Set two years after the previous mini-series, Barbara Gordon is now a captain in GCPD, thanks the info Harvey had and Selina fed to her to take down crooked politicians. Barbara knows Bruce is Batman thanks to her father's journals (Gordon figured it out), but kept the secret so long as he put away the suit. And he has, for two years.
But now civilians are dressing up as Batman, and four of them have been killed by robbers that went berserk at the sight of the cowl. Barbara wants to know what Bruce knows about it. Too bad even Alfred hasn't seen Bruce in over a month. In what is surely an entirely unrelated development, the notorious mad bomber Firefly was just captured and remanded to the care of Dr. Jonathan Crane of Arkham Asylum.
This mini-series has a lot stuffed in it. Too much, probably. You've got Bruce Wayne impersonating a traumatized soldier-turned-terrorist he hunted down, because certain things in the man's manifesto reminded him of Hugo Strange, who apparently worked for Wayne, but recently died under suspicious circumstances. Crane is Strange's protege, and a rival of TV psychiatrist Harleen Qunizel (who I think Quinones bases visually on Madonna) and her "persona therapy."
Two of Strange's other patients are "Edward Nigel Maynard," who is the Riddler (but also a former soldier), and a guy named Desmond, another soldier, but hopped up on steroids and some kind of berserker fury drug. He's called "the Blockbuster." And there's another guy, someone Strange's soldiers found overseas who was urged to participate in the work. He's in a coma, and looks emaciated at first, then steadily regains musculature until he wakes up and walks out of the Asylum. He's very interested in Strange's work, and the improvements Crane made to Strange's drugs. It's Ra's Al Ghul, who I think is based on Ricardo Montalbahn. If so, hell yeah, good call by Quinones.
So it's sort of Batman Begins, but you've also got Winston Drake, who has not retired from crimefighting like Batman, in an outfit a bit like Nightwing's, with an entire crew of people who he calls "Nightwings" that help him out. That just sort of pops up as a thing in the last two issues. Barbara abruptly finds herself the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation. At some point we don't see, she refused to help Selina with something. So Selina set up a hidden bank account to make it look like Barbara was taking kickbacks. This seems to be Hamm's way to have her to ask Bruce for help, since she'd otherwise be antagonistic, but there's no resolution. She's not cleared.
And it's an origin story for Harley Quinn, who did some unethical stuff to get herself a regular TV show, only to get screwed by her producer and the station owner. She ends up needing Selina's help to escape an assassination attempt, and Selina promises to train her up in, not playing by men's rules, I guess.
And there's an element that Batman's maybe treating this whole thing, trying to stop Ra's from getting the fear toxin, as his last ride. Basically, Crane's fear toxin is the lineage of Strange's work that Wayne funded. That's what Batman's accomplished with all his work, his efforts to use fear as a force for change: drugs that could be horribly abused in the wrong hands. He tells Drake his method, getting the community involved, giving them a stake in protecting their homes by working together, is a better way of doing things.
Quinones does some fun stuff with the page layouts during the scenes in the asylum. Crane shows "Firefly" different images to assess his responses, and Quinones alternates rows of the images with a graph of either Bruce's heartrate or brain activity, showing his response or lack thereof. Painful memories are shown in panels shaded in red and outlined with thick black borders. There's one panel of Harley's producer, dosed on fear gas, trying to hide in the room that controls the camera feeds and seeing a dozen different versions of Harley dancing their ways out of the screen.
Can't say Hamm and Quinones aren't doing their damndest to give us our money's worth, but there's just so much going on. It's a movie sequel experiencing bloat, or villain overload or whatever you call it when they start cramming too many antagonists into the third film in the franchise (though I guess this would be the fourth, if the prior mini was the third.) The Quinzel stuff and the fear stuff are woven through the entire mini-series. Crane studying fear to see how to use it further his drug work, while Quinzel uses her patients' issues for shock value to further her career as a TV personality. Each regards the other with contempt, but they're two sides of the same coin. Crane thinks Quinzel's a fraud, but he treats his patients as guinea pigs, hardly ethical.
So much of the rest feels like flyby, blink and you'll miss it, stuff. Little set-up, less payoff. Too important for just Easter eggs, but not developed. Batman on a suicide run, dosing himself with the berserker drug when he confronts Ra's? Out of nowhere. Prior to that, he's talking about how they'll just have to deal with the possibility Barbara outs him if and when it happens. There's a brief scene where Bruce is frightened by the sight of his own costume, as though Crane's treatments affected him. Even though Bruce took a dose of something Strange designed for him that is essentially a mind-wipe drug. Not developed, unless you figure the idea was that, if he's even terrifying to himself, it's time for Batman to end. But he doesn't end. Not dead, not retired, not outed.
Barbara's working with them by the end of the mini-series, her problem of being framed for corruption not addressed. I have no idea if Maynard is on the loose, or what happened with Blockbuster. I don't know if Ra's is dead or not. If there was going to be another mini-series, maybe it's threads to be picked up later. As far as I know, that's not the case. Maybe not a surprise, given it took almost two years for the 6 issues to come out, including 9 months between issues 5 and 6.
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