Two-Face (Batman: The Animated Series)

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“Two-Face”
Batman: The Animated Series episode
Episode no. Season 1
Episode 10 and 17
Written by Alan Burnett
Randy Rogel
Directed by Kevin Altieri
Production no. 010 & 017
Original airdate September 25, 1992
September 28, 1992
Episode chronology
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"Be a Clown" "It's Never Too Late"
List of Batman: The Animated Series episodes

Two-Face is a two-part episode of the first season of Batman: The Animated Series. Al Pacino was originally offered to voice Two-Face, but he turned it down. Richard Moll was then cast as D.A. Harvey Dent. This is considered by many to be one of the darkest episodes of the series.

Contents

[edit] Plot

[edit] Part I

The episode starts with District Attorney Harvey Dent in dreaming that he is being confronted by a mysterious doppelganger, frightened by his twin's repetitive coin flipping, and the dream ends just as the dark, ominous double assures Harvey: "It's time, Harvey... it's time!"

Two-Face
Two-Face

Dent awakens in his office, aroused by a fellow secretary from the D.A.'s office, and heads to meet with Police Commissioner Gordon as he assaults a derelict building that has been taken over by members of Rupert Thorne's gang, heavily defended with stolen weapons and supplies from Gotham Army's depots. Batman intervenes, their combined efforts ensure the gang's capture. Dent publicly congratulates the police and proudly thanks Chief Gordon just as one of the captured crooks splashes Dent's white suit with mud, taunting him with the assurance that he and his comrades will be free. Dent enters a paroxysm of fury, and attacks the crook before everyone around him stops him from beating the man. A second later, Dent inexplicably reverts back to his amiable, corteous self, with seemingly with no memory of the fit of rage.

Meanwhile, Thorne is gritting his teeth, as Dent's actions have crippled his interests in Gotham. He commands his moll, Candice, to find something dirty about Dent's past, despite Dent having a record "clean as a newly-minted dollar". Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, becomes concerned about Dent's mental health when he threatens him violently after learning Thorne's men have been released on lack of evidence, and as one of his oldest friends, advises him to find psychiatric help. But since Dent is in the middle of a reelection campaign as Gotham's D.A. and he knows that if he loses, Gotham will be in the palm of Thorne's hand, and therefore, has to keep a tight web of secrecy about his recurring assaults to avoid the citizens from learning his secret. But he takes Bruce's advice, and goes to Dr. Nora Crest for treatment.

Under hypnosis, while Candice eavesdrops, an alternate personality known as "Big Bad Harv" surfaces, who resents Dent on the grounds that "the guy's a wimp." After a violent confrontation in Crest's office, vocally refusing to let "Mr. Goody-good" take over and get rid of him, Crest pleads with Dent to remain interned, but he won't have it, instead accepting therapy during the reelection race. Later, Dent gives a speech, with a crowd of his supporters, Bruce Wayne, and his fianceé, Grace Lamont, present. During the ensuing party, however, Harvey receives a call in a secluded office from Thorne, who warns him to board a limousine waiting for him outside the manor - or risk the exposure of Big Bad Harv.

Dent leaves, bumping into Wayne into his way out. Wayne changes into Batman after noticing his friend's odd demeanour, and follows the limousine to a desolate chemical plant, where Thorne and his gang confront Harvey, threatening to expose his treatment records to the press unless Harvey complies with his demands. Once as a boy, he fought back against a bully, only to learn the bully got sent to the hospital (albeit for appendicitis, it turned out) and repressed his anger from that point on. Under pressure, he oddly calms down, smiles, and informs them of one minor glitch: "You're talkin' to the wrong Harvey." True to his word, it is Big Bad Harv who rises and attacks Thorne and his accomplices, wiping out the gang with the reluctant aid of Batman. He then sees Thorne seize the therapy records, and chases him through a walkway of the plant, but a stray gunshot from a thug hits a vital switchboard, the cables of which touch the intensely volatile compounds lying in the vat below Harv.

The ensuing explosion nearly kills Harvey, who is immediately transferred to a Gotham hospital. Thorne ponders, unsure, whether he has finished Harvey. As Dent awakens and his bandages are removed, he demands a mirror, just as Grace walks down the hall to meet him - and sees him screaming and bolting from his room, one side of his body has been scarred by the chemicals, giving him an extremely horrible appearance: half healthy, half a monster. With this sight, she faints. Dent, muttering a rueful farewell, flees through the hospital's window.

[edit] Part II

The following episode opens some weeks later, with a building with the numbers "222", and a limousine parking just outside a seedy-looking building. Inside, a voice tells a man with half his body in darkness it's Rupert Thorne's bookie joint. The man then proceeds to flip a coin and to sentence: "Good head-we leave 'em alone; bad head, we hit 'em hard." To this, the joint is assaulted by a set of identical twins wielding tommyguns-and Harvey himself, now wearing a suit that's half white, half black, mimicking his own fractured mind, and calling himself Two-Face. The twins empty the cashiers, but when they open the joint's safe, Two-Face flips his coin again. As the result is good heads, he decides to leave without the safe's contents. Nevertheless, he destroys the joint and warns everyone he wants to give a message to Thorne: he's going down.

Thorne, infuriated that his most fearsome enemy is now targeting him without the constraint of the law and hurting his pocket much more than he ever did as District Attorney, puts a two-million dollar contract on Two-Face's head. Candice remarks, when a thug says he thought they had killed Two-Face: "Are you kidding? We created him." That night, Bruce Wayne has a nightmare of his friend Harvey, and his demonic descent into Two-Face, and how he was powerless to prevent it-and Harvey demands to know why, if he was his friend, he didn't save him. With Thomas and Martha Wayne asking as well why they weren't saved, the dream ends. Started by the horrible nightmare, Bruce vows to bring Harvey back.

Later, two police officers visit Grace, and leave her a beeper with instructions to activate it just as Harvey contacts or meets her. As the policemen leave, it is shown one of them is actually Candice, who says she's sure Two-Face will return to Grace sooner or later. In Two-Face's hideout, Two-Face starts sharing out the profits of the assault to the joint-but his eyes close in pain when he opens his wallet and sees a happy photo of the old days, with Grace at his side. One of the twins asks him why, if he misses her so much, he doesn't go to see her. Two-Face responds to this by flipping his coin-which lands in bad heads. However, he says he's through with humiliating Thorne-and that he's ready to do to him exactly what he did to him.

In the Batcave, Batman deducts that all the places Two-Face had robbed, aside from making a mention to the number two in some way, were also connected as illegitimate businesses of Rupert Thorne's. He also deducts that Two-Face no longer wants to discredit Thorne, but rather destroy him-and guesses his next target. At the office of Thorne's attorney, a man with the surname Doubleday, Two-Face finds a record implicating Thorne into the dirtiest secrets of crime. Batman tries to stop them by convincing Two-Face to surrender, but he's stopped short of making it. Two-Face escapes with the journal, and knocks out Batman with a powerful kick to the abs.

Later, Two-Face finally calls Grace, and tells her to meet him, by stepping into a limousine waiting for her outside. Grace does so-and activates the beeper in her way. Thorne, that moment, interrupts his rants as Candice tells him the beeper's been activated. The limousine Grace stepped into stops at a derelict club called "Wild Deuce 2", where she enters a large room-half of it carefully groomed, and half of it violently destroyed. Harvey stands in the middle of it-half his face covered by a cloth. When Grace tries to reason with him, he starts alking about the luck, and how it determines whether one's good or bad. Grace doesn't believe him, and tries to compel him to regain control of his life. She then removes the cloth covering Harvey's injuries, and says she still loves him. His passion for duality destroyed, Harvey breaks into sobs.

A moment later, however, Thorne enters the club, and kills Two-Face's twin bodyguards. He then asks for the stolen data-only to receive a flat negative by Two-Face. Thorne also imbalances Harvey again by revealing it was Grace who led them to him, under the pretence of a police chase. By threatening Grace's life, Thorne convinces Harvey to tell him where the file is. Revealing it to be under the club's roulette, Two-Face reluctantly gives up the file. Nevertheless, Thorne gives the order to execute both Grace and Two-Face. Batman, however, thwarts the order, and together with Two-Face, they disable the gang and Thorne is trapped under a massive chandelier, unable to escape. Two-Face, despite Thorne's pleas, nearly shoots him with a nearby tommygun, before Grace's pleas not to do so prompt him to take his coin and flip it. Batman, however, dumps a large crate of silver dollars nearby, leaving him unable to discern which is his coin. Desperate without something to rule his life with, Harvey collapses in the club's floor.

The ending lies with Jim Gordon wondering whether's hope for Harvey, and Batman, who says wherever there is love, there's hope. As Harvey and Grace fade in the Arkham van, Batman throws a coin in a nearby fountain that turns heads up, implying that Harvey Dent still has a chance.

[edit] Cast

Actor Role
Kevin Conroy Bruce Wayne / Batman
Bob Hastings Commissioner James Gordon
Richard Moll Harvey Dent/Big Bad Harv/Two-Face
Murphy Cross Grace Lamont
Mari Devon Summer Gleeson
Bob Doqui Doctor
Matt Landers Frankie
Diane Michelle Candace
Linda Gary Dr. Nora Crest
Marc Tubert Carlos
John Vernon Rupert Thorne
Micky Dolenz Min & Max

[edit] Trivia

  • Grace Lamont, Harvey Dent's fiancee, is played by Murphy Cross, who also played a love interest of Richard Moll on the TV series Night Court.
  • Besides being a two-part episode, it is also on Disc Two of the Batman: The Animated Series Volume 1 DVD collection. It is also the first episode with double digits.
  • The scene where Harvey Dent first sees his new appearance in the hospital was intended to be similar to the scene in Batman where Jack Nicholson first discovers his Joker-like appearance.
  • This, the tenth episode of the series to be produced, marked the time when the writers felt the series really took an adult turn - and for the better.
  • The scene where Harvey lies in the hospital while Bruce worries about the possible mental damage the accident caused, you can see his hair, neckline, and hand are clearly undamaged and unscarred. However, when Grace faints after seeing him for the first time as Two-Face by the end of the first part, his hair is discolored and his neck is scarred also; his hand is scarred by the beginning of the second installment.
  • During the beginning of the bank robbery at the start of the second part, Two-Face tells everyone "For the next five minutes, I'm in charge!" This was spoken by Al Pacino, whom the producers wanted to voice the character, in Dog Day Afternoon.
  • When Harvey Dent opens his wallet to give the goons their cut of the money they stole from Throne's shop, you can see the #666 on his credit card in his wallet.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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