolute lack of reaction from the other drivers, and the fact that no children are visible in any of the buses. Plus, the bus driver that gets killed specifically says "buses are here", meaning they were anticipated. Why would so many buses be in the financial district if not for an elaborate smoke-screen?
    • Though while no children are in the buses, we hear the laughter of children as they drive by. Creepy, or bad sound editor?
  • Given that it's a bank owned by the mob, and the possible chance that it's one of those "well known secrets", the Gotham citizens just probably thought that the mob will take care of them later. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're used to bank robberies, I'm willing to be that mob banks in Gotham are deliberately robbed from time to time as a coverup for the mob to transfer funds, probably launder the money in another bank, or make unsuspicious withdrawals, for stuff like bribes, paying off rival gangs, the like.
    • Hey... That's a really good idea!
  • Of course, the real answer is: "It's Heath Ledger doing it."

• This troper... wasn't so satisfied with (big spoiler ahead) the ending. I was so sure that the Joker would either die or be removed from the picture, leaving a battle of white knight v. dark knight in the third movie. Instead, Aaron whatshisface has a role as Two-Face shorter than David Wenham in Moulin Rouge, and the Joker escapes... So who, then, will be the villain of the third installment? I don't reeeally think they can re-cast Joker.
  • It is possible that Dent/Two-Face is alive - the coin that decided life and death was face up beside his body, and there was no coffin at his memorial service. Also there was a lampshade hung on it when Batman dropped the mob boss from the same height - "A fall like that won't kill me." "I'm counting on it."
    • It's face-up because it represents the result of the last flip... Its target is alive since Batman pulled an interrupt.
    • Here's hoping, anyway. Although really, saving the Joker for the third movie would've made more sense, seeing as he's Batman's stated archnemesis. Eh, nevermind.
      • Dent is quite dead. having seen the movie twice, I'm 99.99% sure he wasn't getting back up from that.
        • The Joker was probably intended to be the villain of the third installment, along with some other, new villain. It's not exactly their fault they didn't plan for Ledger buying the farm.
        • This troper can't help but think that Harvey was intended to die, but due to the tragic circumstances preventing the Joker's return, it may transpire that Dent's injuries aren't quite as critical as we may have been led to believe.
          • I'd go farther and point out the careful shooting and dialogue in the finals scenes, where we see Harvey lying still on the ground as Gordon and Batman talk about "his reputation" being destroyed. The camera's on Dent, not on anyone speaking. The whole scene smacks of rewrites and audio looping.
    • No, that's a load of bollocks and wishful thinking. If you want to rewrite someone as not being dead, it's frankly a stupid idea to edit the scene to show nothing but the clearly dead person. The scene was about his reputation; in the situation, "Harvey Dent went off the deep end" does more damage to the city than "Harvey Dent is dead," considering the average life expectancy of a DA in Gotham isn't very long. Harvey's dead guys, and frankly, yes they can find someone else to fill Heath Ledger's shoes.
      • This troper and her mom have a theory that Batman and Gordon told everyone that Dent was dead to preserve his reputation and have taken him somewhere secret, maybe the Bat Cave, to recuperate. Also, in response to the above statement, it would be extremely unwise and frankly, in my opinion, distasteful, to use the Joker again with Ledger dead.
        • Since when can't you recast a role of an actor who can no longer play it? The particular reason why doesn't really matter; the role's been re-cast before, and successfully, so it can be again. I understand respect for the dead and all, but to put him up on that high a pedestal is ludicrous. He did a very, very good job in his role. He's also still very much replaceable. On a side note, why am I spoiler-tagging this?
          • I disagree - it doesn't necessarily matter how great he was at all. Recasting a character with another actor is irritating even if the actor is just very good. See Harry Potter, of course. (Man, I hate Angrydore.) Personally, I think it'd be cool if in the next movie, the Joker wasn't shown, but was manipulating things from the shadows. I mean, wouldn't it be?
          • While I agree that recasting the Joker looks distasteful at face value, think about it for a minute. Heath Ledger put 100 times more effort than expected into this character, on and off screen. He basically gave his life for this role to make sure it left an impact on the movie. Would it really be respectful for the third movie to just disregard the character altogether? I don't think the Joker should get the spotlight, no, but if they can find an actor who looks and can talk like Ledger's Joker for a minor role, the movie would feel more like a follow up to the Dark Knight rather than a sequel for the sake of making a sequel.
  • Lucius Fox goes out of his way to joke that Batman's new armor will stand up to cats...
    • And they did kill off Batman's love interest...
  • Actually The Joker is left hanging on the side of a building and is presumed captured by the SWAT officers in that building. He doesn't escape.
  • Batman's non-fantastic rogues gallery is quite large. Imagine a Riddler as viciously re-imagined as the Joker was, and you have whatshisname from Saw: a criminally insane sociopath with a penchant for games and riddles that are life and death. Or Bane, who, even if you take away the superserum, is still infinitely scary as the only man ever to completely defeat Batman. Or the Penguin, who seems harmless, but can manipulate people into doing a hell of a lot. There's no shortage of people to tap for a third movie.
    • This troper's cousin claims that the next movie's villain will be The Riddler. Since Batman is now ostracized and on the run, The Riddler starts a crime wave to lure him out and unravel his identity. This troper has no idea where said cousin got this information, but it sounds workable--and, if said cousin (who, with all respect to him, isn't very creative) was able to come up with the idea himself, this troper is fairly convinced the up-and-up movie execs can figure something out too.
      • This is actually something that Gary Oldman, who played Gordon, has said; he claims that they've been considering a cyberterrorist version of the Riddler for the third movie.
    • Even some of the more fantastical Batman villains can work with a little retooling. Poison Ivy can still be a perfectly human bio-terrorist who uses deadly toxins. Clayface can be a master diguise artist who steals people's identities. You could even have a dialled-down version of Mr. Freeze using cold weapons, since there is some pretty advanced technology in the movie universe.
    • In my mind, Mr. Freeze should be a hitman who can't feel emotion and so uses liquid nitrogen and an iron billy-club as his calling-card.
    • And let's not forget Catwoman!
      • I did see a pair of fantastic made up posters with excellent casting suggestions for The Riddler and Harley Quinn
      • Guys, accept it. Next movie is bringing us Bane and Catwoman, and that's it. Get over it.
    • You realize you're telling people to "get over" a discussion that ended months, if not years, ago, right?
  • I'm pretty sure I saw Harvey's chest heaving.
    • Watching the movie a second time, I specifically looked for that. In fact, if his chest is moving, it's an accident of the actor, not intentional. Harvey is not supposed to be breathing at the end of the movie.
    • The actor that plays Two-Face confirmed that although he'd like to return as Two-Face, Chris Nolan considers the character dead.
  • Sorry, but in this troper's never-humble opinion, the only villain that could POSSIBLY top Heath Ledger's Joker is Bane.
    • Yes! Exactly what I was thinking! And cast Benicio del Toro as Bane. I've been thinking the next movie should be based on Knightfall. Only, in my version, Bane is the leader of one of several splinter groups of the Order of Shadows that formed after the death of Ra's Al Ghul. Also, perhaps Azrael is a former member, just like Bruce. For him, by the way, I'm thinking Gaspard Ulliel. As for the Joker, really, no matter how they handle him, it's gonna seem like a cop-out, at least it can be an interesting one. I'm thinking that the night Arkham is broken into, The Joker's psychiatrist, Harley,(obviously), who I think Monica Keena would be perfect for), vanishes, and then the next morning, The Joker is fished out of Gotham River. In the end, it'll turn out Zsasz killed him, because he'd been planning on a really sick, brutal revenge against Rachel Dawes, before The Joker blew her up. In the meantime, someone else starts committing crimes as The Joker. Three guesses. This, of course, would be a nice Take That to people who are like "Heath Ledger's dead! We can't have the Joker anymore!" Yeah, we can. Just not THAT Joker. When the Joker says "You and I are destined to do this forever," he meant Batman and The Joker, not Bruce Wayne and Jack Napier. It's interesting to imagine fifty, a hundred, even five hundred years into the future, Batman and The Joker are still going at it. Just not those two guys. And it would fit the whole theme of the man versus what he represents. In the end, Bruce Wayne is crippled, so Jean Paul Valley takes his place, and goes after Bane, and upon defeating him, says something along the lines of "Bruce Wayne is but a man, but Batman is something not broken so easily." Also, I'm thinking of Alicia Witt as Poison Ivy(however they decide to play her), Ben Foster as The Mad Hatter(again, don't know how they'd do it, I'm thinking make him a child murderer), and Nick Stahl as Zsasz. They recast Rachel, what the hell? Oh, and also bring in Bullock and Montoya(I mean really this time), played respectively by Ethan Suplee and Rosario Dawson. Oh, and I thought an interesting way to introduce them would be that, after the deaths of Harvey and Rachel, Gotham is now considered the worst place in the state, which turns it into a dumping ground for pain-in-the-ass "honest" cops, which, obviously, works to their advantage. Hey, at least something good should come out of their deaths.
      • Do you happen to write fanfiction? Because if you do, I'd love to see this.
      • Seconded.
  • Technically, you could make a Joker the villain without ever seeing him. Just have the next plot consist of incredibly elaborate plans crafted by a shadowy individual that Batman spends the entire time trying to figure out. At the end Batman realizes that the entire thing was concocted by the Joker working inside Arkham through Dr. Harley Quinzel to mess with Batman's head. Personally, this troper thinks it would have been awesome for there to have been a scene after the credits set at Arkham where the Joker first meets his shrink.
  • Unpopular opinion here, but they can and most likely will recast the Joker. The Joker isn't a random guy from Batman's rouge gallery, he's Batman's infamous arch-nemesis across every single Batman series. So while Christopher Nolan may focus on a few other villains for a few movies, he probably will bring him back. While it is true that Heath did an amazing performance, Hollywood does not shelve a character role for all eternity because an actor did a great performance, and it's possible (but certainly difficult) to find an actor who can still honor Heath's performance and create a good, frightening Joker. Yes, the fans may think Heath cannot be topped, but many people think Sean Connery was the greatest Bond and yet the other Bond actors are still enjoyable. Heck, some fans still think Jack Nicholson is the best Joker. Don't count out the Joker's return just yet.
    • Depends how long the series goes on. If it manages to last as long as James Bond, sure, of course he will. But most superhero movie series are trilogies (probably for the best, given how well Superman IV and Batman and Robin were received), and if this one follows that pattern it's perfectly reasonable to assume the Joker won't come back.
    • They replaced Dumbledore for the third Harry Potter movie and on with Michael Gambon, who intentionally tried not to mimic Richard Harris's performance (Richard Harris died, of course). I think they'll try to replace Heath Ledger. Whether it'll be successful is still to be seen, but they're likely to give it a shot.
      • Yeah, but it's not as if they could leave Dumbledore out of the movie.
    • Christopher Nolan & Christian Bale have both been quoted as saying that they won't participate in a Batman with a re-cast Joker. I would expect to see someone else play the Joker at some point in the future, but not for a while.
    • Nolan said that his third movie will be the conclusion of the story, so he won't do more Batman films.
    • Regardless whether or not it would be respectful to re-cast the character, why in the world would they have a villain twice in the same series of movies? Nolan's Joker has been taken about as far as he can as a character, so to have him again would just be rehashing the same material. It's time to move on.
  • Good points, all. The O'Neil novelization says that Dent died. They may have left it vague for sequel potential.
  • This troper was honestly surprised when the Joker didn't die. It's doubtful they could ever find a replacement actor that would meet expectations. And if the characters casually mention in the third film how the Joker met his fate between movies, a lot of people would be pissed off. The producers are probably hanging on to a few scenes of Heath Ledger that they can repurpose into a death scene for the beginning of the third movie.
    • This troper was actually rather pleased. They should certainly not recast the part, for how could anyone top Heath Ledger, but it made this troper smile to think that, in Gotham City at least, Ledger's last great triumph lives on. It's the perfect place to say goodbye to both the man and the character: alive, doing what he loves... And laughing.
      • It's also something that Christopher Nolan said publicly: Nolan has repeatedly said that he used Ledger's performance as filmed, with no doubling or looping after the fact of his death. Since Ledger was likely meant to return for part 3, only altering dialogue could have killed of his character once shooting had wrapped.
    • If Batman had killed the Joker (or even allowed him to die) then it would have only proven the Joker correct about his assumption that he could force Batman to break his one rule (no killing) and would have ultimately given him the last laugh (seriously, he laughs hysterically all the way down his drop when he thinks he's going to die). Of course, when Batman does save him, he laughs all the harder, because he is overjoyed to have an opponent so incorruptible, who will never kill him no matter what he does (including kill his love interest), which means the two of them can go on fighting forever. It also gives him the chance to mock Batman about how he was able to corrupt Dent, which he considers (and Batman and Gordon agree) to be a much more meaningful conquest. The point of the Joker is that he's a no-win situation kind of guy.
    • No-win situation, eh? Clearly the Joker should be going against Kirk
      • Of course -- just to throw this out there -- the courts could find him legally guilty of serial murder and terrorism and have him executed while keeping him under too much supervision to pull anything. Or successfully keep him locked up in Arkham Asylum for the rest of his life. That would just about stop him from fighting Batman forever.
      • Yeah, but this is Arkham Asylum we're talking about here.
      • But given that the movie is supposed to be more believable, the prison security should be portrayed as more reliable so the Joker couldn't just waltz out when he felt like it just like in the silver age comics. Real life prisons are more reliable, so the Nolanverse's prisons should be about the same.
      • Heck, if Joker Immunity were being suspended here, it's hard to imagine how the guy could survive to stand trial! How many cops did he kill, now? Cop-killers are prone to fatal falls down the jailhouse stairs, in cities as corrupt as Gotham. Even if he lived to reach lock-up, there's bound to be a lot of mob guys there who aren't too happy with how he'd screwed their gangs over, playing out his sick, non-profitable little games and trashing half the city.
      • No reason he didn't crazy-prepare for this turn of events as well.
      • Also, let's not forget the Joker is extremely physically capable, at least on a match to Batman for sheer strength and ferocity if not technique. Remember, one of the cops [i]did[/i] try and mete out a little "catchup" as Terry Pratchett might put it during The Dark Knight. He did so against a Joker who had already had his ass kicked by Batman and had no available weapons to hand. Who won that one? And let's not get started about the pencil trick... I would have thought there'd be a big dose of the Rorschachs if you were in the same prison as Joker: "I'm not locked up in here with you! You're locked up in here with me!"
        • This troper disagrees but considers you to be awesome for having coined the phrase "dose of the Rorschachs."
    • Also, keep in mind that he was captured, was sent to jail, and made it out. He wasn't in Arkham, but that place is probably as corrupt as the rest of Gotham (wasn't Scarecrow running it in the first movie?); all the Joker needs to do is use everyone's greed to play them against each other, then walk out.
• The Joker crashes the fundraiser party and throws Rachel out the window. Batman jumps out after her and saves her, leaving the Joker there with all the guests and a fairly poorly-hidden Harvey Dent. (Seriously. In a closet? With a bar across the double doors? The Joker would never look there!) Then the movie moves on to later scenes. What did the Joker do while Batman was gone? Schmooze with the guests? Help himself to a bit more wine? They just leave a tense moment without resolving it.
  • I figured that he threw Rachel out the window to distract Batman and make a getaway. However, if I were Batman I would sure rush up there to check, not lay there cuddling and cracking jokes.
    • Well, come on, he just fell how many stories onto a car? I think some personal pain is preventing him from moving for a bit. Plus, Joker lets go of Rachel's arm, and then immediately starts running away in the split second before he's out of frame. It's reasonable to assume he continued running, because he knew Batman would be coming back and getting out of a penthouse in time would be a big enough concern.
    • Yeah, about that... the fall itself always bugged me. I'm not sure I buy that they would survive it, let alone survive it without any lasting injuries. The first time I saw the movie, I kept expecting Batman to whip out his grappling hook and swing them to safety, and was shocked when they hit the car... but everyone kind of treats it like no big deal, when I'm pretty sure they fell far enough to qualify for "lethal." And thoughts on the cape slowing them down or something is nonsense... it did nothing to slow their speed, by the impact their bodies had on the car. Batman wraps himself around Rachel as if his body would somehow absorb the kinetic force of their momentum, and even if that's the case, he himself gets off without harm. Anyway, that just bugged the hell out of me.
    • I think the cape did something. It being unable to fully deploy plus being weighed down by Rachel meant it wasn't nearly as effective as it usually would have been, but it still did something to lessen the impact.
    • In order for the cape to do something it would have to be "open" like a parachute or kite, allowing the air to catch from underneath it. Instead it was wrapped around them like a ball. Even forgetting that, assuming the flapping edges of his cape slowed them down somehow, they still hit the car with enough force to shatter bones. How much they were slowed we can't really know, but however much it was it was still enough to crumple the car's window and top, and that's not something you can just walk away from.
    • Cars are very soft in movies.
    • If you notice, when they're about 10 feet from the ground, his cape does open for a second, which might have slowed their fall a little. Probably not enough to avoid injury, but we're talking about Batman here. The car was probably just so scared of him, it crumpled under him to absorb the blow, rather than risk angering him.
  • The Joker did point out that he thought for a while that Dent was Batman. Having Dent vanish from the party and Batman appear would certainly seem like a big clue, and shift Joker's focus away from searching the penthouse.
  • According to the novelization by Dennis O'Neil, the Joker was escaping during this time, and Batman even sees his getaway car speeding by while he and Rachel are recuperating. Additionally, while getting away, Joker wonders if Rachel is "someone special" to Batman, so by this point he may have been considering that Batman is Dent, which lines up with the above comment.
  • I wonder what Harvey was told after the party. If I woke up in a closet that was barred from the outside, with little to no memory of how I got there, I'd have a few questions. Also, does Rachel ever tell him about getting thrown out the window? Maybe that's how she distracts him from asking questions about the closet incident.
    • Once he's told of how the party was interrupted and by who, it really isn't much of a logical leap for Dent to figure out that Batman sapped him and stuffed him in a closet to keep the Joker from finding him. Which is actually what happened, let us note.
      • Bruce is counting on him thinking it was Batman. Which is why when he grabs Dent from behind, he uses his Batman voice to tell Rachel, "They've come for him. Stay hidden."
  • It has been announced that the villains of The Dark Knight Rises will be Bane and Selina Kyle.

• At the end of the film, Gordon and Batman discuss how to deal with the five murders that Dent committed. But I only remember three killings - those of Detective Wuertz, Maroni, and Maroni's driver. Even if Ramirez died from her pistol whipping, that leaves one unaccounted murder. Who else did he kill?
  • I was wondering that myself. The only other one I can think of is the guy who was supposed to be in the car with Maroni. If you watch closely, you can see him get dragged off.
    • I counted four: Wertz, Maroni, Maroni's Driver, and the guy he does away with to get into Maroni's car. I always thought the fifth was a mistake, either by Gary Oldman (and an even bigger mistake to leave it in) or by the editors. It's entirely likely that a scene was shot in which Ramierez did die, and it was changed in editing. If that happened, it's also probable that Oldman's line was shot as "four" and "five" and the editors left the wrong one in.
  • I remember Gordon said: "five dead, two of them cops." So apparently Ramirez did die from being pistol whipped (either that, or Harvey found a creative reason to flip again like he did with Maroni).
    • Another possibility: The Joker shoots a cop at the hospital, then hands a gun to Harvey later on. If it's the same gun, perhaps Dent was blamed for that murder as well. Of course, that cop's body would've been blown up, and the Joker's gun doesn't appear to be the revolver he hands Harvey. (For one thing, it has a silencer/suppressor on it, and revolvers can't be silenced.)
    • The cop's remains could have still been mostly intact, if somewhat crushed. The building was blown up, but it wasn't a fire-based explosive.
  • If Harvey died in the fall, he'd be number five.
    • Considering that they were able to pin the murders on him, I doubt that he WAS the fifth.
    • Okay, Gordon knows that there were two cop traitors and that Dent was out to kill them. Perhaps he just falsely assumed that Ramirez had been killed instead of spared.
    • After all, Gordon had no way of knowing that she was still alive. So, including the other cop, Maroni, Maroni's drive, and Dent himself, those are the five deaths..
    • Yeah, Gordon knows that A. Ramirez was guarding his family, and B. Dent kidnapped his family. Presuming he went straight from the Joker to Dent's, he probably would have assumed Dent killed Ramirez.
  • It also could have been :the bartender with Weurtz. I doubt that Harvey managed to learn how to appear and disappear into thin air after just seeing it once.
    • Watching it again, it seems that the five deaths are as follows: Wertz, the bartender, Maroni, his driver, and Dent himself. Assuming that Gordon knows about Ramirez, that is. If he doesn't, then remove the bartender, and add Ramirez, which is the most likely situation. He doesn't refer to people being murdered, just people dead. And he simply says that there's no way to cover it all up and make Dent out to be the white knight the city needs. So, he not listing Dent's kills, he's simply stating the fact that so many dead people can't be hidden from the public. which prompts Batman to state that he killed "these" people. Note the use of the word "these". He's explicitly including Dent.
      • Nolan was actually asked about the seeming inconsistency in the body count. His reply: "I will answer this question one day. But not today." Sounds like we may find out the definitive answer in Batman 3, and that we don't yet know the whole story.
    • They wouldn't need to explain Harvey's death. They could just say he died of complications.
      • I was about to say, "But if Batman was thought to have killed Harvey there's no way he's getting it back.
    • How about the two cops at the hospital?
      • Simple; they blew up, maybe with Harvey.
  • Why does Batman have to take the blame for Harvey's murders in the first place? Couldn't they have just as conveniently blamed those killings on the Joker, so Harvey got to remain their white knight and Batman doesn't have to become Public Enemy No. 1?
    • Considering that this is the Joker, he very well could have had alibis for every one of those murders already in place. At the very least, it would be next to impossible for Batman to not be implicated in Harvey's own death, considering how many cops were at the scene, so he's still going to be responsible for that death.
      • He does have an alibi. He was setting up the ferry plot the whole time. And he has about fifty hostages from the hospital to verify it. Crazy Prepared indeed.
    • Batman has a pragmatic reason to allow himself to be blamed. Earlier in the film there's a scene that suggests that Batman is having trouble: the mobsters are learning that while they may get the tar beaten out of them and left for arrest, that Batman will not kill them. Consequently, Batman has lost the element of fear and dread that makes him effective. With Batman blamed publicly for murder, the mobsters will begin fearing him again, believing Batman capable of cold-blooded killing. Batman doesn't care if the public likes him; as long as he knows he hasn't broken his moral code against killing, he's content with letting other people believe he's capable of killing.
      • It might help stop all those lame Bat-wannabes from getting themselves trounced and/or killed, too.
    • And blaming them on The Joker would have meant that The Joker would have won: We was shown to break Gotham's White Knight and Batman would only have been blamed for having been incapable of saving the city.
  • Getting back to the original, from this Troper's position, he sees the five deaths as the bartender, Wertz, Maroni, his driver, and maybe a cop who was with Ramirez ("two of them cops"). Having Ramirez die off camera would make no sense; they might as well have had Dent shoot her instead of pistol-whipping. Gordon wouldn't have assumed Ramirez was dead, because she wasn't protecting his family; she got them away from the other cops. After being whipped, Ramirez could have called in the attack.
  • Commissioner Gordon is King Arthur.

• They made references to people being from Arkham Asylum. Why the hell are they still using it? HOW, if its been so short a time that Wayne Manor hasn't even been rebuilt yet?
  • Wayne Manor was burnt to cinders, but Arkham only had a hole in the wall.
  • It's been a year. "A year ago the cops were afraid to touch you" etc etc.
  • Don't forget that they have to build the Bat Cave, too. If a construction company accidentally found it while working his identity wouldn't be secret for long.
  • It took them a while to regain the Narrows, but when they did, they managed to lock up a lot of the escaped looneys. At least, that's the impression I got from the fact that Batman is dealing with something as ultimately trivial as mob money.
    • Actually, that's not really that trivial. It's stated that Lau is the mob's only money launderer, thanks to the very thorough efforts of the Gotham Police. Thus, catching Lau would effectively bankrupt the mob and could put them out of business. Indeed, if not for the Joker's involvement, it could have worked.
  • Also, Gotham Knight has a story that shows the new Arkham, which has expanded to cover the entire island (the Narrows were abandoned). Now the entire place teeming with criminals (not locked up or anything; just walking around and using guns and stuff) and more of a super-prison that an asylum. The segments are all canon, so that's what it'll look like if the place reappears in the third movie.
  • Since when is Gotham Knight part of the Nolan-verse cannon?
    • Since it came out and was noted as taking place between the first and second movies?

• Why did the Joker-Bankrobbers ignore the guy in the glass-walled room in the middle of the lobby at the bank when they were telling everyone to put there hands up and their heads down?
  • They didn't see him. Seriously, check out that wall: there's plants or something in front of the windows. And quite frankly, they are so hyped on adrenaline or drugs or both that they simply didn't think of it. Also, the Joker planned the whole thing: maybe he knew and didn't tell them that the guy would have a shotgun. Especially considering what he does later.
    • Just a correction to this comment (that I made): the office is clearly visible. So, it seems it's the latter half of the comment above: Joker knew and didn't tell the others, so that hopefully the manager would kill one of his guys.
      • Or two. The guy who was killed by the bus driver was probably originally supposed to be killed by the manager (he got shot in the arm instead). Joker did seem somewhat surprised/upset that he was still alive. He took care of things quickly enough though.

• Exactly how did the Joker know where they were going to turn back onto a major road during the chase scene? Did he have men on every street to stop helicopters?
  • The Joker had the luxury of picking the exact time and place for his attack. Why not pick one with a very limited # of possible escape routes? Also, its not hard to predict that after losing all of his chase cars and being shot at with an RPG, the police van driver is going to make an immediate beeline to where he can get back in touch with his aerial escort.
  • What this troper wants to know is why the police went underground at all? Sure, the Joker blocked off their route, but the other side of the road was completely clear. They mentioned they'd closed off all the roads, so they didn't have to worry about a head-on collision or anything, and they could have more or less gone the route they'd planned with a slight detour around the truck.
    • Notice that the route that's blocked off keeps on the same level as the rest of the street, while the route they take (underground) is clearly on a downwards slope, so the vehicle couldn't have forced its way onto the top path since it wasn't level with the rest of the road.

• How did the Joker even manage to set up the boat scenario? With the Sadistic Choice and hospital scenario, it's plausible they were both a long time in the planning, but the boats was based on a last minute decision to evacuate in an emergency.
  • It's possible he knew that a mass evacuation would follow his ultimatum (he did suggest it, after all!) and knew the boats were the most likely way that it would happen
    • He did. He specifically warned everyone during his ultimatum that the bridges were off-limits. The boats were the only way out.
    • Actually, he said the bridge and tunnel crowd would be "in for a surprise" which everyone took for a threat. The real surprise, of course, was that he put bombs on the boats instead/too.
    • This troper prefers and thinks that it was a case of "instead". The Joker is saying they're "in for a surprise", which people take to mean that people at the bridges and tunnel are going to die. But it's the Joker, so everyone's suspecting that. Thus, the "surprise" is that those places WONT kill anyone!" My problem is, why didn't people, if they were that desperate, just swim across the rivers? Sure you can't take your stuff with you, and it'd be tough, and not for everyone, but it'd be a relatively short and easy looking swim for someone fit, and it's not a bridge or a tunnel (or a boat), AND there's even ladders/walkways along the water's edge that would make it very easy to get up! On the other hand, there are police everywhere keeping people off the bridge...
    • Are you serious? Ever tried to swim over the Hudson?
      • The confusion there is that the canon layout of Gotham has wide rivers, but the actual shot Nolan used was the Chicago river which a few hundred feet wide, at most.
    • But when the Joker was telling the people on the ferries about their choice, didn't he quickly mention that if anybody tried to jump out and make a break for it he'd just explode both boats? Maybe you're talking about people who weren't on the ferries, but was he able to make everyone else by the water hear? If so, he probably meant it for them too (as in, if they decided to swim he'd just blow up the boats). He was obviously keeping a watchful eye during the whole thing.
    • what bugs me is that they checked out the bridges and tunnels with a fine tooth comb but no one ever thought to check the boats out?
    • Why would they? The Joker specifically said bridges and tunnels, and he's a man of his word. Until he breaks it.
    • Yeah, because the Joker specifically mentioned the bridges and tunnels and all their resources were focused on those. And everybody wanted out; "Come nightfall, this city is mine, and any left plays by my rules." I wouldn't want to be the one to tell people they couldn't leave after an ultimatum like that from the Joker.
    • What bothers me is that nobody was in the engine room of either ferry at all before the launch. You'd think there'would be crew down there making sure everything is running properly who would notice barrels full of explosives that shouldn't be there.
    • Forget the bridges, tunnels, and boats. Lucius Fox states that Gotham is a city of 30 million people (probably counts the Gotham metropolitan area, but still). That's more than any city in the world save Tokyo. You'd think a city of this size would have an AIRPORT.
    • Airports A. have limited, previously scheduled flights that are probably full up so that almost nobody who wasn't already leaving the city could have gotten on a plane in such short notice, and B. tend to be miles and miles and miles away from the city it mainly services because planes are very loud and need a lot of wide open space to take off and land. Even if Gotham does have an airport with its name on it, it's very likely you'd have to take a train, bridge, or tunnel to get to it.

• So Lucius Fox lets Bruce Wayne walk away with explosives, a tank, an extremely lethal Batsuit, not to mention cooking the books to siphon off the millions of company dollars it takes to pay for all this, and covers up for a known fugitive wanted by the police... but when Batman wants to use the sonic cell phone trick to find the Joker before he murders thousands of people, somehow that and that alone crosses the line?
  • Just to clarify, it's never said that Bruce Wayne is taking money from Wayne Enterprises to fund his mission as Batman - the guy is a multi-millionaire. Equipment might "disappear" but money never does.
  • Well, his cell phone trick was essentially spying on a whole lot of people, including innocents. He could tell exactly where anyone in the city was as long as they were using a cell phone. Lucius was okay with Batman, who is using all of those toys and money to nab criminals and help people, but he was not okay with Bruce pulling a Big Brother. Plus, he didn't know that it wasn't a permanent addition to Batman's toys.
    • But if Lucius was okay with letting Bruce have all that other equipment because he trusted him not to misuse it, why wouldn't Lucius trust Bruce not to misuse the magic cell phone trick?
      • Because Bruce was going to use Lucius' other toys on criminals. The cell phone trick specifically exploited innocents (and it was much, much more powerful than anything he had before). Lucius himself used the cell phone trick on the Hong Kong gangster without complaint.
      • Technically Lucius used his cell phone to knock out the security devices at the building in Hong Kong. The sonar phone was just a new toy he showed Bruce. Bruce's device allowed him to see and hear anyone in Gotham using a Wayne Industries cell phone, which, for some reason, seemed to be at least half the city. Which is why we should think twice before buying an iPhone.
      • This troper opines that it was probably some sort of There Should Be a Law thing about the Patriot Act.
        • It probably was (a thinly-veiled reference to the Patriot Act, that is). Anyway, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Bruce never said anything (at least nothing this troper recalls) about using the cell phone trick to spy on average Gothamites. He specifically said he was just trying to track down the Joker, which falls squarely into the "only for use on criminals" category in this troper's opinion. Also the whole "Lucius was okay with it when Bruce was just using his Bat-gear to catch bad guys and help people" excuse doesn't really fly when you consider the full implications of what Bruce was doing. First, embezzling (and it definitely does count as embezzlement) all the money needed to pay for all that Bat-gear (plus the money to maintain, repair, or replace damaged Bat-gear) is a serious violation of the law and, presumably, whatever ethics policy Wayne Enterprises has. And since Wayne Enterprises is a publicly traded company that means they're stealing from their shareholders. Second, kidnapping a foreign national is a SERIOUS violation of federal and international law and, depending on just how far the Chinese government decided to take things, potentially an act of war. Third, I don't buy the whole "pulling a Big Brother" argument either because I simply can't see how giving Batman the power to spy on people is worse than giving him tons and tons of incredibly deadly and destructive Bat-gear and letting him run around town doing whatever he wants with it. It would have made sense if Lucius had been slightly uncomfortable with it all along and the cell phone trick was just the last straw. But throughout both Batman Begins and Dark Knight Lucius expresses precisely zero discomfort with anything Bruce is doing. He seems to trust Bruce completely when he really has no reason to (after all, he'd never even met Bruce before the events of BB). For all Lucius knew, Bruce could have been murdering homeless people in between fighting crime. Who could have stopped him? And how would they even know it was him? Homeless people probably get murdered by the truckload in Gotham City.
        • Actually, this article helps to explain the matter of Batman kidnapping Lau. Turns out to have been okay.
      • Just a small side note, Batman's equipment is not funded by embezzlement. While he may use Wayne Tech resources, Bruce Wayne has PLENTY of money of his own. The profits he makes from the company are his to do with as he wishes, just like your paychecks are.

• • • • And also: Bruce Wayne is the majority shareholder, if not the only shareholder, in Wayne Enterprises; he bought most, if not all of it out, when the company went public through a bunch of trusts and companies -- "it's all a bit technical". And Bruce quite explicitly doesn't consider himself a criminal if it's his own or his family's goods he's stealing -- indeed that's the justification he states to Ra's al-Ghul in the first movie when he says "I never became one of them [criminals]" -- because it's a Wayne Industries shipment that was stolen. It's also apparent that Lucius may not have known Bruce personally, but he knows the background Bruce is from: he knows Alfred, and he worked closely with Bruce's father on the Gotham Public Transport system.
        • • Just because Bruce Wayne owns a majority of Wayne enterprises, that does not mean that he owns the company. If Batman uses Wayne Tech resources without paying Wayne enterprises, he is stealing from the shareholders. For example: if, before his death, Steve Jobs had walked into an apple store and walked away with an iPod, he would have been stealing from Apple.
          • Lucius was against it because it was, in fact, a spying program. The potential for misuse was so much greater, and considering the significant investment that Bruce funneled towards the project, plus the clandestine and incredibly illegal nature of the project, and the massive ethics violation...all of that probably pushed Lucius over the edge. It's not hard to conceive that he would lose faith in Bruce. Imagine that he knew the man was a vigilante doing good. Then, out of nowhere, comes the Joker and his over-the-top methods of inducing anarchy. Lucius still supported Bruce when he tried to go conventional. Then, all of a sudden, Bruce stole his technology and implemented it on unsuspecting citizens. At this point, he's probably convinced that Bruce is willing to do anything to catch the Joker, and ultimately any criminal, and that's what violates his ethics. He knows Bruce is doing good, but when he crosses the line to try and stop the bad guy, then he decides that he can't support Batman anymore.
            • It seems less like a reference to the Patriot Act (although it's there) but more a shout out to the Brother Eye stuff from the comics. Batman hasn't had a good track record with massive surveillance.
              • One key thing... Bruce Wayne did this behind Fox's back. That is part of the reason he had a problem with it. He took an existing "toy" and made it much, much more powerful. As for comparing it to his other toys... he could essentially see everything around him. The only thing that could have been even more powerful than seeing all of Gothan City would be predicting the future.
    • Fox realizes that his willingness and ability to create a device capable of spying upon all of Gotham showed that he was on a path that could eventually lead him to being no better than the criminals. Sure, he only wants to spy on people to find the Joker. Suppose that then he decides to use the technology to find the next Joker before he has a chance to do anything. And then eventually, to stop the next mugger before he can do anything. His "resignation" was basically saying "I've given you everything I think you need, but I'm cutting you off now before you can even start to think about taking it any further".
      • Isn't it perfectly possible he won't resign? After all, he said he couldn't keep working for him as long as the sonar system was in place, and the sonar system go boom. Lucius stays?
      • That's the implication from the film. Batman's voiceover says "Some people deserve to have their faith rewarded" as Lucius smilingly watches the sonar system self-destruct. As he walks away, he's putting his suit coat back on; the whole scene screams that Lucius is happy to be back at Wayne Industries, because he knows Bruce Wayne can be trusted to do the right thing.
    • While we're all on about the cellphone trick, Here's a side question: What the heck kind of morons is the Chinese accountant hiring anyway? Lucius walks in, checks his cellphone into the security desk. Then on his way out, Lucius walks out, holding up his phone, despite having checked it at the desk, and the guard /doesn't/ find it the least bit suspicious that he's leaving a high end cellphone behind? Or (and maybe it's just this troper's thoughts) that he's carrying /two/ identical cellphones on him?
      • That one's actually pretty easy. "Sir, you forgot... wait. Oh, you've got your phone... whose phone is this? There's no way that guy would have two perfectly identical cell phones. Ah well. I must be wrong. The right guy will show up." Sure, we can ask why he didn't try to figure out WHY Lucius had his phone, but he probably took the easy route, as humans, being the lazy, slothful creatures we are, are wont to do.
      • Yeah, it's not that far fetched to think that a security guard would shrug his shoulders at something like that. It's pretty mundane. People leave things like cell phones behind all the time.
  • I think that it was more the fact that Bruce crossed between being a vigilante in the shadows and almost became a living god with his omnipotence. Normally no matter how pure and good a person is, something like that will force them to develop a god complex (ie power corrupts, absolute power etc.)
  • Also, there's no way to not abuse a system like that. Even if he was only going to use it to spy on criminals, how does he know the person he's spying on is a criminal until he's already been watching them for awhile? How do you pick out the one person you're after without also noticing what all the people around him are doing? It's the same issues that the wire-tapping and Patriot Act issues in real life brought up: is catching one potentially important phone call worth listening to hundreds or thousands of innocent people's private conversations? Bruce's motives were never in question, but the very nature of such a tool violates the rights of every bystander who just happens to be in its line of sight. And yeah, I don't think Lucius resigned: the instruments exploding at the end was the movie's way of showing us that Bruce agreed with him, and so destroyed the machine to keep Lucius Fox aboard (remember, the ultimatum was that either that machine goes or he goes).

• At the end of the film, Gordon's story will be that Batman killed a bunch of crooked cops and mobsters, and needs to be arrested, whereas Harvey Dent is perfectly innocent. Fine so far. But in his story, why did Batman kill Harvey Dent?
  • Dent realized he was killing those people and confronted him about it. Things got heated, Dent gets pushed off a building.
    • Or Gordon could say Dent died in the hospital explosion; nobody knew he was missing except a few cops. Or go one better and say he died of his injuries.
    • Yes. It's possible Gotham can get beyond Harvey and the truth will come out eventually, but if they think Batman killed him...

• Why oh why didn't they just pin Dent's crimes on the Joker or his henchmen? It's not like anyone would notice a few more deaths in the general chaos.
  • Because the general consensus of Gotham's population is that the whole Joker situation was a symptom of a larger problem - namely a masked vigilante instigating some sort of crime arms race. Pinning everything bad on Joker and still holding up Batman as a hero would just make that problem worse and everything would be back to square one. Instead, in order to make Dent's death mean something, the authorities need to stop being in cahoots with Batman, thus making a martyr of Dent and endorsing his legitimate brand of crime-fighting while cracking down on the "real" problem.
  • Not to mention that declaring Batman a killer and a menace would probably help to discourage any more potential Copy-Bats.
  • Because it is still wrong pin a crime on people you know to be innocent even if they are guilty of plenty of other crimes. If you want to sacrifice an innocent, picking yourself is the most noble thing to do.
  • Having just watched it for a third time, and mulling this over while watching it, I think the fact that the Joker is still alive and in custody. Sure, people know the Joker killed many, but he can still deny that he killed THOSE people specifically. In fact, he probably would!
    • Of course he would. He could just about repeat one of his lines from the movie: "Me, kill those people? I was right here!" * Holds up his cuffed hands* "Who did you leave them with, hmmm?"
    • Also on the plus side, if the criminal element in Gotham thinks that Batman killed a bunch of people, they'll be that much more scared of him. Bruce and Gordon probably didn't intend this part, though it would be useful and in fact is a reference to at least one moment in the comics where Batman muses aloud that he's insulted the crook he's interrogating thinks he would leave any evidence after killing someone...
    • And any decent defense attorney would take a look at those murders and figure out the joker didn't do it (not consistent with his sadistic choice style after all) a bit of digging would lead you to Dent. Whether you conclude that Dent really is batman as he said in the ruse or find out he is two face is irrelevant at that point as both destroy his reputation and everything he worked for I would also propose that batman may indeed blame himself for the deaths so we are actually seeing him (in his own grief stricken mind) finally taking responsibility for his own actions.
    • Plus, if they want to keep the Joker behind bars, the worst thing to do is try to frame him. If a denfense attorney found proof of evidence tampering on the part of the police, they could move to get the whole case thrown out.

• Gordon's "death" and reappearance just felt like that moment on The Simpsons when Bart, having seen Ralph's gravestone, says to the very much alive Ralph, "I thought you were dead!" to which Ralph replies, "Nope!". Would it kill them to give a little more explanation? It could take as little as one sentence -- Oh, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, and then they hid me in X place ...
  • Yeah, what was that about? I didn't think for a second that he was really dead, but it would have been nice if they'd made a concession to the possibility that we were fooled.
    • Gordon states earlier in the movie that he's playing a particular plot close to the chest. When he comes back from the dead, Dent even mentions that. In fact, he's playing it so close to the chest, that even the audience doesn't know about it. Kind of a meta-joke, if you will. Besides, it's not unreasonable to assume that Gordon would be wearing a bullet-proof vest when he's working a death threat against the mayor. Even if they don't show it.
      • You know what's really close to your chest? A concealed bullet-proof vest, that's what.
  • Those were pretty high-caliber bolt-action rifles. Can anyone identify them? And I'll presume teflon-coated rounds... this is the Joker. Gordon would need a plate of steel like V used in V for Vendetta.
    • He stole the guns from a salute. Actual rounds are fired during a 3-volley salute, but the guns firing them are typically slightly modified to firing smaller cartridges. The guns used in the movie are M1's which, although they fire a large (7.62mm) round, can be modified to fire something much less deadly, like a .22 rimshot. Considering the fact that the salute is in the middle of a street, and the guns are quite obviously aimed at buildings, it's entirely reasonable to assume that we're talking very small rounds, likely .22s or something similar. Rounds that small are easily stopped by a good vest. And the Joker may be crazy prepared, but I doubt he had the time to reload the guns, which, for the M1, is not easy to do for someone untrained without firing off all the rounds first (and even then it's hard to do).
      • BLANK rounds are fired in a real 3-volley salute. No bullet actually comes out the barrel. In the movie, Joker replaced the blanks with live rounds.
  • Yeah, but what was stopped the Joker from shooting Gordon in the head?. One shot and the whole "fake my death" plan would have collapsed.
    • It's actually really hard to shoot people in the head. It's a very small target that moves around a lot. Anyone trained to actually hit and kill people with a gun tends to aim for the chest and the heart, which is why they invented bulletproof vests in the first place. Gordon banked on it - and they were right to, from what I remember, since the Joker doesn't tend to go for the headshot.
    • Keep in mind also that Gordon jumps in front of the mayor. The Joker likely wasn't anticipating that, and would therefore be unable to actually shoot Gordon in the head, as he'd have to know exactly where he was going to be.
    • The Joker wasn't aiming for Gordon. He was aiming for the Mayor. Joker's many things, but you need to be bloody Bullseye if you want to A. change targets, B. Aim for the head, and C. do both of the above in the, what, quarter of a second between turning and pulling the trigger?

• Is it even possible for a police officer to be promoted to Commissioner straight from the rank of Lieutenant? The Wire made a big deal of the number of ranks there were (detective -> sergeant -> lieutenant -> major -> colonel), and IIRC you had to spend a certain minimum length of time at each level before promotion. I wouldn't normally care about a detail like this in a superhero movie, but the movie makes a point of talking about the way the city's legal systems work in a moderately realistic way, which puts the burden on the screenwriters to pay attention to the way these things work in real life.
  • I think that Commissioner is a politically-appointed position, so they could be anyone the Mayor felt was appropriate. Naturally, you'd want to pick someone at the highest level of command to avoid annoying your other superior officers. But given how dangerous the Commissioner's job has become in Gotham, and his collar of Joker, I doubt they'd be too upset.
    • "I think that Commissioner is a politically-appointed position": It depends on city and state law. Some jurisdictions elect a Commissioner (or the equivalent), others are appointed, and others are a meritocracy. But since Gotham was modeled primarily on New York, and the Commissioner of the NYPD is appointed by the Mayor of NYC, it's reasonable to assume that the Commissioner of the GCPD would also be an appointed position.
      • It works however the movie says it works. If he goes from Lieutenant to Commissioner because they say so, then that's what happens.
        • ...that's a copout, dude. I don't mind the fact that Gordon got promoted; I mind the fact that nobody thinks it's unusual or worth commenting on.
          • Um, that's because it's been set up since long before the movie started. It's the backdrop of the whole movie -- Gordon has his special case unit, embattled and officially disapproved of by his superiors and struggling for cash, using all kinds of hardcore unorthodox methods to try to cut through the red tape, and all of a sudden he achieves an amazing, dramatic success. A * hugely heroic* success, one that put his own safety at * tremendous* personal risk, a success that seems to have put away one of the most terrifying villains Gotham's ever known. As the mayor says, there's really no argument about it. It would be more surprising if the mayor * didn't* make Gordon Commissioner in the wake of such an event.
            • Keep in mind there's a longrunning subtext going back to the first movie that the only reason Gordon hasn't risen through the ranks faster, despite his obvious ability and determination, is that he won't play ball with the corrupt politics of the department. And everyone knows it.
              • I'd imagine Gordon became Commissioner out of political necessity. He took down a psycho that had killed numerous people and terrorized Gotham. He'd be a hero to the Gotham people, and they'd probably be calling for his promotion. The mayor wouldn't have had a choice if he wanted to keep his job.

• Something just occurred to me. That accountant, Coleman Reese, still knows that Batman is actually Bruce Wayne and has evidence that proves it. With the Joker out of the picture, what's stopping Reese from A) trying to blackmail Bruce Wayne again, or B) going on tv again? For that matter, wouldn't the police be demanding that Reese turn everything over to them? Batman is now wanted for multiple murders, several of them cops, after all.
  • It would be kind of difficult for Reese to reveal who Batman is, considering he was kiddnapped by the Joker immediately after the accident with the car, and presumably killed just like the others. I'm I the only one who remembered that scene where Reese is forced to do that video?
    • No, no he wasn't. That's not Reese at all, that's Mike Engle, the guy from the news. And Joker didn't kill those people anyway. Those were the hostages dressed up as clowns in the climax. How did you miss that?
  • Well Bruce did save his life by crashing his Lamborghini into a would-be assassin's truck, and they exchanged that look... Well, I figured that would stop him from revealing the secret for publicity's sake (especially since he was only going to once Joker escalated things so far). Against police pressure, I don't have an answer.
    • Against police pressure, he could just say, "I was wrong." Or something to that effect. Police do not have the ability to force a witness to testify, only to compel them, and there are a lot of limits to that pressure.
      • We may not have seen the last of Coleman Reese. The Riddler uses a lot of aliases, and Mr. Reese, Mysteries? Eh? Eh? And he did figure out Batman's true identity, which shows that he's very intelligent and can solve complex mysteries...
      • DUDE! That right there is awesome! Good call, I completely didn't see that. This could lead to a very interesting third movie. And, the Riddler would never reveal Batman's identity, because a riddle is useless if everyone knows the answer.
    • Coleman Reese is NOT the Riddler. There is no way the studio would allow the villain of the third movie of a HUGE franchise be played by someone who's biggest roles so far were a small role in this movie, and a bunch of one shot guest appearances on various TV shows. No disrespect to Joshua Harto, but he is no match for Liam Neeson, or Heath Ledger in terms of star power. However, there are a lot of rumours going around right now about who will play the Riddler and a lot of them come from reputable sources. My money's on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, or even Robin Williams (who really wants to work with Nolan again).
  • Another thing on that note: Reese finds the blueprint, recognizes it as the Batmobile and gets the idea to use it for blackmail. Why didn't whoever worked on designing and constructing the Batmobile in the first place get the same idea? Keep in mind that it was originally not designed for Batman, but as a private venture for the military, so it was not like they got to handpick ones they knew would never talk.
    • Because there's no clear pictures of the Batmobile. Think about it: how many people have actually seen the Tumbler on TV? Clearly? The one time, in the first movie, it's seen from above in a news chopper pointing a camera almost directly down. That's not exactly a good profile shot. No one's seen it well enough to know what it looks like. End of story, and in fact true for most/all of Batman's gear.
    • Also as someone who has worked on fabricating metal (it stands to figure a lot of the work was done by separate divisions, and maybe even outside contractors, and it was probably all custom) after a while it all starts to run together in your mind, and that was just a machine shop at a small Halliburton outfit. I imagine a major R&D firm like Wayne Enterprises where you're building prototypes and moving rapidly from project to project (cause half that stuff never gets picked up after the prototype stage, that's the nature of R&D) it's even worse. Most of the Tumbler probably wasn't even built by hand anyway. Lucius designed it, so that's sewed up. It also would be a simple matter to say the Tumbler was stolen, sold into private hands or claim that your applied sciences division fell victim to corporate espionage. Who is to say the Tumbler Bruce test drives is the same one he turns into the Batmobile? He may have had another built to increase plausible deniability.
  • Why doesn't Reese blackmail Batman? Because he's one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world who also spends his night beating criminals to a pulp. Oh, and apparently, he now has abandoned his "no-killing" rule, according to the police, giving Reese even less of a reason for wanting to blackmail Batman now.
  • For that matter, why hasn't anyone else put two and two together? An accountant from Wayne Enterprises (with that young, athletically fit majority owner possessing a Dark and Troubled Past) says he can reveal the Batman's identity (ie, the superhero with all that high dollar equipment, including a friggin TANK). Granted, the evidence may not point * directly* to Bruce Wayne, but there's not a lot of other names on that list to choose from.
    • Reese didn't work for Wayne Enterprises, he worked for an independent firm who was called in to look at Lao's books for the merger (not an uncommon practice in corporate mergers). Note Fox's CMOA line: "Let me get this straight: You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands. And your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck." "Client" not "boss".
    • It's not shown as much in the movies for time's sake, but the comics go to great length to show how Bruce crafts his public persona: he goes to a lot of trouble to appear as one of the "idle rich". In real world terms...could you ever imagine Paris Hilton as Batman?
      • You just made me sneeze chocolate milk out my nose.
        • And made me remember Alicia Silverstone and nipplesuits. Thanks a lot.
      • Enough was shown in both movies to indicate that Bruce was a bit of a Rich Idiot. It's very likely that no one would have believed him. His only proof seemed to be the Tumbler and he gave those blue prints to Fox. What is he going to say now, "Oh, I saw blueprints for the Batmobile at Wayne Enterprises but they're gone now... but anyway, that rich jerk who burned down his own house is really the Batman."
  • Something just occurred to me: would Reese have told anyone at GCN beforehand what he knew, or offer up any evidence? Or do they just let anyone who claims to know Batman's secret identity on as a guest spot? Seems like there should be at least a few GCN executives who know or something...
    • In the middle of a city-wide crisis, no doubt with constant 24-hour coverage and the demands of the modern media machine to get something, anything on air to fill that slot and bring in those ratings, I suspect the primary concern on the minds of the executives involved was less "we'd better get some form of verification and proof this guy knows what he's talking about" and more "this guy can win us the ratings war? Why is he not on the air ten minutes ago?!"
  • Perhaps it's nothing more complicated than simple gratitude? Bruce Wayne did save Reese's life with plenty of risk of his own, even though he had every reason to be willing to let Reese die in order to protect his secret. That's a pretty noble thing to do, and you'd have to be a special kind of jerk to simply brush that aside and screw over the guy you owe your life to for nothing more than publicity or money. Under those circumstances, keeping schtum about the guy's night habits is about the least you can do in thanks. It could just be a subtle way of reinforcing the "not everyone's a humongous bastard" part of the film.
  • There's still enough plausible deniability. Reese never found concrete proof that Bruce Wayne is Batman, just that Batman secretly uses resources from Wayne Enterprises. For all he knows, Bruce is just really good friends with Batman, the same way Peter Parker pretends to be friends with Spider-Man to justify how he always gets great photos of him in action

• Similarly, how/why did Reese immediately jump to the suspicion that Bruce Wayne himself was the Batman? Wouldn't it have made more sense that Wayne was merely employing/funding him? Just curious what other tropers thought of this.
  • If someone is misappropriating Wayne technology to facilitate The Goddamn Batman one could probably count on one hand the people with the power to cover it up: Fox and Wayne. Fox is far too old to be Batman. Wayne, once you look at all the other evidence, is the only one who makes sense.
    • Also, Fox has a 'stache.
    • And is, you know, black.
    • Batman's black. Well, he has been since he painted over that yellow logo and lost the bright grey tights. (Oh, fine. Yes, but who's to say the lunatic who burned the mob money on the news isn't the only guy wearing makeup? In a funny costume? Wanted? By the police. You know what I mean.)
  • Well, certainly it was possible he was just funding the Bat, but in any case he had a link between Wayne and Batman. He might not have realized it was Wayne himself until Fox noted it.
  • that is how this troper reads it, Reese only said that batman gets his equipment from Wayne R&D, it was Fox who all but stated it was Bruce.

• It seems to me that the Joker's "which one will you save" scenario between Rachel and Dent relied on Batman being the only one who could make it there in time to rescue them. Doesn't Gotham's police department have any officers out on patrol that they could radio?
  • It was most likely set up so that entering one building would blow up the other.
  • After every cop in Gotham was up all day working extra security on the Mayor? They'd be running a skeleton shift.
    • It was probably the fact that the Joker knew only Batman would reach either one of them. After all, Batman got there in enough time to save Dent (mostly), but the police only got to Rachel's location with a few seconds to spare before the place went up. Joker is just Crazy Prepared enough to know how fast the Batmobile goes.
    • The Joker had been killing cops left, right, and center, and Dent wasn't very popular amongst the Gotham PD. If a call came over the radio to check out an address that the Joker had given, I wouldn't be in much of a hurry either.
  • Also, the police don't know what's in the buildings, or have any idea how long they've got, or even if the Joker is actually telling them the truth. In that kind of situation, they would presumably establish a perimeter, wait for SWAT to arrive, and storm the building; after all, for all they know, the Joker could have goons inside waiting to ambush them, rigged traps for the cops/Batman, etc.

• When Batman entered the Joker's building and discovered that the clown-henchmen and hostages were disguised as each other, he proceeded to beat up SWAT cops to prevent them from killing hostages. The original tripwire to save the hostages from sniper fire was probably necessary, but after that, he'd already proven he had Gordon's cell number, so why didn't he just call and tell him about the switch?
  • By the time Gordon answered and Batman explained the situation to him, cops may have started shooting civilians by mistake. Furthermore, Gordon's heard from Harvey by that point, so there's no guarantee he's still there and in easy contact with the other officers.
    • Time, time, time, time, time. SWAT trains to hit a location as simultaneously as possible, and in fact, this group of SWAT officers is rather horrendous when it comes to that, but oh well. Batman simply doesn't have the time to go through the chain of command. In fact, despite his efforts, he's still barely fast enough to take them all down and get them to rethink shooting the hostages. And he has to blow up part of the building to do it. By the time orders came through, a lot of people would've been dead.
      • Thing is, in at least some real-life hostage rescue teams, it is a standard procedure to disarm, secure and detain EVERYONE in a building (I think, flashbang everybody, tie their hands and push/march them out of the building, so you can work out later who actually is a hostage and who wasn't/isn't. That said, I'm not sure how this works when the hostages have guns taped to their hands, tape over their mouths and a mask on their faces (more flashbangs?). Normally used for the case when a hostage taker in civilian clothing drops/hides their weapon during a hostage rescue.
      • In this case though, considering the hijinks the Joker had gotten up to over the past few days/weeks, I reckon the SWAT Teams would be adopting a "shoot first, a lot" policy.
  • Original-question troper here. Ok, the above makes sense, but he still could have called Gordan and explained the situation while beating up on the cops. He's Batman, he can fight and talk at the same time. Telling Gordan or someone about the switcheroo instead of letting them figure it out on their own could have saved him a lot of time and effort.
    • It's already been pointed out that Batman was going flat-out just to save people the way he did.
  • Why the hell didn't the hostages just LIE DOWN with their guns under their bodies? Especially when Bats started beating up the henchmen, who in turn started to ignore the hostages they were presumably keeping from doing this and started battering Bats...
    • Because people in terrifying situations they have no experience in just don't think. People die in crash landing fires because they can't process the thought that they have to take off the seatbelt to escape, what chance have they got of creating and enacting such a complex line of reasoning? Half of military training is purely so that in stressful situations you can still think clearly.
      • Also, maybe they were told "If you move from this spot, we'll kill you" by the henchmen. But yes, the above chap/chappette was pretty much right: they were brown-pants terrified, so just seized up.

• When Batman drops Maroni off the building, we hear at least one of Maroni's legs break. And yet, somehow, just a couple days later he's walking with a cane when Two-Face offs him. Did I miss something? The film doesn't have a very concrete timeline, but it seems to me that it takes place over a week or so, tops -- and that's not enough time to heal a broken bone.
  • We also never see his legs. Assuming one leg is broken (reasonable), he might just have a walking cast on it, using the cane to keep pressure of it. Your timeline isn't off, but it's not unbelievable at all. People with broken legs, especially shin bones, can be walking the same day they broke it, although that's usually a bad idea.
  • The mistake may be in assuming the leg was broken at all. This troper has torn a calf muscle, dislocated his ankle and broken his foot and his leg. All of them made a similar sound to the one in the film. The broken leg was actually the quietest, and the dislocated ankle was the loudest. For one, that fall could have cause any of those injuries. For two, it could have broken a number of other bones or dislocated another joint. For three, it's not like it was a compound fracture if it was a broken bone. For four, he probably wanted to get his shit together and get out of the Joker's city ASAP and wasn't caring about the consequences of walking.

• How on EARTH was Joker supposed to have managed to rig an entire hospital to be completely demolished whilst it was still in use? That sort of total demolition would take very rigorous planning, and weeks of careful preparation by trained professionals who would have to drill large holes into numerous support beams etc in order to make the building actually fall down. He couldn't have done it unnoticed...
  • Well, you do make good points but professionals worry about nearby people getting hurt. The Joker, not so much...
  • He probably paid people to do it. In the opening scene, the hired goons are talking about how Joker is really good at planning things. So Joker makes off with the bank money and uses some of it to pay people to secretly rig explosives in the hospital, then has them killed later on.
  • Because he's the Goddamn Joker. The Joker's entireschtick in the movie is that he is a ridiculous genius when it comes to planning. Which is ironic, considering his speech to Harvey where he says he's an agent of chaos who goes entirely against the plan in the first place. But then, he is the Joker.
    • Not really ironic. That speech was clearly designed to push Dent over the edge. His speech is "all part of the plan."
    • Well, specifically, his schtick is knowing THE PLAN. You know, the one everyone ELSE has? He sees it, he predicts it easily, and he RUINS it. Because your pain and frustration amuse him. Life never goes according to plan. Like the speech. "If I say some soldiers are going to die, no one cares. But I threaten one little mayor... SUDDENLY EVERYONE LOOSES THEIR MINDS!!!" The Plan isn't threatening... even when the plan is HORRIFYING.
    • Plus, he's the JOKER. Your befuddlement at his hypocrisy is adorable.

• So when Dent confesses to being Batman, why does nobody ask for proof? Especially given that they've already established the presence of Batman impostors who had more proof than him.
  • Well it's not like he'd been convicted and sentenced, or even charged. I'm pretty sure a confession is evidence enough to make an arrest, and then you investigate (and interview the suspect) to find the evidence. Otherwise it would be like "Yep, that confession sounds pretty solid - let's arrest you now! Oh, you've gone..."
  • Besides which, isn't it pretty much established that Dent and the cops are working together to try and trap the Joker? I just assumed that it was all part of the bait.
  • There's also the courtroom scene where Dent casually slaps a loaded gun aside and knocks out his would-be assassin with a witty quip, which isn't exactly what you'd expect even from a crusading district attorney. And then the party scene, where Dent disappears and then Batman shows up and saves everybody, and then Batman disappears and Dent re-appears. Sure, we know that its because Bruce locked Dent in the closet, but they didn't. If they'd wanted to, the GCPD could probably have established enough probable cause based on circumstantial evidence to hold Harvey for questioning even if he hadn't confessed.
    • In fact, Joker himself mentioned that for a while, he thought Dent was Batman.

• Why does everyone assume that Maroni died in the car with the Driver. I seem to remember that Dent was in the car too, and he walked out without a scratch. So, yeah, seatbelt or not, he should have survived that too.
  • "Five people dead, two of them cops." Count the two Maroni goons, and you've only got one other person in the movie Dent could have killed. And if Maroni did survive the wreck, Dent probably finished him off.
  • Seatbelt. Rollover.

• When Joker first relates his little scar-story, holding one of the bosses at knifepoint, he finishes by slicing his face open offscreen. Guy falls down and is implied dead. To my mind, a Glasgow grin (well, only part of one) would hurt like a bitch and a half, but it wouldn't kill you . . . right? It happened in Pan's Labyrinth, IIRC, and the victim was uninjured enough not only to talk but to sew it back up himself.
  • It wouldn't kill you right out, but it'd certainly be horrifying/bleed a whole ton- and I presume that though the guy collapsed, the Joker finished him off as well rather than just leaving him with the half-cut-open face. And if you scream, it just tears your face open wider. Such fun.
  • And, of course, there's also the possibility that he drowned in his own blood.
  • You mentioned, it happens offscreen, so we don't see the nature of the cut. It'd be just like the Joker to act like he was about to inflict one injury and instead inflict another.
  • There's no actual proof that the Joker gave him a Glasgow grin; for all we know, he could've just stabbed the guy in the neck or did a variation on the magic trick...
  • It could be that he just passed out from the fact that he just got his face cut open. Then the Joker could deal with him at his leisure while he was unconscious.
  • For what I remember, Joker just shoot him after telling him "Why so serious?". Well, the gun is not in plain sight, but maybe he had new kind of "Flower Trick"....
  • Right after he cuts the guy's face open, Joker smashes the pool cue and holds his "tryouts." Even if the guy survived the face scar, he was probably bludgeoned to death by his former lieutenants.
    • No, the broken cue was so that those former lieutenants would stab each other. He was making them either kill each other, or all die.
    • I gathered that, but the winner could have just as easily been forced to finish off his old boss as part of the "application process."
    • Possibly, but that's probably just a bit too speculative.
    • Yes, it is. Think of it as the flipside of the Law of Conservation of Detail: What you see is what you get. The Joker killed him, and made his boys fight it out. No need to make it any more complicated than that.

• This one was the most annoying in the movie. The police have the Joker in custody - relieve him of all his inventory, are dying to find out who he is - and yet they leave his face-paint on? Surely the first thing they would do would be to remove it and photograph his face!
  • Its the middle of the night and thirty cops were just either killed or wounded in action. Procedure is going to suffer slightly in that kind of situation.
    • It bugs me, though, they didn't catch, yanno, THAT, on the other goon.
    • Catch it with what, an X-ray?
      • A hideous, fresh, operation scar should arouse some suspicion. Especially when the guy starts moaning and groaning about stomach pains. And yes, x-ray. Unless I am severely misunderstanding airport security machinery, which I hope cop shops have.
      • I could probably count on one hand the number of police departments that have X-ray machines on hand. CSI units would have X-ray machines, but not ordinary police precincts. They neither have the room, nor the technicians, nor the need, nor the money to house one.
    • And unless it's standard procedure to strip rounded up goons, they were never going to see the scar in the first place.
      • Yep, all of these guys were just in holding. They weren't formerly charged yet.
  • They probably wouldn't be able to identify him even if they saw his face.

• If Batman doesn't use guns, what are on the front of his bike/tank? (not the wire harpoons, the things blowing cars up)
  • No one said Batman didn't use guns. They said Batman didn't kill.
  • Sub-question: Who is in the cars he blows up? We see a couple kids in the backseat watching him, so how does Batman know he's destroying an unoccupied car, especially at the speeds he's going?
    • Those cars are parked off to the side, while the kids are in a car that's in traffic on the road. Of course, this doesn't necessarily preclude someone from being in one of the cars he blew up, but presumably he was at least looking for that.
    • Actually, although it's never stated outright, Batman doesn't use guns. This is what's behind his dismantling of the clowns shotgun (instead of salvage), and use of batarangs instead of guns. It's also how Scarecrow is able to tell the fake Batmen are just that: his line "That's not him." is delivered immediately when fake batman raises his gun. That he sticks to this rule in every other instance makes the Tumbler-guns that much more irritating.
    • He says "That's not him" in response to the fact that there's more than one "Batman," the relative lack of professionalism of the attack, and the clear use of lethal force; when the Tumbler arrives his reaction is "That's more like it." And when the Tumbler starts firing its guns, what's his reaction? He sure as hell doesn't say "Oh, wait, that's a gun. This isn't Batman after all." Its quite clear that the presence of multiple attackers who wish to use lethal force and the lack of high-tech gadgetry is what tips the Scarecrow off that these guys aren't the real Batman, not the mere fact that they're using guns.
  • Its called "intimidation." See the screen on the Tumbler. There's not a whole lot you can do with a man-portable firearm that doesn't involve killing people, but a vehicle-mounted weapons system programmed to only direct fire at the environment is another instance entirely. Besides, how is he supposed to take down other vehicles? Punching them?
    • The only thing the Tumbler and Bat-cycle guns are used for is property destruction. They're never used against human targets.

• Not so much a complaint about the movie, but a complaint about reviewers of the movie. Why did so many reviewers of the movie not get that when Joker told his "Did I ever tell you how I got these scars" he was making it up? So many of the reviews I've read (hell, even Roger Ebert!) seem to think that those stories (or even "Story" as Ebert seemed to have only caught the "abusive dad" story) are actually part of Joker's past!
  • Reviewers often base their review on one press screening. They are human, they're quite capable of missing details that are readily apparent on a second viewing. The scar stories take up less than thirty seconds in each case.
  • Ebert's position actually has some merit, given that there is a separate occasion where the Joker says "You remind me of my father. And I hated my father." So his story about his dad giving him the scars may not be true, but the abusive childhood probably is. Still, it would be a mistake to boil the Joker down to a Freudian excuse.

• Why the hell was the Scarecrow treated like such a pathetic throwaway villain, getting arrested at the start of the movie? This version of Professor Crane is pretty limp-he gets nailed right off the bat, so to speak, and he doesn't even have a costume. He's just a glorified drug dealer who wears a burlap sack on his head. Where's the straw hat? Where are the ragged clothes? Where's the...well, the Scarecrow?
  • Let's just say that all hell given to him by Batman in the first movie had got him. Or maybe he just think that getting arrested is fine; he could get out in fashionable way. He's not that crazy, after all.
  • Consider that without Ra's Al Ghul and the Shadow league he has no access to the blue flowers that are the basis of his fear-gas, and that even he mentioned in Batman Begins that the mask itself isn't that scary without it, and that his license to practice was presumably revoked hard after his part in the events of BB became common knowledge, and that he's probably a wanted fugitive, becoming a drug-dealer doesn't seem tremendously far-fetched.
  • It's All There in the Manual. In the DVD extras, there are several episodes of the Gotham News (with Mike Engel). One of the stories involves a teen that took fear toxin laced ecstasy. It's speculated that the Scarecrow is in fact Not Quite Dead after the Narrows disaster and has linked up with drug dealers.
  • The real reason, of course, is that the actor wasn't interested in coming back for a major role, and Nolan presumably decided that it was better to have him be arrested than to just ignore it entirely.
  • I just figured he was continuing his sadistic fear-drug experiments, and using the Gotham drug market to both finance his work and to sucker unwitting test subjects into trying out his new formulas. The dealers complained at the beginning that his drugs have horrific effects on people, and that the only reason they're working with him is because because Batman's driven away their other sources.

• Joker. Wears. Face-paint. Maybe the Glasgow grin works, it's perfectly acceptable when used as a reason for his... own unique way to put smiles on those serious faces, as well as the "how I got these scars" stories, but the facepaint? A more proper Joker would have ghastly purple scars and eternally pale skin and bruised lips, and would have used pink facepaint for the scene with the 21-gun assassination. Not to mention that this completely invalidates the origin of Joker Gas.
  • The face-paint works better in this case than any origin story about how his face got messed up. The reason why? Because it not only creates the idea that the Joker is just some ordinary guy, but implies that the Joker looks like he does - and by extension acts like he does - because he chose to and believes in the psychotic ideals that he preaches. There's no tragic reason for him becoming the Joker, nor is there any cause that can be readily attributed to what made him who he is. He hasn't been twisted by an accident or deformed by some terrible event in his past. He simply is, and the implication that he chose to become this irredeemable, monstrous lunatic makes the Joker a thousand times more terrifying than any other Joker incarnation previously.
  • Also, Nolan seems to be going so realism. There is face paint in the real world. There are not vats of toxin sitting around for someone to fall into or whatever.
  • Agreed with the above, and it doesn't matter that it invalidates the Joker Venom's origin, because this Joker doesn't need it. It's likely Nolan didn't want to repeat the 'creepy gas' element too much, anyway.

• When Batman takes down Lau in Hong Kong, he cuts the power to the building. However, the glass fish tank is still clearly lit. Why? If he cut the power, why is the fish tank clearly lit
  • Battery back up?
  • The fish tank probably was locally powered. It looked like the cell-phone EMP device simply cut power from the ground up; anything powered by batteries or emergency power past the lower levels would have worked just fine.
    • Also, considering that there was an entire room in the building that still had power and numerous lights were also still on, the question really shouldn't be why the fish tank is still lit.
      • Guys, Occam's razor. It's obviously full of electric eels.
        • This would be why the hovercraft is fine, yes?

• Did it bug anyone else that there was a hefty white guy and a young Hispanic woman in Gordon's special unit, and they didn't turn out to be Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya? Granted, since the big guy is killed by the Joker and the woman was guilty of accessory to murder, so I guess it's a good thing it wasn't them.
  • Can't remember where I read it, but originally they really were Bullock and Montoya, apparently. But when it became clear they had to be informants for the mob, which neither of those characters are, it was decided their names would be changed (to Weurtz - who was actually killed by Two-Face, IIRC - and Ramirez) rather than derailing them and upsetting the fans. Note that some of them got upset anyway because they thought those two really were Bullock and Montoya.
  • I think Bullock is actually in the movie, for a split second... this troper saw someone that looked remarkably like him as depicted in Batman: The Animated Series at that last scene where Gordon destroys the bat signal. He's one of the cops in the crowd that you see for literally a second, and he appears to be grinning, which would certainly fit his character. I could be wrong though.
• Do you mean the guy at 1:37 in this video?

• It doesn't seem like a spoiler but Harvey's crazy-ass burnt face. And the fact his left eyeball doesn't have an eyelid. Come on, people.
  • What about it?
    • Biologically, it's IMPOSSIBLE. Just cannot be. The whole thing would collapse in about twelve minutes.
    • Yeah, uh, considering the movie's already thrown out laws of conservation of momentum (Batpod) I think some biological mucking-about is perfectly fine.
      • ???? A show being silly and dumb in one aspect does not nuetralize the 'bugginess' of another aspect for me.
    • If you don't mind drifting into the less realistic, the cans surrounding Harvey might have been filled with a version of the Joker toxin, this time a flammable sealant. After burning away part of Harvey's face, it froze it in the current position, keeping the eye in place. As long as you didn't set the person on fire first, it could conceivable be used to permanently set a person's face in a smiling position. For bonus upsetting-Batman points, the Joker's plan would cause whoever Batman wanted to save to have been found not only burnt, but frozen in a position showing (s)he knew Batman failed to save them.
  • I found it more annoying that Two-Face is perfectly capable of forming "m", and "p" sounds when half his lips are missing and booze visibly dribbles through the bottom of his mouth. "M" I might be able to let slide, but for "P", you need an air tight chamber to create the sound. The lack of speech-impediment for Two-Face in general has bothered me, but in his other incarnations he always still had lips, albiet deformed ones, and a full inner-mouth. As far as the eyeball goes, I can see it staying in (although with difficulty), but not how it stays lubricated enough to not be a shriveled husk, much less useable and moving.
  • Ah, but isn't there a story about how Nolan wanted quite realistic burns on Two-Face (and possibly realistic post-burn pronunciation although that could easily become narmy or unwittingly comical) but that they freaked out test audiences too much, or that the potential for freak-out was deemed to high..? Executive Meddling and/or Real Life Writes the Plot I suppose.
    • The non-dryed-up eye is actually an Aluminium Christmas Tree, Check out this fellow here: Chase No-Face, a cat who was hit by a car and disfigured, losing his nose and eyelids in the process. He's all healed now, and without the eyelids his owner merely gives him eyedrops twice a day to keep them moist. That's probably what Harvey and the doctors at the hospital were doing and he simply took the bottle with him when he left the place.

• How come Batman adamantly states that he will never kill, a point which is made in both movies more than once, always seeming to imply that no matter what, he will stick to it...and then at the end of The Dark Knight...he goes and kills Two Face? I mean yes, of all reasons to kill someone, it was as noble as you could get, trying to save Gordon's son, and yes, you can argue that in the heat of the moment, he may not have been thinking straight, but it still comes down to the fact that he killed a man and apparently doesn't seem to mind that much. He's more concerned about preserving Harvey's reputation than he is about the fact that ultimately, the Joker was right. He did end up brekaing his one rule.
  • It was accidental. You think he wanted to kill Two-Face? He tackled him and they fell off the edge.
  • Except for the fact that The coin lands face up. Fate chose Life. Two-Face isn't dead--Harvey may be, based on the memorial service, but Two-Face lived.]]
  • That coin toss was for Gordon's son. Two-Face had already tossed the coin for himself.
  • Which landed on heads.
    • This is the movie you choose to debate Batman's ethics? In the Keaton one, he literally drops a bomb at the feet of many mooks, vaporizing them quite horrifically.
    • But in the Burton movies, Batman's "no killing" code was never stressed. It was given a lot of attention in the Nolan films.
  • I think gravity has more say in whether Harvey lives or dies than that coin. The fact that his landed on heads only means that he wouldn't shoot himself. Either way, Batman didn't do this on purpose. I think he knows it's impossible that he'll get out of his crusade on crime without a few deaths. This was one of those instances where he just couldn't do anything about it. I think his code was to always try his hardest to come out with everyone's lives intact, but understands that sometimes things just happen.
    • Also, Batman's rule is that he won't murder anyone. Murder denotes intent. Batman probably tried to save Harvey, and ironically it may be Harvey's gunshot wound that stopped Batman from saving him. An injury to a person's core saps a great deal of upper body strength. Note that he didn't have the strength to hold himself up on that ledge for long, much less his weight and Harvey's.
      • Actually, his rule is that he does not kill anyone. Whether or not it was murder isn't what inspires Batman's rule. Were that the case, he could be as reckless as he wanted (far moreso than he is in the film) and justify any collateral death as an accident.
  • This troper sees the breaking of this rule is the whole point: each of the three main protagonists is shown to have played their A game and lost: Gordon trusted crooked cops and it came back to bite him, Dent was pushed so far that he broke and went somewhat ax-crazy, Batman had to kill a dude and "break his only rule". The Joker wins.

• In the real world, Joker's plans would have washed up when that mob boss put the bounty on his head. Look at the possible sernareo: Joker has a knife; you have a gun. Do you A) Bust a cap in his ass and take the 500 grand, or B) Listen to him ramble about an overly complicated plan that would never work in real life.
  • What on earth makes you think that would be the scenario? He's a psycho, not an idiot. He's fine with guns when the situation demands them, he still has that money he stole from the bank, he's quick as a snake, he's a hell of an improviser, he's really damned smart, he lies like a champion, he's got a bunch of minions who don't seem to care about money, and absolutely no rules, whatsoever. There's probably a string of hopeful assassins who wound up dead or maimed or strapped to bombs or smiling ear-to-ear, literally. Or all of them at once.
  • The very first thing the Joker did after getting the bounty placed on his head was kill the man placing the bounty on his head. Also, the Joker had a knife to Gamble's mouth, and there was no indication Gamble was armed. And how would Gamble collect the very bounty he placed on the Joker anyway?
    • Gambol, people, Gambol. G-A-M-B-O-L. Gambol. It Just Bugs Me.
      • Same here, but not for the same reason. "Gambol" is a synonym for 'traipse, dance, tiptoe through the tulips'. I rather prefer at least the implication he's named after something you do at a card game than something you do listening to a Tiny Tim record.
    • Gambol was the guy who posted the bounty, not the guy who would collect it. He'd probably just write the collectors and IOU or something, or give it to them in cash. As for him not being armed, he had two bodyguards, and the Joker had a pretty nifty plan for getting at Gambol. Gambol was probably overconfident, and didn't want a gun on his belt messing up his billiards game.

• A thing that bugs me is how the pencil is stuck into the table for his "magic trick". Wouldn't the tip of the pencil break?
  • What, you never got bored in class and stabbed a pencil into the woodwork? That said, he couldn't be sure he'd have a suitable table. If I was the Joker, I'd have brought along a pencil with a steel lead. It doesn't need to be a pencil for the trick to work, it just needs to look like a pencil.
  • I haven't seen that scene in a while, but I thought he set the pencil on the eraser side and drove the guy's face down onto the pointy end.
    • Nope. He definitely smashes the pencil into the table pointy side down. That being said, it seems likely that the pencil was indeed not a pencil but something of the Joker's evil mind. Or it was a regular pencil, and Joker's simply badass enough to kill someone with the soft end of a pencil...rushing up to meet them.
    • Yeah, it was the soft end of a pencil. But you know what's softer than a rubber eraser? Your eyes.

• This has bugged me since I first saw the film. At the beginning the alarm guy says "Funny, it wasn't trying to dial out to 911 it was trying to reach a private number." I presumed that this was an allusion to the bank's silent alarm trying to reach Batman. But why would Batman protect a suspected mob bank? Especially in view of the fact that (as has been noted in previous discussions) robberies of mob banks can often be clandestine transfers of money.
  • ...Or, you know, they could be calling for other mobsters to come protect them.
    • Exactly. I just assumed it was meant to make you think it was calling for Batman, but then when you realise it's a mob bank -- they're calling the mob.
    • When was it ever implied it was calling Batman? It was clear from the start that it was a mob bank, that one teller with the shotgun practically spells it out.
    • But at the point the alarm guy made that statement, there was no indication that it was a mob bank. This troper certainly thought that it was a call to Batman the first time he saw the film, but in retrospect it becomes clear that it was a call to mob protectors.
    • And the bank got Batman's number...how? This troper knew from the moment the private number was mentioned it was calling out to the mafia.
    • Doesn't one of the robbers mention that it's a mob bank right as they're starting the job?
    • No - The scene with the electrified vault (and the "mob bank" explanation) comes after the scene with the private alarm.

• The fact I am apparrently the only one who thinks Jack Nicholson's Joker, while not as well-acted, I concede, is more like, well, The Joker than Heath Ledger's. Ledger's performance, if not his appearance, could be any psychopath. But Jack, oh, Jack, THAT was classic Joker. The Joker I know and wanted to see. The kind who didn't kill because of some Nietsche-ish thing about chaos, but because he found it funny.
  • But Dark Knight's Joker does find it funny. He just expanded his modus operandi from simple killing to causing as much horror, chaos and violence as he can. That's why he's so terrifying; killing people is a bad thing to do, but it's so much worse to warp and twist and break and hurt people until they're just like him. Besides, Jack Nicholson's Joker had a reason for doing what he did; he was rejected, betrayed, burned and tried to get revenge on the whole world. This Joker has no reason whatsoever beyond it being fun, and he mocks the very idea that he has any other.
    • Napier was indeed betrayed, but he was by no means out for "revenge on the whole world". Jack was always insane -- getting dropped into a vat of chemicals just finally provided him as a way to vent all that psychosis.
  • If you actually believe the Joker's spiel about doing what he does because of Nietsche-ish chaos, you're way too gullible. I mean, do you honestly believe what the Joker is saying when he's clearly manipulating someone? The Joker doesn't believe in or care about chaos for its own end: he wants to hurt people, kill people, and ruin people.
    • No, the Joker actually does probably believe the Nietsche-ish chaos stuff. His actions in the film probe this. (Why blow up a hospital? He could have used any building with lots of people in it, and not have warned them ahead of time.) But still, he still is in it for laughs as well, he just sees chaos as the best way to live.
      • He blew up a hospital so that everyone would be too busy evacuating instead of noticing him giving his chaos speech to Dent. Also if Dent had not fallen for it and killed the Joker instead, the explosion would have hidden the Joker's death. For a man without a plan, he certainly covers all his bases.
        • He is not a man without a plan: he is a man whose plans are indiscernable and constantly shifting.
    • Everyone going after Reese was just a sideshow. He wanted freedom to mess with Dent's brain, because messing with Dent's brain would cause more chaos. That's all he wants, not a new order built up from chaos. Sure, the people he hurts end up changed, but only to the point where they go out and cause more hurt. Frankly, the guy's not Nietzschian so much as a living embodiment of corruption. He urges people to give in to their worst, most selfish instincts. He is, in fact, a Card-Carrying Villain who thinks Evil Is Cool and his philosophy is only appealing in the way that evil so often is. And why is he like that? Because he thinks it's hilarious - or that might as well be the reason, since it's the only explanation he'll ever offer and we'll ever get.
  • Related to the comparison of Heath Ledgers Joker versus Jack Nicholsons, what just bugs me about that is every time I express enything remotely similiar to liking Jack over Heath people automaticly dismisses me as a nostalgic luddite. Never mind that their interpretations of the character are really different, and the movies in general are very different, I'm still supposed to like the new one more.
    • They are two versions of the same character; the comparison is inevitable. And, well...forgive me if I suggest that it might be because Nicholson did it for a famously huge pile of money, and more or less plays Crazy Jack Nicholson, whereas Ledger put an insane (appropriately...) amount of effort into his portrayal of the character, which shows; you really can't see him in there. Nicholson's take is probably more fun, and I can't fault the guy for wanting his cut, but I personally prefer Ledger because he was so fantastically horrible. It comes down to what you want out of your Batman movies and actors, I think.
  • I don't get it when people say that. "Jack's was more like the actual Joker than Heath's." Based on what metric, exactly? The Joker has gone through DOZENS of iterations and characterizations, going all the way through the spectrum from sociopathic killer (how he started out in the original comics) to a completely harmless prankster comedian who liked to play minor tricks on people, to a mook level criminal, to the brilliant mastermind of an entire criminal organization. But overall, his characterization is typically in the middle. He's usually a brilliant mastermind and sociopathic killer, AND has an odd sense of humor and crazy jokes. Batman: The Animated Series is a good example of the typical joker...he can be funny and silly one moment, but completely terrifying and serious the moment you piss him off.
    • Precisely, look at the Joker's original Golden Age appearance. The criminal activities he does could be said to be kinda eccentric, but it's not like he ran around throwing explosive whoopee cushions and giggling like a 5 year old. He didn't even make any jokes nor did he laugh all that much.
  • Really, it just depends on what version of Joker you like more. Nicholson draws from much the same sources that Batman: The Animated Series does, while Ledger draws from The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, and the like. Personally, I prefer Ledger's performance, if only because he's more successful at submerging himself in the role; at times, Nicholson seems to be playing less The Joker and more Jack Nicholson-as-a-supervillain, while Ledger's turn as The Joker is utterly unlike anything we've ever seen from him before, either in the movies or in real life.

• Why do Gotham's mobsters keep their money as a vast pile of cash? Have they never heard of Swiss Bank accounts?
  • Physical cash is harder to trace. Electronic transfers leave electronic paper trails; they don't have to worry about that with cash stored inside their own banks. Plus, electronic accounts can be frozen. Physical cash, not so much.
  • Plus that as far as this troper figured out, just the Joker requested his portion in cash. It's no way necessary that all of the rest was in the same form.

• At the end of the movie, one of Batman's main justifications for taking the fall for Dent's crimes is that if it was revealed that Dent murdered people, all of the criminals that he put away would be let go. Umm...why? Does No Ontological Inertia apply to the criminal justice system too now? Let's be thankful it doesn't work this way in real life.
  • Much earlier in the movie, after the courtroom scene where hundreds of mobsters were charged at once, the mayor points out that what Dent did was a "farce" that would never fly normally, and could only be sustained because the people and the courts liked him, and Judge Scorillo was on Harvey's side. With Scorillo dead, the only thing keeping the entire absurd case from being thrown out was Harvey's reputation and popularity, which would be ruined if everyone learned he was a psychotic murderer.
    • Based on countless hours of Law and Order, if a DA or policeman shows any kind of corruption, they have to review all his convictions. Defense attorneys seem to be really good at getting their clients off the hook in these situations.
  • This was really the only thing in the movie that bugged this troper. Uh oh. The attorney killed three or four people. Well, I guess we better release those 500 criminals he put away, despite the fact that they have already been convicted. It doesn't make sense. The Judge liking Dent doesn't fly either, because Dent talks about this type of case as being a real thing. Not just something he thought would be funny and it turns out the Judge would too. So if it is found out that Dent is a criminal, then there is no reason that the justice system would just reverse itself and have all the criminals out on the streets.
    • I don't think they were convicted yet. As I recall it, Dent didn't even imagine that they would be convicted, he just wanted to charge them all so that the entire mob would be off the streets for a few months and the commissioner and mayor could do some real good in the interim. Then Joker appeared. As for the rest of your comment, Dent didn't just kill a few people, he murdered the head of the very crime syndicate he was in the middle of prosecuting. At very least, the District Attorney murdering your co-defendant is more than enough grounds to get your case dismissed for malicious prosecution.

• Why didn't the guy just spit the grenade out and make a run (stumble) for it the moment the bus door closed? He could see that the pin was attached to the bumper.
  • Because the grenade was wedged in his mouth. He couldn't spit it out.
  • Also, he was lying on the floor. He wouldn't have time to get it un-wedged, get up, and run out of the blast radius before the bus pulled out and it went off. Basically, the only way you survive an encounter with the Joker is if he decides to let you survive. Which, lucky for that guy, he did.

• Why didn't anyone who is faced with their kid's and love's death blow up the boat? I'm not advocating mass murder, or saying that 300 lives don't matter, but eventually, paternal instinct takes over.
  • Because no one wanted to get their hands dirty. No one wanted to have hundreds of deaths on their consience - especially when they didn't know if their opposite numbers were going to kill them. No one wanted to be a murderer. Didn't the movie make that quite explicitly clear?
    • Yeah, that was the entire point of the scene. Paternal instinct or no, people generally do not want to kill others. For a normal person, killing someone is extremely difficult to bring yourself to do. There's a reason that a huge part of military training is based around changing that mindset, after all. There's a huge difference between, say, fighting off a robber to save your kid, and killing 300 people in cold blood, after having to think about it.
  • When you're in a large crowd and a decision must be made, then statistically you are far less likely to act than if you had been the only one there. Say someone is attacked - people will stand around for several minutes waiting to see if others jump in. Someone has a heart attack? Don't count on someone calling 911 right off the bat. The choice is either to die or kill 300 other people? Let someone else make it!
    • Exactly. It's called the bystander effect - even when everybody around realizes Something Must Be Done for a perfectly good reason, the more people are around, the more each individual figures somebody else is going to do it, and thus ironically the less Something gets Done. In that particular case, on top of that basic psych fact, there's the added notion that you're going to be the one who does a monstrous thing in front of your entire family and 300 other people (including news crews). All judging you for it and looking down on you, even if that's what they wanted. Especially if that's what they wanted : better hate you than themselves. Dunno about you, but I'd rather get blown up.

• I'm not that familiar with Batman canon, but how did Alfred go from hunting crazed jewel thieves in Burma to being a butler? It sounds a bit like someone with a Ph.D. driving a taxi.
  • Depending on which origin is canon at the moment, Alfred's been everything from a British Army battlefield medic to former MI 5. It's widely accepted the Alfred is a Retired Badass.
  • Clearly, you haven't had much experience with taxi drivers.
    • Just affirming the truth of this line: I took a taxi yesterday, and it turns out that the taxi driver used to be a sniper in the Red Army. He told me a few stories.
    • Also, it seems that every hot dog stand in Toronto is run by someone who had a Ph.D. in their home country.
  • What does a soldier (or possibly a mercenary) do when he gets too old or too sensible to get shot at for a living? Well, a soldier becoming a valet is almost an old trope in its own right.
    • That seals it. Alfred is a mega-badass.
  • I remember Michael Caine talking about how he had invented a backstory for this. IIRC, Alfred was in the armed forces of some kind, and he was injured and spent a lot of time on base, where he learned to cook (having nothing better to do). At that time, Thomas Wayne was looking to hire a butler, and wanted a tough guy for the job, so he was looking around this army camp, and he met Alfred.
  • It could just be that Thomas Wayne, a man who believed in doing the right thing, in his early days had rubbed a few people in the wrong way. Still continuing his medical practice, he found that occasionally, he needed a bit of protection from the occasional thug sent to 'teach him a lesson'. Simple solution? Hire a bodyguard. But what do you tell your patients of the fellow constantly at your elbow, watching attentively, keeping track of everything, all the time? "Oh him? He's my butler."
    • I gotta say I love the idea of Alfred being the Wayne's bodyguard.

• The Joker is ridiculously good at planning, to the point that he has a contingency established for even impossible eventualities (like Batman lifting a fingerprint off of a shattered bullet). He's smarter than everyone else in the movie, and he "wins" almost every encounter he's involved in (largely because he's either so well-prepared or such an amazing improviser that he can construct a Xanatos Gambit out of pretty much anything that happens). He constructs elaborate death-trap games, from which it is almost impossible for his victims to extricate themselves. And all through the movie he leaves a trail of clues (in the form of video cassettes, PA announcements, fake name tags, playing cards, or forged newspaper articles) that alert the police to his next move before he makes it. Isn't this incarnation of The Joker basically just The Riddler with a Glasgow smile and a clown suit? His death traps are social instead of mechanical, and his clues tend to damn as often as they assist, but the modus operandi is very similar. Not that I'm complaining; but this could make it tricky or redundant if Nolan ever tries to incorporate the actual Riddler into his mythos.
  • Exactly what this troper thought. While it is in amazing incarnation of the Joker, he loses the whole Chemical and mechanical aspect of the Joker's comic personality (Well, except for All-Star Batman Joker), has no special gadgets. He is literally, a regular guy in a clown outfit. Heck, I hate this argument, but the Joker tells one joke, and has maybe, oh, about as many ironic lines as every other actor, and considerably less then Fox. This is the greatest Joker I have ever seen: The Riddler as Batman's greatest enemy.
  • Just to correct a misconception: the Joker did not plan for Batman lifting a fingerprint from a bullet. The camera was there to mislead the snipers; it's pure cinematically efficient coincidence that Batman was right next to it when it went off. Anyway. I think that the Joker and the Riddler are pretty similar characters from the get-go, really. The Joker broadcast his crimes before he committed them quite often, right from his first appearance up to the Tim Burton movie and the animated series. The difference is in their approaches and their motivations; the Riddler wants to prove he's better, the Joker wants to screw with people/Batman. The Riddler will give you a way out; the Joker will only let you choose how to completely screw yourself over. Which is why I'm not particularly thrilled at the thought of the Riddler being the next villain.
    • I have to agree that I'm not thrilled with the notion of the Riddler being the next villain either, because of another difference between the Joker and Riddler: The Joker, in this movie and the comics, makes his threats very personal for Batman. In the movie, he takes away (albeit unknowingly) just about everything Bruce is fighting for. How can the Riddler top that? He'd have to deduce that Bruce Wayne is Batman and/or kill Alfred. And if that becomes the plot of the movie, I'm holding Gotham randsom until Mr. Nolan gives me a check and a writer credit.
    • Ledger's Joker does seem to have Riddler level planning skills, but there's an important distinction to note between the two characters - the Riddler doesn't lie. He hides the truth and disguises it, but he is always compelled to offer it, as well. You ask him a question and he can't not give you an answer. IIRC, there was a comic story where he tried to give up his riddles because they kept getting him caught, but he couldn't shake the compulsion. Given how big of a cornerstone flat-out lying is to the Dark Knight Joker, I think it seperates them pretty handily. But yeah, you probably can't follow-up that version of the Joker with the Riddler, since basically the only advantage the Riddler has over the Joker is his ability to patiently construct very long-term and intricate plans. Jokers who exhibit that ability are much more dangerous, because they manage to marry that it with unpredictability, which Riddler never can.

• I cannot for the life of me understand how Harvey Dent got out of the hospital after he and The Joker had their little chat. As soon as The Joker walks out, he starts to detonate his bombs whilst Harvey lies in his bed and can barely move. How is it that Harvey is not really really dead?
  • Harvey could move fine. The reason he was stuck in bed was that he was tied down. Presumably after their little talk, the Joker undid his restraints. EDIT: Just rewatched; Joker undoes the restraints while he's talking with Dent.
  • There was an implied amount of time that passed between the point where Harvey did his coin flip and the Joker walked out. It should have been obvious that the gap between those two scenes were not continious.

• I'm always kind of bewildered by that scene with the flunky who has an exposive sewn inside him. I'm sorry but it just seemed a little ridiculous to me that the guy was still walking around for, what, maybe an hour? I'm no doctor but it seems like it would take one heck of a surgeon to keep the guy alive that long after being cut open like that (did you see the size of the scars and the protusion?). At first I didn't think about it because I just assumed the Joker had a surgeon do it for him, but the way the guy talks about it I'm pretty sure the Joker did it himself. I know he cuts people up, but there's a big difference between cutting people up for torture or killing and actually operating on them. It bugs me more every time I watch the movie.
  • Humans are surprisingly durable creatures. As long as no major veins or organs were cut, and lots of anesthesia was applied, it'd be quite possible to walk around for hours, albeit in a rather incoherent state. And there's no direct indication that the Joker did it himself, just that he had it done, and that he convinced the guy to go through with it.

• Not sure if this has been brought up yet (or if this should be at the top of the page), but how, exactly, does the Joker manage to get so many loyal henchmen? Sure, some of them, like the one Dent tried to interrogate, are schizophrenic nuts, but really, it's pretty hard to find that many people out there who are simultaneously nutty enough to follow a loon like the Joker and not realise that it's probably a one-way ticket to getting knifed up the minute you outlive your usefulness, yet rational enough to carry out his often madly complex plots. Furthermore, some of his henchmen - like those kids who help him kill Gambol near the beginning - look pretty sane to me. What could the Joker possibly offer them? How could they miss the fact that he's clearly Axe Crazy? And later on, he manages to convince the Chechen's entire gang to turn against Chechen and start working for him at the drop of a hat. Once again, how?
  • I always assumed that at least some of those thugs were supplied by his clients after the Joker took the job of finding Lau.
  • Money and fear, a potent combination. There's a new player in town, and he pays well. So you go work for him -- and it's only once you've joined his crew that you realise he's crazier than a smashed windshield and about as healthy to be around as Mary Mallon.
    The obvious thing to do then is quit, right? But then one of your colleagues starts talking about getting out with his share, and that's when the Joker takes him to one side and gives him his... severance package.
    • I think the fear worked a bigger factor than the money did. Not at first, probably, but once word got around that there was someone pulled the bank caper, a few more people joined his shindig. After he faced the mafia during their meeting, insulted them, came out alive, and then took out the head of one of the warring gangs, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of mobsters thought they'd rather join the Devil be on the side that fights him. And once he pulled off his jail gambit, which involved fooling Batman himself, I wouldn't be surprised if every remaining unjailed thug in Gotham flocked to him, knowing that he was their greatest leader against the Dark Knight. Rats clinging to the floating piece of wreckage, you know?
  • Also keep in mind that there are still a lot of uncaptured escapees from Arkham, as mentioned near the beginning of the film (or possibly the end of Batman Begins, in any case.) Batman mentions that the police officer wearing the Rachel Dawes nametag is a paranoid schitzophrenic, and some of the captured lackeys, including the lackey with the bomb in his stomach are also clearly insane.
    • Why so serious ? http://www.whysoserious.com/
    • All I can say is, those are some pretty disciplined, obedient psychos.
      • At least with the big guy in the jail cell, it seemed Joker played on his psychosis and fed him some mumbo-jumbo about "putting bright lights" inside of him.
      • Yup, Joker is remarkably good at preying on people's own particular psychology in order to get them to do what he wants. His conversation with Harvey should have aptly demonstrated that. Once he figures out how your brain ticks, he tailors his manipulations accordingly, which is part of what makes him so terrifying. You literally have no way of knowing if anything he says is a lie to convince you to do what he wants, or not. This applies to crazy people as well as sane ones. Hell, for all we know, that whole conversation with Batman at the end was actually a gambit on his part to make sure that Batman never killed him, rather than an attempt to goad him into doing just that. When it's all tolled up at the end of the film, Batman's a wanted fugitive, the white knight of Gotham is dead, and the whole city is terrified of him - and there are about ten other ways his plan could have worked out to his favor even if things had gone differently.

• Probably really obvious (or already asked), but how did the Joker get into the mob meeting without anybody finding all the explosives inside his coat? The first shot of the scene is explicitly of The Chechen walking through a metal detector and getting inspected by the guards.
  • Its implied that the Joker has guys in the Gotham Mob in his pocket, considering how easily he slipped out of the meeting. Its pretty obvious he wasn't frisked on the way in, considering how he shows up out of nowhere and everyone looks surprised, and the fact that he knew about the meeting shows he has someone in the mob in his pocket.
  • Watch Joker closely as he walks in. You hear the guard yell in pain and fall against the door, and then the Joker steps over his unconscious/dead body.
    • No, that's the sound Gordon made when he kicked a pile of cash in frustration.
    • No, it's not, dammit, because the Joker doesn't turn up until about a third of the way through the scene. This, from memory, is the sequence: Maroni enters, getting searched by a door guard with a handheld metal detector (or something). The mobsters begin their meeting, with Lau speaking to them on the television. They react to Lau's plan with varying levels of scepticism/annoyance. They then begin discussing the issue of Batman and how they're going to protect their cash, whereupon the Joker smacks the aforementioned door guard (that is when you hear the guy yell and fall), steps over his body, then walks into the meeting, fake-laughing. He prevents them shooting him in that instant with sheer audacity and later his coat o' grenades; he wasn't inspected or searched. The mobsters refuse his deal, so he shrugs and vanishes, and the scene ends. Basically, the Joker entered and escaped, unharmed, through the front door, with sheer charisma and audacity combined with careful planning and preparation - and, interestingly, didn't achieve his stated goal right then. He's later proven capable of improvising, but it does add to the "One man, some clown, he's nothing, he's nobody," assumption that dogs him during the movie's first act.
  • Simple: the Joker doesn't walk through the main door, the one with the metal detector. He uses a side door. Where's that kitchen supposed to be, anyway?
  • I was actually thinking about this for a minute too, and it's not much out of character...What if Joker was waiting there for quite some time? Few hours before they started setting up, he may have been hiding in a cabinet or something else. Maybe even a full day.

• How does The Joker fire that RPG from inside the truck? Even with the back door open, the backblast would reflect off the interior of the vehicle and fry him.
  • That's a common error made in most movies. Very few directors know about backblast.
  • If you re-watch the film, the door behind the Joker is open as well
• The moment in the tunnel where the Joker fires the RPG, only for the Tumbler to take the hit, always bugs me. Namely, how did Batman know when to accelerate (which just happened to be at the exact same moment that the Joker was aiming for the armored truck)? I don't care how many gadgets he's got in that thing, there's no way he would have been able to see what the Joker was doing, especially given the fact that he was crouched low in the Tumbler, therefore was completely reliant on the readouts on the computers, which probably weren't programmed to deliver that kind of precise data.
  • The RPG was partially poking out the door of the truck. Considering the Tumbler has equipment precise enough to pick out humans against a relatively warm background, it would make sense that he'd have something as simple as a camera on the thing.
  • He had also just fired two RPGs before at the police car in front of the security van. It'd be reasonable to assume he'd fire another, because why waste two clear chances to kill Dent unless you have more rockets?
• Why is such a big deal made of Bruce not revealing his identity? Its like, he has a ton of cash. Why not just get lots of security for loved ones and bribe the jury?
  • Did you completely miss the scene where Joker manages to kill every single person under police protection, often right infront of them? It wouldn't do much, no matter how much security.
  • Bribing the jury...you mean you expect Bruce to engage in exactly the kind of corruption that he's become Batman to try and stop?
  • If Bruce reveals he's Batman, he'll be arrested and charged in hours at the latest. Wayne Enterprises will crash and burn due to the massive stock hit it would take, Bruce would end up in jail for vigilantism, and Batman would be no more. Those are generally Bad Things.
• Here's one that bugs me. Most of it makes sense, but I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible that Gordon knows Batman's true identity? Think about it, how many times did they exchange cellular communications? Gordon would definitely have used his resources to find out who those numbers belonged to. What do others think?
  • You don't think Batman would mask the numbers he's using somehow?
  • Aside from the fact that Gordon probably wouldn't trace the numbers, considering he's an ally of Batman, if he did run the numbers, he's probably going to find them registered to a Mr. Doesn'texist, out of Nowhereville, in Middleofscrewitallistan.
  • Wayne Enterprises has been seeding Gotham's cell phones with secret technology in order to set up the sonar trick he uses at the end. If he * didn't* program himself an untraceable method of using those phones, he needs to quit his night job.

• Why transfer Dent by a convoy through twisted city streets where an ambush could be set up? Why not just fly him out in a helicopter? The very same helicopter that was providing air support perhaps?
  • Because it was a trap that was intended to draw out the Joker. The fact that they had clearly set everything up so that they would be drawing the Joker out in the first place should have made that fact blindingly obvious. (also, flying him out on a helicopter would be a bad idea; all the Joker needs is a single surface to air missile....)
    • Yeah, you saw what happened to that helicopter, didn't you?

• What's with the age of Gordon's kids? In Begins he has a toddler at home, seen when Batman pays him a visit, and yet in the TDK the younger (Barbara, maybe?) is at least six if not older. How much time exactly passed between Begins and TDK?
  • Well, actually if that girl is Barbara it is not too hard to explain. Most people don't know Barbara is actually not Gordon's daughter (okay, well, she is, more on that later). She's his niece. Gordon ended up adopting her when her parents died or something similar to that. And, yes, we do find out eventually in comics continuity that Babs is Gordon's biological daughter because he had an affair with her mother, but as far as most people know Babs is Gordon's adopted daughter, not biological.
• By the same token, why is it Gordon's SON who gets the focus in this film? Did anyone think that if it had been Barbara, especially at the climax, that it would have been the perfect setup for an eventual turn into Batgirl?
  • Nolan wouldn't do Batgirl but it would had been a nice reference.
    • Yeah, even if he doesn't like Batgirl like he dislikes Robin, Barbara Gordon IS his daughter. And it would have been more tense if it was a little girl in danger instead of a boy; wasn't there also a generic little boy in the end of BB?
      • this is some bullsh*t thing that tends to happen in a lot of films really, a character gets a boy and a girl and the girl is usually cast into the background, not considered to be as important unless the villian is a serial rapist or something [[roll]] fxcking sexist if you ask me. and just plain pointless too, they should have just given Gordan one son only, then it would have made more sense
        • Well, there's the fact that Nolan so wanted to avoid "side kick" association the he not only failed to acknowledge Barbara "Babs" Gordon by name (which admittedly, might have been confusing without exposition as his wife is also named Barbara), but kept her face hidden.

There's also the fact that Nolan has a son himself, so the idea of relating to that kind of father/son dynamic was easier for him and really, that's all the story essentially called for. Yeah, he could have blown it up and included more of the Gordon family, but as the man was stuck trimming fat off of the movie anyway by the time TDK had to be ready to go, it probably wouldn't have made to the screen anyway. Finally, it's probably a bit of a holdover from Year One, where Gordon's son is put in danger and Batman winds up saving his life. I guess with all the attention Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) had gotten in media over the years, focussing on James Gordon Jr. for a bit was definitely a new way to go.

If Gordon's little red headed girl started going all vocal with the Batman worship and "Why are they chasing him?", the last few years would have been filled with almost nothing but "He's totally setting up Batgirl!" and "No, Robin comes first! He can't do that!" and "But "The Batman" cartoon did it!" and "That cartoon sucked! Fück off and die!" and even more Andre Robin posts. Yeah....

• When the fake Batman's corpse drops down in front of the window, how on earth did he already have that mass of scar tissue after a few days?

• Okay, I get that Batman's ninja-trained and everything, but something that always bugged me (among other things) was how Batman could get into the middle of the cocktail party, behind Joker, without any of the party guests reacting in any way. The ballroom is well-lit, the Joker is surrounded by onlookers, yet Batman is already on the floor when he says his line, "Then you're gonna love me." What gives?
  • Everyone was looking at the Joker, that's why.
  • And their field of vision doesn't include the two square feet immediately behind the Joker?
  • Bats wasn't behind the Joker, he came in from the side. And you'd be surprised what people can miss if they're not looking for something. Also consider, it's not like Batman was just standing there waiting. It's likely he jumped the Joker as soon as he had a clear path, after squeezing his way through the shocked crowd first.
    • He could have also dropped down from the ceiling, where no one would have any reason to be looking at all until he descended.
  • Why would they alert Joker to Batman's presence? They know an ass-kicking for the evil clown dude is merely seconds away.
• So, none of the people on the ferries had cell phones? I mean, sure, the civvies wouldn't have had the numbers of anyone on the other boat, but the ferry workers probably would have.
  • No, it's pretty much confirmed that the people on the ferries had cell phones -- because Lucius Fox, while using the supersonar device, tracks the Joker's voice from audio sources on the ferries (i.e. the civvies' mobile phones) but determines that's not the source of the Joker's signal. On the other hand, even if the people on the ferries could call out, what would it help? The Joker's threatened destruction if anyone tries to get off the boats.
    • Yes, but they could have called the other boat and said, "Look, we're not going to blow you up, so you don't blow us up." or something like that.
      • In which case they will still get blown up by the Joker when the time runs out, so no matter what deal they make the pressure to go back on it and save themselves goes up by the minute.

• If this one has been discussed further up, apologies, but I had a moment of Fridge Logic: Batman lets himself be framed for Dent's murders so Dent's reputation is preserved. The prime reason for this seems to be so the cases against the five hundred-odd Mob members won't be thrown out (in an earlier scene, Batman calls Dent's stand against organised crime as the first legitimate ray of light in Gotham in decades. Dent himself asks the Mayor to consider what can be done with 18 months or so of clean streets.) But if that's right, then Batman's gesture was either unneeded or futile: the case against the Mob depended entirely on Lao's testimony as their banker, and Lao (it is implied, if not on screen) was killed by the Joker in the fire that burned up the Mob's money. At that point Dent's reputation doesn't make a spot of difference to the RICO case at all.
  • Dent's reputation would have affected more than just that case. With Bats taking the blame for the deaths, Dent goes down as a martyr, a hero to the people, and someone to inspire the next DA to live up to. If Dent is implicated in the deaths then, oh well, he was just another whacko, currupt politician. The morale of pretty much everyone in the city goes down from that, and you might find yourself in a worse position than the city was in during Begins.
    • Also on this trooper's third viewing of the film earlier this year (I keep meaning to watch it again but I keep slipping) Dent takes Lao to court to testify. You only see the scene before they leave where Dent throws him a bullet-proof vest and mentions they are going to court, but that's enough to show that Lao got his testimony out of the way before his untimely death. Plus the goal was not to convict all 500 hundred of them. Only the top mafia guys could afford to make bail; all the lower and mid-range guys would not be able to afford to make bail, and it was expected that most would plead out when it became apparant their bosses wouldn't come to their rescue (since they aren't making any money because most of their guys on the streets are in prison). With the Joker's spree of terror going on those 490 guys would have some hope of getting let out, but once his efforts to corrupt Batman and Dent failed they had Lao's testimony on record and the prosecuting attorny has just become Gotham's marytr. With no way to discredit Dent's prosecution and Lao's rather damning testimony combined with the Joker's spree still on the minds of many gothamites the RICO case is pretty much decided against the mob.
• So the Joker makes a deal with the three mob leaders; kill Batman and he'll have half of the mob's money. But he doesn't kill Batman, so why does he get the money?
  • He, uh, didn't make a deal with the mobsters to kill Batman. That was why he had to walk out with a whole pile of grenades ready to blow in the first place. It was after Batman captured Lao that the mob actually called the Joker, and in that case, it was clear they called him to break Lao out of jail so they could keep their money safe.
    • I know he didn't make the deal then, but the mobster who decided to hire him (Chechen?) said 'He's right. We have to fix real problem. Batman'. And it didn't say anywhere that they hired him on different terms.
    • But the terms were different at that point, because the police had Lao, which changed everything. As long as Lao was in police custody, their money was literally gone. And that was the problem in the first place: the police and Batman were targeting the mob's money. The Joker solved that by getting their money back.
• What exactly happened to the mob banker after the pin on that gas grenade was pulled? Did I miss the fate of the bank robbery victims?
  • It's my guess that the gas simply killed him, and probably everyone else in the bank. To my knowledge, nerve gas is typically invisible to the human eye, but that wouldn't have looked anywhere near as fearsome as Brown Smog of Death TM
  • This troper thought that was just a smoke bomb- another example of why the Joker could just as easily be called the Jerkass. People in this troper's theatre were laughing- because you expect, well, his head to be blown off.
    • I hadn't thought of that. That actually makes a lot of sense. So it turned out the Joker isn't just an Ax Crazy psychopath...but he's a mean jerk too!
    • Well, actually, given that military smoke grenades generally use white phosphorous, what the Joker actually did was set the man's head on fire.
      • I always thought that it was Smile-X gas.
      • This troper assumed it was a gas-based form of his Joker Venom from the comics.
      • Harmless brown gas, folks. The Joker was, get this... playing a joke.
        • 'Cause he's an asshole.
          • Not wanting to beat a dead horse, but mob banker guy is most likely dead considered how any real smoke grenade gets incredibly hot when releasing smoke, as in scalding hot and combined with getting shot multiple times in the legs I'll count him out. Also Joker is an asshole.
      • I assumed it was fear toxin, considering that about a second after it releases you see him react to it and scream slightly.
      • I don't think so; there's an in-universe news report on the robbery that mentions nothing about fear gas or any deaths aside from the four other clowns. It's just harmless gas. The banker was probably just freaking out slightly due to the whole 'I thought I was going to explode/who was that crazy bastard/I no longer have knees' thing. The Joker's entire reason for pulling the job was to get attention and annoy the Mob, and that would be less effective if everybody in the bank was dead and thus couldn't report seeing him. Also, he is an asshole who likes to see people squirm.
      • I assumed that, based on the Joker's preceding line about how whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger, that the gas was harmless and nonlethal and was meant to illustrate his point. Also, as the above troper notes, the newsreport would likely have mentioned nerve gas or fear toxin or the like being released in the bank.
      • Furthermore, there isn't much reason to believe that it was Joker Gas or whatever. If it was, then it would have been seen later in the movie for sure.
  • While we're on the topic of the grenades in the bank, why diden't one of the victims just throw one of their concussion grenades into the bus as it left, or even suicide bomb the robbers in an attempt to saves everyone else?
    • Yes, because a whole bunch of scared civilians are gonna keep their cool and hold on to their grenades if someone else's goes off near them. Brilliant plan. And why would they do that? They're still alive when the robbers leave. You think any of them are going to kill themselves just to kill a bunch of crooks?
• In the scene where they track down the Joker by sonar- how do they somehow manage to use sonar imaging to detect his makeup as well as his general bodily location? It doesn't even seem to pick up distinct facial features for anyone else, but really. It might just be to make him more eminently recognisable, but a big blinking arrow over his head reading "THIS IS THE GUY" or something would have been just as easy to program in. Maybe Bruce Wayne's just a tad slow...
  • Two thoughts come to mind: Bruce programmed in the bodytype, scars, makeup, and such into the search program to go with the voice match, or the makeup makes subtle changes in sound as it bounces off the Joker's face. Either way, no big for Crazy Prepared Batman.
    • It can barely detect facial features on everybody else but it can detect the subtle colour changes in nasty, grimy greasepaint? The first one's a bit more plausible, but still... I'd go with the big blinking neon sign.
    • Remember, it also clearly identifies the SWAT team members.
    • What's so hard to believe? You're making this too hard, they simply implied which was which. Wouldn't it be pretty obvious to discern the hostages, since they weren't moving, and the SWAT team was moving, plus they were going INTO the building. The Joker could be noticed because he was the only guy on that floor, and the ring of dogs he has makes it painfully obvious.
      • The problem isn't knowing which one he is, it's the fact that the screen displayed him with the makeup ON, rather than just as he would look like with it off if it were really working like some ridiculously high-tech echolocation. All right, chalk it up to Viewer-Friendly Interface and presume that Bats is really just that prepared.
• Okay, so the Batpod is cool as hell. But the whole time I kept focusing that cape flapping mere inches above the rear wheel and waiting for something messy to happen. Seriously, couldn't he tuck it in or something?
  • They'd better include that in the next movie or something- if there is one. Somebody GRABS that cape and slings him around like a ragdoll. Or it gets caught in a revolving door or something. Or stuck to his shoe.
    • Sling him around like a ragdoll? Bane, anyone?
    • Obviously Lucius needs to collaborate with Edna Mode.
      • And the pairing name, it shall be Ledna. Or Lode.
  • One of the special features on the DVD features development of the Batpod, and they had actually thought of this danger. Originally they decided that the memory technology in the cape would allow it to fold up into a backpack shape so it would be out of the way. When they tested the pod using the costume, however, the cape never got snagged in anything, so they abandoned the pack idea.
• After two hours of Thou Shalt Not Kill, Batman tackles Two-Face to his death, and this goes completely without comment? Weak.
  • The Moral Dissonance was already there in the first movie, when Batman decided that letting Rah's Al Ghul die in an explosion was totally okay when he could have, say, saved him and had him arrested. The issue of Batman's No Killing rule and his varying respect of it has been raised in the comics over the years, but it hasn't in the new movies... as unbelievable as it may seem to most Dark Knight fanboys: Batman not being called out for his double standards limited some people's enjoyment of the movies.
  • The difference is that, despite his rather extreme methods, Ghul wasn't a psychopath. The whole aim of the Joker's psychological assault on Batman is that they are exactly the same, which forced Bruce to realise that he had to take a higher stand and become a true hero. I prefer to see it as Batman's continuing evolution as a hero.
  • Uh, Ra's was fully capable of jumping out the window Batman left through in Begins. He chose to die. And in TDK, Batman kinda sorta takes responsibility for killing Two-Face when he says, quite clearly and outright to Gordon, that "I killed these people." Sure, he was taking on the burden in order to keep the streets safe, but at the same time, he is outright admitting to and taking responsibility for killing him, even if the death was unintentional and part of saving Gordon's life.
  • I think the last sentence is the most important. It's not like he pulled out a gun and shot Dent in the face, he tackles him to stop him shooting Gordon's kid.
  • Also, there's a difference between throwing someone to their death and jumping in to save a kid. He had a chance to save the Joker or not when Joker was plunging to his death. With Two-Face there wasn't as many options, just save the kid or let him die. Likewise when he was fighting through all the fake doctors to rescue the hostages dressed like clowns, any of them could have died in the heat of battle. But he had no other choice. I think this comes down to the decision to kill someone vs. having no other choice.
    • Batarangs seem to do the trick in the comics, and Two-Face wasn't even "about" to shoot the kid--his coin was in the air. How hard would it have been to simply elbow him in the face so he could release Gordon's son, and proceed to beat him up? (This is the guy who, moments earlier, tied a bunch of trained SWAT guys together and had made them fall out of a building without killing them.)
    • Batarangs: Please, show me where in the movie he ever used batarangs. And as for the SWAT team, he hadn't been shot in the stomach when that happened. Getting a bullet in your gut kind of impairs your ability to fight. And when dealing with the SWAT team, he wasn't immediately dealing with a deranged, armed individual who had a gun to a child's head. Batman only had one goal: get Harvey away from Gordon's kid before he pulled the trigger on the pistol and killed him. He doesn't have time to pull any fancy moves to disarm him.
    • Actually, Bats is shown clipping them to his belt and using them in the previous movie (specifically to knock the lights out during his first tussle with Falconi's goons), so it's likely that he had them on hand during this film. That said, shurikens and the like (especially of the size shown of the Batarangs) are more for distraction than incapacitation, and hitting Two Face's hand would've been a difficult task even if he hadn't just been shot, what with the risk of hitting Gordon's kid in the face instead.
    • Additionally, from a writer standpoint, even if Batman casually mentions he takes responsibility for Dent's murders, he still killed someone and doesn't even address that, despite this being one of the main points of the rest of the movie. As for killing vs. letting someone die, Alfred made a point of assuring him in Begins that the killer is the only one responsible (in that case, for the Wayne murders).
    • "I killed these people." Note the bolded word. These. Meaning he includes Dent in the list of people he has killed. So yes, Batman did address and accept responsibility for the killing of Harvey.
      • It's precisely the use of the word "these" that gets me. Is Dent just one of "them?" If Batman doesn't differentiate between people he kills and people whose murder he takes the blame for, that just doesn't scream guilt or anything. As for how much choice he had, for one thing, the scene could have easily been rewritten to allow for a less fatal situation; Batman wouldn't have needed to kill Dent if, say, they left out the whole "punishment" part and Gordon's son was the only person Dent was about to kill (thus freeing Batman up of his wound). For another thing, as I said in the IJBM for the Dark Knight specifically, Batman doesn't have a "no murder" rule; he has a "no killing" rule. The difference is vitally important; otherwise, Batman could potentially level entire buildings full of people without wanting to kill anyone, and his code would be A-okay with that. Realistically, yeah, that scenario probably wouldn't have played out any differently (though if Joker can perfectly time a bus to kill a treacherous mook, as far as I'm concerned, Batman can be an expert with the batarang), but the writers really didn't have to put Batman in that position (or alternatively, Batman could have made it explicit that yeah, he realizes that he killed Harvey Dent, and is genuinely disturbed by this, before moving on to taking responsibility for the other victims).
      • Interestingly, I just realized he did exactly that (leveled a building full of people) in Begins. Personally, it's easier for me to think of this an AU kind of thing (where Batman's "no killing" rule is a whole lot more lax) at this point.
  • May I remind everyone that, as someone said above, he obviously didn't mean for that tackle to be fatal? Batman doesn't, technically speaking, never kill anyone, even in the comics: he just never * deliberately* kills anyone.
    • Citation, please? The reason it's a no-killing rule rather than a no-murder rule is to prevent Batman from getting comfortable with these kinds of "justifications." And even if he doesn't actually have a no-killing rule, he would still have had a stronger reaction to the accidental killing of one of his closest allies (especially when the entire point of Batman's development in the movie is Thou Shalt Not Kill).
      • He has said in the comics, "Never intentionally," when asked whether he's ever killed anyone. I'm not one of those people who can give you the exact issue for anything so I don't know exactly where, I think in Detective Comics--I'm sure people on Batman forums can help you out. As for the films themselves, he never explicitly states in them that it is his police never to kill anyone, even unintentionally, so your "Citation, please?" backfires drastically. This is a place to get things off your chest, not to insistently debate things.
  • What was he supposed to do, sit down and sob about it for the last two minutes of the movie? In all likelihood he tried to save Harvey, but it's hard to hang with one hand from a ledge while holding onto a man weighing almost as much as you when you've spent the last few hours going all out to battle a lunatic clown and have just been shot. Batman accepted responsibility when he said "I killed these people" and ran off. He knew the cops were minutes, maybe seconds away; he didn't have time to do much more than that if he didn't want to be caught.
• Dark Knight spoilers: Why doesn't Gordon pin the cops' deaths on the Joker or his thugs? There's no evidence linking him to their murders, but there's no evidence incriminating Batman either.
  • Because the Joker probably has an alibi already planned out for that. Not to mention that, in a way, pinning those crimes on the Joker is wrong and illegal. Though its also wrong to pin them on Batman, the difference is Batman chose to have them pinned on him, which is really not much worse than what's already happened; it would be next to impossible for Batman to escape the fact that he killed Dent anyway, and since he's already killed one man he can go ahead and take the heat for the others.
    • Illegal yes. Morally wrong no. Joker drove Harvey insane with the express purpose of causing him to commit murder, which makes him morally accountable for Two-Face's actions. Hell, if the real story got out it would probably make him legally viable as well. Keeping that in mind blaming him is arguably more moral than blaming Batman, since all they're doing is altering the facts of the case, not the actual innocence or guilt of the Joker.
  • Because the Joker was visibly elsewhere at the time some of Harvey Dent's victims were killed. Its either blame Batman or admit Dent did them.
  • They couldn't say random thugs or the mob did it? I thought Gotham was a city where stuff like this happens all the time.
    • "Random thugs" kill Salvatore Maroni? The head of the Gotham mob? Ditto for two cops and Harvey Dent? You can bet dollars to dinars that having no suspects (which is what those boil down to) would inevitably trigger a massive investigation, which would turn up Harvey's complicity. Batman, meanwhile, is a visible figure who can be accused without any trouble, especially as he was responsible for Dent's death.
  • This Troper always assumed the purpose of accepting the murders was twofold: To remove the blame from Harvey and have him 'die a hero' and to make the criminals fear him again. Remember what Maroni said, "You got rules, the Joker, he ain't got no rules." By accepting the blame for the murders Batman lets the mob know that he no longer has a rule about not killing people, and they will fear him again.
• Why is the Batman Gambit named after a guy who loses, repeatedly, to the Joker in Dark Knight? Where was this genius who can defeat anyone short of Dr. Doom with a week's worth of planning? Where was the psycopath without a goal? I saw a pretty clear goal to the Joker's actions: Prove that Gotham was irredeemable. Yeah, the actor was good, but the character, not so much. Same with Batman, who obviously does not understand terrorists' psychology. They won't stop until they've achieved a goal. And some of them just get another one after that.
  • ...Erm, because it was named for the interpretation of the character in the comics, not the one in the movie? The way comics are written, and the sheer amount of time Batman has been around and the huge number of hands the character's been passed through make pinning down a definitive Batman or Joker a dicey thing. This Batman isn't terribly experienced still; this is his first encounter with the Joker, when he has no idea what he's like, or indeed what being a comic book superhero is like. One of the major themes here is that the Joker is a new kind of criminal, one representing something other than petty greed or misguided ideals, that Batman has never faced and therefore doesn't understand. And, okay, where was it said that the Joker had no goal? I know he says it, but he lies, all the time. He definitely had a goal in The Killing Joke, which the movie takes inspiration from.
    • Ah, alright. This is my first encounter with Batman, and it wasn't such a great one. Hype Backlash and all that.
      • One method of making something darker is making the hero less effective and/or the villains moreso; it ups the tension. Try the animated series if you'd like to see Batman being awesome, as well as a general recommendation.
    • Did it ever occur to you that those features of Batman and the Joker that you think are important aren't actually required in Batman's stories? Go read some of Batman's Golden Age stories and you'll see a Batman who doesn't really have ultra mega magical intelligence and a Joker who isn't a complete Cloudcuckoolander.
• Am I the only one who thinks that throwing an electronic remote detonater into highly conductive salt water might cause an undesirable explosion?
  • I'm a little bit more bothered by the fact that everybody believes the Joker about which detonator does what.
  • Probably because the detonator required a key to be turned to activate.
  • Highly conductive salt water? It wasn't an ocean, I think it was a river or a bay. I doubt that a bay is conductive enough, but I'll check to see what kind body of water and the salt level in bay water. (Runs off to check sources.)
  • IIRC, Gotham = Chicago (plus that's where it was filmed). There are no salt water bodies in that area of the US. Plus, given Gotham's apparent condition, the "water" would have been mostly pollutants anyway.
• Let's see - what EXACTLY did the Joker do? Since there's no way he could have planned that meticulously, we'll assume he was telling the truth about making things up as he went. So...by the time he's drawn "Batman" into the open, he's got at least two abandoned warehouses filled with explosives because...um...you never know when warehouses filled with explosives might come in handy! (The cell phone bomb is realistic enough as a contingency.) So, while the police were occupied, he kidnapped Rachel because (if both he and Batman survived the battle), having Rachel in a room full of explosives might be a good idea. Then he saw a golden opportunity to kidnap Harvey (phenomenally stupid guards, perhaps?) and set up the notorious Sadistic Choice. The rest seems like typical Joker fare, but that whole bit toward the middle...what?!
  • "There's no way he could have planned that meticulously." Says who? It was quite obvious that the Joker set up the entire freeway gambit to get him arrested and into the police station so he could get Lao out and then burn him, the Chechen, and half the mob's money in one go. Of course, there's no rational reason for him to do any of this, but that's because he's the Joker.
    • He planned not to corrupt Batman into killing him?
      • If Batman kills the Joker, then he wins. If Batman doesn't kill the Joker, he continues his plan to grab Lao and blow up the MCU - which means he wins. Xanatos Gambit.
  • "Phenomenally stupid guards, perhaps?" No, just Wertz handing him over to the Joker's goons. Which is the whole reason Harvey murdered him later on.
  • His goal was to get Batman to kill him, thus proving that everyone is corruptable. And that wasn't a plan. It was a goal. He didn't have a plan to get to that goal. He did have explosives rigged in the warehouses, the hospital, and the ferries, just in case he needed them. He didn't know when he was going to use them, just that he would probably need them. As for the freeway chase, once again, his goal was for Batman to kill him. If he was captured, he had the bomb planted in the thug and had his goons capture Dent and Rachel, just in case. And Dent was just a contingency, in case he couldn't corrupt Batman. He didn't plan this. He just saw a golden opportunity, seeing as how Dent's girlfriend was just killed and half his face was burnt off.
    • I begin to wonder how many buildings and public structures are sitting with explosives in/on/under them, that the Joker rigged up but didn't use. . .
• Why does The Joker get so pissed off whenever someone calls him crazy? Given that all other Joker incarnations have gleefully accepted the fact that they're completely Bat-Shit, why is it such a big deal for him?
  • Presumably that's a part of how he really got the scars.
  • Because the Joker isn't insane. In fact, he's the Only Sane Man.

"You see, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve."

• • He's only crazy insofar as you see sanity conterminous with a certain framework of morality. Though nihilistic and violent, he would no doubt take pride in his firm grasp on reality, his deep understanding of psychology, and his complex schemes and experiments. Someone that smart, hard-working and successful certainly wouldn't take kindly to being called crazy.
    • con·ter·mi·nous/känˈtərmənəs/Adjective 1. Sharing a common boundary. 2. Having the same area, context, or meaning.
      • No charge.

• Why didn't they wash the Joker's face at the police station? Isn't it the first reasonable step towards identifying him?
  • My theory is that he isn't wearing makeup, but his face is tattooed.
  • See The Dark Knight page for a reasonable answer.
  • He isn't tattooed (you see him without the makeup for a split second after he shoots Gordon, and you can see the sweat making the makeup run in some shots), and washing his face isn't going to help ID him unless someone recognizes his face personally.
• Christopher Nolan passed up a great chance to get people hyped for the third movie. For This Troper, the best part of Begins was Gordon's "Escalation" speech, with the foreshadowing of The Joker. In TDK, they could've explained a major plot hole, as to how a random crook could gain access to such a vast array of weaponry. He could've at least been shown opening a crate that said COBBLEPOTT (or SIONIS) or had a penguin-logo stenciled-on.
  • "vast array of weaponry"? The Joker has a few dozen assault rifles and submachineguns, some grappling hooks, and a single rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and a lot of bombs and timers. You can get that at Omar Al-Terrorist's Discount Generic Soviet Arms Shop, and can manufacture most of the explosives, timers, and radios using easily-acquired chemicals, electronic parts, and a basement lab.
    • Which is precisely the point: TDK's Joker is being drawn as a terrorist, and not some lighthearted I-Hate-America mujahid that the Air Force can go after or whose Doomed Hometown could even make him sympathetic to some, but a full play at all the terrifying implications of a Terrorist Without a Cause who does it all For the Evulz. Ledger!Joker just wants everyone to stop kidding around and see that all their laws, all their faith in each other, means nothing next to the fundamental chaos of the universe, and he wants to have as much extremely violent fun proving his point as possible.
    • I thought he was getting his weapons from the mafia, they have a reputation for selling those things in real life.
    • And part of the point was that the Joker didn't have a vast array of weapons, because he didn't need them to achieve his objectives; he says himself that essentially part of his point is to show how a society can go from functioning and orderly to panicked and chaotic with just one guy with a few everyday items and the willingness to use them creatively.
• I understand why he does it, but isn't the fact that Batman chooses Rachel in The Sadistic Choice, and that Gordon and the other people in the police station at the time know this, a big giveaway to his identity? Surely there's only a few people in the city who would pass up saving the rising star D.A. to save his girlfriend.
  • How many people know Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes' backstory together? Probably Alfred, maybe Dent and...well, that's probably pretty much it. Given Bruce's facade of dating a different girl every other week, who's going to even remember that the assistant DA was his friend as a kid? Plus, as has been established, by this point everyone knows Bruce as a Rich Idiot With No Day Job, who sleeps all day and parties all night. Who would think that he's Batman solely on the evidence that Batman chose to go after a girl that at one point in the past was a close friend of Bruce?
    • Additionally, Batman's identity is kinda clear. Bruce Wayne arrives after years of being thought dead to Gotham, and shortly afterwards, Batman appears. Batman is using really high quality, expensive stuff. You want to tell me nobody has connected the dots? There's not one person with a few hours to spare and a news website and a brain in Gotham? That's something I want addressed in the next movie. Plot idea: Riddler finds out Batman's identity, and starts leaving riddles linked to each other, that lead to his identity. He has to solve the riddles, and find out where they lead, before everyone in Gotham does. Have one of the other people solving riddles be a young police officer called Tim Drake, who used to idolize Batman before he killed a bunch of policemen and Harvey Dent, if you want to include Robin in a good way.
    • This Troper would very much like to point out that that is not "a good way" to include Robin. Also, as mentioned, Bruce actively cultivates a public image of "Bruce Wayne: Idjit", i.e., an identity as far away from "potentially Batman" as he can manage, specifically to deflect any possible suspicion.
    • One person did connect the dots -- it was a plot point. Probably quite a few people suspect that Wayne Enterprises at least funds Batman, even if they don't link him to Bruce himself.
  • Not very many people would even know that Batman was involved in Rachel's rescue at all, IIRC.
  • The Joker makes it clear in the interrogation scene that he knows there's something between Batman and Rachel. Anyone who looked into the matter would find out that Rachel and the Batman had a thing going on. There'd be no reason to assume that Rachel and Batman were friends when he's out of the mask. After all, Gordon and Batman are a team, but Bruce Wayne and Gordon barely know each other.
  • It doesn't surprise me that the Joker sees the connection. Batman follows her around and thwarts the mob's attempt to murder her in Begins, and then he gives her one of the only doses of the antidote at the end. All of that would have wound up in the police reports.

• I've seen the pencil scene in Dark Knight twice, and both times it looks to me more like Joker shoved the pencil up the guy's nose, but everyone else seems to think it went into one of his eyes. Does anyone else concur?
  • It always looks like it's going into his mouth to me.
  • You can watch it more times here. I honestly can't tell. The script doesn't say, either... maybe it was meant to be ambiguous?
  • It's gotta be the eye. A wooden pencil isn't going to penetrate the throat well enough to kill someone, and Joker would have to bring the head down on a really specific angle for it to have any hope of doing damage through the nose. The eye, by contrast, is a big squishy hole in the face leading directly to the brain.
  • Who knows, maybe Joker didn't do anything special with the pencil. He could've just slammed the guy's head on the table while simultaneously making the pencil disappear like a regular magician would.
    • Heh. That's funny.
• Does anyone else think that the Joker's plots in this movie come across more like Two-Face plots? There are two ships, with two bombs and two detonators, etc. I've kidnapped two people, and you have a 50/50 chance of saving the person you love. Just seems a little too focused on duality for a movie that also features Two-Face, especially when those very plots are CLASSIC Two-Face.
  • The Joker's goal was to create Two Face in essence. It wouldn't surprise me if he chose that to play off Harvey's psyche specifically.
• This Troper never managed to figure out the fingerprint thing, he got that brick but shot another one, analyzed the brick HE SHOT and with the fingerprint he get... An adress? Someone, please, explain it to me.
  • It's pure Hollywood Science, but here's the logic behind it: Batman takes the brick with the bullet from the room. He then shoots the same caliber bullet into the same material, with the bullet presumably marked in some way. He then analyzes the bullet he shot to see how the bullet shattered. He then uses that data to virtually reconstruct the bullet he found in the wall. From that, he gets the fingerprint from when the bullet was put in the chamber. He takes the fingerprint and matches it in a Magical Database to find the address.
    
    There are so many holes in this that I don't know where to start, but that's the movie's logic behind it.
• Why does Bruce as Batman keep using the bat voice when he's alone with Lucius? Does he absolutely have to use it if he has the cowl on or something?
  • It's probably a psychological thing. While he's Batman, he has to sound like Batman. Kevin Conroy did more or less the same thing in the DCAU. He used the Batman voice even when he was alone with people who knew his secret identity, if he was in the suit.
    • Hell, he even did it when he was alone in the Batcave with Alfred, not even in costume. It's kind of his "I'm working" voice.
  • I think he's staying in the habit. It's important not to let yourself slip up and start talking normal. Bad enough you look like Bruce Wayne. The parts of your face that are visible, anyway.
  • And yet, the line "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you" and many others from Batman Begins were clearly Bruce Voice...
    • To be fair, he was just starting out, and that particular line was being spoken to someone to whom he previously had a fairly significant emotional connection and who already clearly knew he was Bruce Wayne anyway.
• This is tiny compared to some of the more philosophical complaints, but here we are. Those ballet dancers on the boat? How come they're all C-cupped and up? Have the casting agencies not seen what a Real Life dancer looks like? large breasts and Fan Service aside, this really bugged me.
  • Batman must stay in character at all times as Public Bruce Wayne lest his cover be blown. And would the Bruce Wayne the world knows choose any ballerinas to be his companions who do not have large breasts?
• When Coleman Reese is on TV, and the Joker demands he be killed so he can't reveal Batman's identity, why doesn't Reese reveal Batman's identity immediately?
  • What, and piss off the Joker more? If he keeps quiet and lasts the hour, he's in the clear. If he deliberately spoils the Joker's fun, well, the Joker's not going to be happy about that.
• In the beginning of the film, when we see the Joker from behind right before he hops in the car with the other bank robbers, he's holding his mask in his hand. So he was just standing on a busy street corner in broad daylight looking the way he does, and nobody seemed to notice. I can chalk this up to the fact that at this point in the story he hasn't begun his campaign of anarchy against the city and is just some weirdo in makeup, but later both the Batman and Maroni imply they know who he is.
  • He has his face down. I was going to say that his hair was partially covering his face, but I checked, and it's slicked back. The people on the street would just dismiss him as a clown wearing messy makeup. The real question is why the other clown-masked bank robbers didn't recognize him as the Joker. His face was definitely visible from the car, even though he immediately puts his mask on.
    • I figured the guys in the car just assumed he took the job really seriously.
• Something just occurred to me--does the Federal Bureau of Investigation not exist? For all the things the Joker did, and for all the threats he made (like blowing up a hospital, which he actually did; not to mention kidnapping a District Attorney), Gordon and the Chief of Ds would have been kicked aside as the Feds took over and tracked him down in two minutes. This goes beyond the Joker's knack for planning every little thing. Everything he did--pretty much his entire existence as an "agent of chaos"--absolutely hinged on no Federal involvement. Is there any resolution for a glaring and positively huge plot hole?
  • I think you're rather overestimating just how effective the FBI would've been. What, precisely, could they have done differently to "track him down in two minutes"? They're not superheroes either. People tend to grossly overestimate how effective federal agencies in general are in fiction.
  • Not only that, but it's standard Critical Incident Response for cities to request support, logistical as well as administrative, from nearby cities in the event of a situation that overpowers their ability to respond. Even planned events, like the Olympics in Vancouver, required support from other states and agencies. Think of what a roving natural disaster like the Joker would call up. Does no one in Gotham even consider calling Metropolis to send over Superman, or New York to borrow Spidey for a little Bat support? Failing that, how about you send us some goddamn National Guardsmen with big old tanks!?
    • You mean like how the national guard did show up, in uniform and with choppers and bomb squads?
    • Most superhero movies up to now operate under the assumption that their hero is the only one in the world. Also, Spidey belongs to a different company entirely. Plus, I'd like to know just how, exactly, tanks would've helped in stopping the Joker. It's not like he's going to war in the streets.
    • To say nothing of the fact that by bringing in tanks, you're just daring the Joker to start stealing tanks. Does the Joker in a tank sound like fun to you?
    • Moreover, this is a Gotham City. Any neighbouring cities or federal agencies would just be like "Violence in Gotham, what else is new" and only make a token effort to do anything. It's not said in the movie, but perhaps most politicians at the federal level actually want to see Gotham burn to the ground.
    • There is a whole slew of tropes dealing with this problem in fiction. Superman Stay Out Of Gotham because he is an utter Game Breaker unless the Joker happen to carry some kryptonite.
• What's the significance of Harvey's nickname? Is it supposed to imply that Harvey is really a double-crossing backstabber, because he never gave that impression at the beginning of the film.
  • He used to be in Internal Affairs, which meant, essentially, spying on the other cops. That's why they called him "Two Face."
• During the chase sequence, the 'Pod bursts out of an alley, and the lights mounted with the guns seem to be spinning around the long axis of the bike. Is that what's going on, or is it an optical illusion?
  • It's not an illusion. The wheels can actually pivot 360 degrees around the long axis of the Batpod. You can see it again when Batman drives it up the side of a wall and then the 'Pod twists completely around to keep him upright. Presumably it's designed that way so a sideways skid doesn't automatically lead to a wipe out.
• Dent's courtroom scene with the mobster on the stand has him pulling a carbon fiber gun on Dent. Given the tech in the rest of the movie, I have no problem with a gun made entirely out of carbon fiber. Bullets, on the other hand, have been mostly unchanged since about 400 BCE. How would he get a bullet past the metal detector?
  • Yeah, its not like the fact that the Gotham mob having a huge part of the police force in their pocket is a major plot point or anything. It would be thoroughly impossible for them to smuggle weapons past security.
    • Then what's the point of the carbon fiber gun if he can sneak bullets past? Why not a real gun?
  • The bullets may have been made of ceramic, or some such hard but non-metallic material. They may shatter, but they only really have to go a couple feet and penetrate the skull, it's certainly possible.
  • I think a bigger problem with this scene is the way the gun didn't' fire. Seriously, why did it misfire?
    • Because it was a crappy gun, as evidenced by the fact that Dent points out it is a crappy gun.

• Something that literally hit made me scratch my head and wonder is how Harvey survived the crash in the scene where he spares Maroni but shoots his driver. Even if he jumped out the window, he would have at the very least been injured. The car flipped literally seconds after Harvey shot the driver.
  • Harvery very clearly puts on his seatbelt as he's saying he's about to shoot the driver. Putting on your seatbelt does a lot to help you survive in a rollover.

• Is no one bothered by the fact that at the end of the movie, Batman and Commish Gordon commit blatant obstruction of justice by covering up Harvey Dent's crimes? Forget about the people of Gotham losing hope -they aren't little kids, after all- Bats and Gordon are actually proving the Joker right by shuffling off their code at the first sign of this perceived "trouble." And believe it or not, Moral Guardian media reviewing website Plugged In was one of the few reviewers to actually pick up on this in their review:

...Batman creates a lie—a flat-out fabrication that patronizingly presumes he knows what's best for Gotham's citizens, and that they're too fragile or shortsighted to accept the truth. In an age when we are all wary of lies, deceptions and governmental cover-ups, this kind of fabrication (well-meaning though it may be) feels especially wrong and, in any case, always violates one of God's core commandments: Don't lie."

• • They have a choice between covering up Dent's crimes, or letting all kinds of bad things happen ( at the very least, all the surviving mobsters would be freed ). Yes, the movie takes the point of view that the truth is not always the most important thing. Is this really any more of a Family-Unfriendly Aesop than all the bad things ordinary people end up doing at the prompting of the Joker? Also, Bruce doesn't have any "code" that says "don't lie." His code has stuff like "help others", "save lives," and "make Gotham a better place."
  • Yeah, the Moral Guardian website picks up on it, because it's their job to nitpick anything that doesn't fit into either Wholesome American Values c. 1953 or an uber-conservative version of the Bible. The Ten Commandments aren't going to govern a Batman script, and nowhere in any Batman canon are the commandments really central to his character except for "Don't kill."
    • Seconded. Batman will lie to people, cheat people, and beat the crap out of people, but he won't kill them. Everything else goes. His goal was to keep the murderers and other criminals imprisoned by Harvey in jail; if he needs to lie to do that, fine.
    • Not to get too off-topic, but the whole point of that website is to inform people, particularly those with kids about what is in films. Better to be overly thorough than to leave stuff out that someone else might consider important to know.
  • Ahem. Original poster here. I would like to take this moment to explain that the reason I cited Plugged In was because it is an often overlooked source that picked up on this, and I posted on this page because I was looking for an opinion on my statement. What I got was a sarcastic tirade about the purpose of Plugged In. Anyhow, I think there's another headscratcher somewhere on this page that talks about Harvey Dent's charges. But regardless, I'm pretty sure it would have made things a lot easier for everyone to just say "Oh, the Joker made Dent go crazy and go on a murder spree, but the Commish managed to stop him before he could kill more people. Too bad ol Harv' is dead. Oh, and Batman was there too." But the fact remains that Gordon and Batman committed obstruction of justice, abandoning their "code," as the Joker puts it, i.e., the law, at the first sign of trouble, even if the perceived trouble is patently ridiculous.
    • I'll point out that not only did Plugged In's reviewer love Batman Begins, but their point is the same reason why The Dark Knight is featured as an example on Family-Unfriendly Aesop. That picture of Bane tearing up a picture of Harvey's in The Dark Knight Rises suggests the plan is just going to fall to pieces anyway, if framing yourself for murder to cover up another man's crimes was even worth it in the first place.
    • To the OP, Gordon and Batman didn't abandon their "code" at all. Batman has always been about doing the right thing, but understanding that he is just a tool to make Gotham a better place and will eventually go away when Gotham no longer needs him. Gordon himself also follows the spirit of the law more than the letter; he works with Batman, who is legally a vigilante and "the law" dictates that he should be arrested for that, he works wth a police department filled with people suspected of being corrupt because in Gotham he is the only honest cop there is, and the common thread between both actions is that he is doing things for the good of the people of Gotham. Covering up Dent's crimes follows that; seriously there is no good that comes out of revealing it; every single criminal Dent locked up in his entire career will be set free, the people of Gotham will loose hope and fall back into the same state after the Wayne's were murdered that made Gotham what it is today, anyone who wants to believe that people are good will look at what happened to Harvey Dent and see that even the White Knight of the city could fall so far, what hope is there for anyone else? Not to mention that the police force would be demoralised and the Mob will get a second wind and undo every single victory Gordon and Dent had worked so hard for. It's not about blind adherence to rules, it's about doing what's right.
• Joker wants to prove that everyone can be corrupted. Batman doesn't kill him, so he admits that Batman is truly incorruptible. Than Batman goes ahead and kills Harvey Dent. So what, that's it? Joker won? Batman broke his one rule, got corrupted?
  • It's been suggested that Batman didn't mean to kill Dent. After all, he'd dropped people from similar heights before without killing them. He was just acting on impulse to try and save James Jr. When it comes to Batman's other 'murders', it could be that the Joker knows full well that Two-Face did the killings. He knows pretty much everything that happens in Gotham, and he had a personal interest in Dent as his little pet project, so I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that he somehow knows the truth. What he would do or say when he learned that Batman copped to the killings is left to speculation, however...
  • Except it was slightly more complex than "Batman goes ahead and kills Harvey Dent". A physically exhausted Batman tried to save both Harvey and the kid, but didn't have the strength for both. Joker did win, but in the sense that Gotham's white knight was now just as dark as everyone else, and her dark knight is now being pursued for murder. Technically, Batman still hasn't killed anyone.
• How is the Batpod assembled? It shoots right out of the left side of the tumbler, but uses both front tires. Either the tumbler has an extra wheel just for the batpod, or it's a bloody Transformer. And don't get me started on how the guns pop out of nowhere...
  • Again, the "special features" on the second disc cover this. The driver's-side wheel pops out first, followed by the passenger's-side wheel, which fixes itself onto the back of the 'Pod. (However, it all happens so fast that it's nearly unnoticeable without freeze-framing.) The guns are presumably concealed under all that cowling...remember, the Tumbler was made for military purposes. A) it has to have an 'eject' function in case of IEDs, and B) that eject function has to be at least somewhat lightly armed.
• Security tells Fox that Batman broke into R&D. Doesn't Bruce Wayne have the authorization to enter his own R&D department without breaking in?
  • No, Security tells Fox that something's happening in R&D. Bruce didn't have to break in, but someone noticed that someone had set up a huge computer system and everything that was using electricity.

• When one of the clowns is grazed by the bank manager's last shell, he angrily asks Joker where he learned to count. Why would he think a (supposedly) average thug would actually know the magazine capacity of that shotgun model?
  • Five shells is pretty much the standard capacity of a shotgun magazine, absent an extended magazine (which a sawed-off shotgun wouldn't have) or a rod to reduce the capacity (which wouldn't apply here, since those are used to maintain hunting regulations).
• This isn't exactly a problem with the plot, but I can't think of any better way to describe it than that it just bugs me: In the scene that introduces Harvey Dent in all his crime-fighting glory, Dent hits that two-bit mook with a right cross, takes his gun away and dismantles it while telling him to buy American next time... after said mook got his gun out, aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger. It's certainly plausible, but it just bugs me that a cheap gun malfunction is all that saved Dent from getting his head blown off in the scene that's supposed to establish him as a potent, crime-fighting powerhouse.
  • ....and? It drives home a very real fact: no matter how badass you are, if some jerk with a death wish gets the drop on you, you're dead. It can happen to Dent, and it can happen to Batman, too.
    • Okay, that makes sense. It just didn't feel like it was trying to drive that home -- the most (overt) we get down that road is Harvey's "I'm fine, by the way," with the emphasis on how awesome he is. So I was a bit confused.
  • Well, the fact that he wasn't even slightly rattled after coming within a gnat's wing of being shot in the face has to count for something...
    • It does show his fearlessness, but one thing that struck me later as Fridge Brilliance is that it also shows his weakness: he doesn't really understand how dangerous a game he's playing, and he doesn't appreciate that he was only saved by blind luck. Later, after he's lost everything, it all hits home with a vengeance, and that's when Two-Face's belief in chance as the great equalizer is born.
  • On a side note to this topic, it just occurred to me that it was possible that the gun was deliberately faulty. I mean, think about it, it's rare (maybe not rare, but certainly unusual) for guns of even poor quality to malfunction if probably loaded. What if the mob witness (I forget his name) had been given a gun that he, and his superiors, knew was faulty? They weren't trying to kill him at all, just scare him off. After all, killing a DA in a courtroom in front of that many witnesses would probably get you a life sentence at least. Who would agree to that? But attempted murder would get you a considerably shorter sentence and the guy would be able to reap his rewards upon leaving jail.
    • On the other hand, any mafia button man who's willing to get a life sentence for his boss is going to be set up for life. He's going to find himself extremely well taken care of in prison, particularly in a corrupt city like Gotham where even the prison guards are probably in the mob's pocket. The few inmates who don't fear and respect the guy who had the brass to shoot the DA in the face in the middle of the courtroom are going to find themselves with a knife in the back if they try to mess with him. Prison might just be a long vacation.
      • Alternativly that guy just screwed up big time and was given a choice between concrete shoes and a swim in the harbour or killing Harvey Dent.
• Hong Kong. Wouldn't Gotham's media go crazy over the fact that their superhero was in another country? Yes, it was a once-off visit for Gotham's benefit, but even then the media should be asking questions.
  • • What would they go crazy about? Batman hasn't exactly signed an exclusive contract or anything with the city or anything. And the media is already asking all kinds of questions about Batman.
    • The only people who saw him, really, are Lau's men. Even if they told someone, remember Dent snarking that Lau's "travel plans are not [Gotham's] concern"?
    • Even if the media knew about it, Batman is doing nothing more than extraditing a criminal back to Gotham for prosecution. No different than if Scarecrow had fled to a neighboring city/state and Batman had brought him back.
    • Oh no, extradition involves transfer of criminals through a legal process. Batman simply went to Hong Kong and nabbed Lau's ass, since the Chinese wouldn't allow one of their citizens to be extradited to the US.
• There was a lot that bothered me from the hospital scene (the aforementioned impossibility of the Joker's bombs being planted for one), but nothing stuck out more than the way the doctors had covered Dent's face. In real life, they would definitely have his head fully wrapped than lightly place a thin layer of gauze on the side that was burned. Aside from the impracticably, it's just down right cruel. If I were a burn victim, I'd feel taunted if someone did that to me.
  • Harvey has been refusing treatment. And this being the Joker, the bombs were probably dispersed through the building hidden in... I don't know, get-well-soon flowers? Stuffed animals? Medical supply boxes? It's likely the building was wired to blow before he ever made the threat.
• Not really a big one; but who makes Joker's clothes? Does he hire a goon to do it or does he sit at home next to a sewing machine making them (I prefer the latter for LOL purposes)
  • Would a purple suit really be that hard to find? Beyond that, The Joker mentions that he bought it ("And by the way; the suit wasn't cheap. You autta know, you bought it.")
  • "You bought it," could be referring to the materials. Gordon says his clothing is all custom, no labels, so he probably had it custom made by a tailor (who he probably paid, then killed anyway).
    • The "You Bought It" is a joke. Joker's been stealing their money, and since the heist has acquired a bright purple suit.
  • Heck, for all we know, Joker just sewed it himself. Maybe he likes to sew things when he's not busy killing people.
    • He was able to sew a bomb inside of a human being and keep them alive afterwards, so there's some evidence of sewing/suturing skills.
    • A bomb and a cellphone.
      • (shudder)
      • The Grinch is good with a Singer; why not the Joker?
• When he's in custody why does the Joker still have his makeup on? In the Nolanverse Joker's face isn't chemically bleached like in most other versions, he is specifically stated to be wearing makeup and we see him without it in a scene. During the booking process wouldn't they take the makeup off in order to take accurate booking photos?
  • One reason I can think of is that before they could get to taking a mugshot of him, they got the information that Harvey and Rachael were missing, and instead they opted postponing going through with it in order to interrogate him as to their whereabouts.
  • Plus they had literally just finished taking him to the station after having all of their resources stretched to the near-breaking point, the simple answer is that they hadn't gotten to the booking process yet because they had to secure all of his goons, go over all his weapons, and make sure they had every base covered before going through the procedures since the slightest slip-up would be seized by the mob's lawyers.

• Harvey says “you either die a hero or live to become the villain.", so does that mean that because Batman was never the public hero, and he will not use the sonar system to spy on people, he will never be corrupted like Harvey was? But at the same time, if Alfred had let Bruce read the note that Rachel wrote, would he have gone bad like Dent? How is anyone’s faith being rewarded by lying to them? What did the joker threatening to blow up boats have to do with spying on people, except that it pointed out that they needed to spy on people in order to get the bad guys? Why did Harvey Dent accuse Gordon of making a deal with the devil? If the device that was used to spy on people was used to save the day, why did they destroy at the end of the movie?
  • Okay, that's a lot of difference questions. Bruce probably would have quit being Batman if he had read the note; Harvey went bad because he lost everything that mattered to him, while Bruce at that point still had a father-figure in his life. Bruce's faith in Rachel was rewarded by Alfred not breaking the news to him that she wasn't waiting for him, since the truth would have been more devestating and there's no reason to let him know since Rachel is gone. Joker's blowing up the boats had nothing to do with the spying, Batman justified the spying in order to stop the Joker, but everyone involved knew that it was simply unethical and too much power to be put into anyone's hand, since power corrupts. Hence why Batman destroys it at the end; he created it soley to stop the Joker and destroyed it to prevent it from being abused. Harvey accused Gordon of making deals with the devil in relation to the rest of his unit, since they were both betrayed by corrupt Officers, just like Harvey brought up with the first meeting with Batman.

• Two questions: 1. How come when Batman caught the Joker with his grapple gun, it didn't result in killing him from the sudden stop? 2. Joker decides Batman must love Rachel because he jumped out the window to save her. But what's to say he wouldn't have done that for any hostage dropped out a window? What makes that act so special?
  • Presumably there was enough give to slow down Joker's momentum enough to not kill him. And his exact words "the way you threw yourself after her" showed that Joker noticed just the slightest bit that Batman clearly had something for Rachel.

• Does anyone else think the theme about "Truth versus Faith" seem like a really awful lesson? I mean, it suited the circumstances, but otherwise, it's a pretty dishonest moral.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop

• If nearly all of Gotham's cops are corrupt, where do all the SWAT teams come from? What about all the other cops? I remember there being two corrupt officers who kidnap Harvey and Rachel one of whom was being blackmailed, but it seems like most of the rest are honest. Is Gotham's reputation just that bad?
  • It may not be that the actual majority of the cops are crooked, but the ones in important positions are crooked. Also, there's degrees of crookedness--not all of them are going to be at the "actively collaborating with mobsters" level.
    • And even good cops aren't omnipotent. Maybe they don't know that the guy giving them orders is being bought.

• In the fight in the construction site, did Batman really have to beat up every single SWAT officer present? No simpler, non-violent way like telling them which hostages are which?
  • They were breaching a room with armed "suspects." They would not have stopped to listen to Batman.
  • He tied them up and hung them from the side of the building. That was probably the most "non-violent" way he could have stopped them, and despite how it sounds describing it, it was a pretty harmless ordeal.

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