C'mon Now, Batsy!

Back before Bill Willingham, Robin was written by a fellow named Jon Lewis for about a year and a half. His last story arc involved Tim's 16th birthday, and someone delivering a featureless white cube to Tim's home. Tim goes to Batman to help him figure out who sent it, why, and what it is exactly. At one point, the cube opens, and attaches glasses and earphones to Tim's head and he receives a message. From an Alfred from the future. With a metal hand, no less.

Future Alfred tells Tim that things have fallen apart because some time not to long from when Tim sees this message, one of their little family will go too far in trying to protect the innocent, try to establish a police state, the powers that be will strike back, and it all goes to hell from there. Alfred lays it at Robin's feet to find and stop their ally, but gets shot before the message is completed. So it's down to Tim, as he figures he can't trust any of them with this knowledge.

So he proceeds to drive himself halfway round the bend. He sneaks into the cave to try and use some "neuro-ontoscope" Batman whipped up to try and pry secrets from the goon who apparently delivered and built the package (but doesn't remember doing either), only to see the device gets smashed while he tries to subdue the guy (who has gotten free somehow). He comes up with scenarios to explain how any of the others could gotten to the point Alfred describes, even plans out a scenario that he will suggest to each of them, to see if they bite, and give themselves away as the future traitor.

OK, spoilers for the conclusion after this point.

As he gets ready to put it into action, Future Alfred appears before him, fully solid, not a message, not shot. Tim realizes something's off and attacks him and discovers it's actually . . . Present Day Alfred*. Yep. The whole thing was training. Batman built the cube, he and Alfred came up with the message, Bats hired an actor to portray the goon. Batman even built some hunk of junk called a neruo-ontoscope to see if Tim would think to take it apart and verify what it did (he didn't, minus points, Timmy). He does give Tim points for keeping an open mind and questioning the character of his closest friends (yep, not trusting your friends. That's certainly something Batman would consider important).

Cheap shots at Batman's interpersonal skills aside, he does choose one rather curious thing, to criticize Robin for. Batman tells Robin that he should have dismissed the whole thing outright on the grounds that it involved time travel. Let us think about this for a moment. Batman has been on the Justice League with Booster Gold, who is from the 25th Century. Maybe Booster somehow kept that info a secret from Batman. I haven't read much of the JLI "Bwa-Ha-Ha!" issues, so I don't know whether Booster being from the future was common knowledge among his teammates or not. I suppose it's possible Batman knew, but just figured Booster was delusional, though I'd think a mind scan by J'onn could debunk that mighty quickly.

I would think, though, that Tim would struggle to scoff at time travel, when one of his best friends is Bart Allen, who's from the 30th Century, and I really can't believe that Impulse would be able to keep the fact he's from the future a secret from his friends, even if he felt like it. Now, I grant that Future Alfred was only from about a decade or so in the future (2012 I think, but the story is from late '03), but given that there are people who do the Temporal Shuffle around the DCu when the story took place, it doesn't seem preposterous someone might get ahold of their work. Especially if some super-hero decides to take over everything and people start getting desperate.

It's funny. When I read this story originally, I was mostly annoyed by Bats being a jerk, because it really does seem a bit excessive just to teach Tim some stuff about deduction, on the grounds that Robin needs to learn to 'Question everything.' I was right there with Tim as he threw his cape in Batman's face and told him 'Go to Hell!'. Heck, I'm still with Tim on that one, even if he did wind up going back to Batman, but the time travel thing stands out a bit more now that I know more about DC than I did back then (I think Robin and JLA were the only DC titles I was buying at that time).

I guess this is one of those cases where the title exists in a separate universe all to itself, and so things that involve these characters in other books didn't necessarily carry over this one. Still, based on the point Batman was trying to get across, I think the things he brought up were probably sufficient. I wonder how much he had the deck stacked against Robin, though. For example, if Tim had tried fingerprinting the actor pretending to be the goon called Yak Black, would it have revealed the truth, or had Batman rigged the Batcomputer to confirm the fake's identity, to further mess with Robin. Actually, now that I think of it, if Batman wants Robin to 'question everything', then he shouldn't have chastised the kid for accepting time travel. Batman may think it isn't possible, but that doesn't make it so**.

* Alfred then offers Tim a drink from a flask, saying Tim's of age tonight, regardless of his birthdate. Never pictured Alfred for a flask man, or a consumer of liquor, for that matter. Must have been stressful business.

** Since Batman's belief do not control the universe, regardless of what his ego might believe. Unless he stole the Reality Gem from the Marvel Universe recently. Which I wouldn't put past the guy.