The problematic plot of Batman: Arkham Knight
*Warning: This article contains numerous spoilers for the plot of Batman: Arkham Knight.
I really enjoyed the stories in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City so naturally I was excited to see what Rocksteady was going to do with Arkham Knight. I was thoroughly enthralled with jumping back into the series at first. And then after only a brief amount of playing, I saved Gotham from a massive fear toxin explosion and the plot began its nosedive into aggravation. While Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are spot on and really bring their characters to life, the script they’re working off of is lazy and trope filled.
Right off the bat, I began groaning about the direction of the story in Arkham Knight. Why did you have to turn Oracle into a damsel in distress? Batman already had plenty of motivation to save Gotham. I’m pretty certain that it’s his only motivation for getting out of bed in the morning. The game was great without needing to take a strong, intelligent character and reducing her to a mere objective. In previous games, Batman would have been lost without her ability to monitor and advise him along the way. That she is easily replaced by Alfred (who can now apparently control city systems with ease) is downright infuriating. And then she’s reduced even further by having Batman witness her apparent suicide. Even the flashback of her being shot by Joker only serves as a way to allow Batman to feel guilty because he should have protected her. She goes from essential character to plot objective and then to motive. On top of that, even if that’s the best plot they could come up with, they abducted the wrong character. (More on that in a bit.) Oracle is the worst example, but certainly not the only one.
Catwoman is another capable character now needing to be saved by the Dark Knight. At least Selina has a small role to play in her own rescue. She’s tricked into her capture, but that’s not necessarily better. It’s twice that the writers decided to use an abducted comrade to motivate Batman. Another damsel in distress for him to swoop in and save. Again, this is a completely unnecessary use of a tired plot device. Players will confront Riddler (especially if they want to see the 100% ending) without needing to undermine Catwoman as a character.
Like the treatment of Oracle, Catwoman’s arc is problematic in the way that the writing portrays female characters as incapable and in need of rescue. It’s disappointing to see characters who had featured prominently in previous games knocked down in this way. However, this is only part of why the story in Arkham Knight is just plain bad. The lazy writing and the overuse of an uninspired plot device continues through the game with other characters as well.
The Joker at one point takes a jab at this terrible writing by saying that Batman can’t leave his friends alone for five minutes without one of them getting captured. AND IT’S FUCKING TRUE. Scarecrow goes on to coerce Commissioner Gordon to hand himself over by using Barbara (she’s not really dead) as leverage and finds out where Batman’s secret base is. And because Bruce had already locked Tim away in a cell, Scarecrow captures him, making Robin another piece of bait that Batman still didn’t actually need as motivation! He would have gone after Scarecrow anyway because Batman isn’t cool with him trying to drown Gotham in fear gas. Could they possibly find another way to use this same plot device again? You bet your ass they can.
WTF? How does this even happen?
As a fourth abducted comrade in one game, Nightwing finds himself captured by Penguin’s gang and in need of rescue. Despite his confident attitude in the face of being bound and tortured, this is no less a blow to the character’s agency. There’s no reason to have him caught and used to force Batman (or the player) to finish the mission he was already doing in the first place. It’s a blatant adding of insult to injury when after saving Nightwing and beating up his captors that he’s then CAUGHT AGAIN as soon as Batman turns his back to blow up the weapons cache. Someone please explain to me how in the fuck Penguin manages to get the drop on Nightwing by himself? Dick is literally kneeling just so Penguin can have a gun to his head. Are you fucking serious? Did he waddle up and perform some ninja-leap-choke-hold takedown? This is well beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief, even in a comic-book video game.
Digressing from the shitty use of hostage taking as motivation, there’s the horrid case of the Arkham Knight as a character. First, let me say that when Dax Ginn said that Arkham Knight “is a completely original character,” he was a little off the mark. Changing the name of an existing character’s alter ego and putting him in a different suit is far from completely original. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that started wondering why Arkham Knight seemed a lot like the introduction of Red Hood after encountering him a couple times. It’s bad enough that they tried to play him off as being a new character, but then actually changing his helmet to red once his identity is revealed is annoying. I would have happily played a game with Red Hood as a bad guy without having to be lied to. But fine, he’s really Jason Todd, who never actually died in this universe—he was only tortured for a year by Joker while Batman thought he was dead. We may have had some chance of guessing that if Jason’s story had been introduced sometime before the halfway mark of the third game. The mangled Death in the Family story seems to be badly jammed in as an afterthought.
So why the hell did we not get a story where Jason (former Robin) abducts Tim (current Robin) in order to torture him the way Joker had tortured Jason? Of all the crap that goes on in this game’s plot, that seems like it would have been the most likely scenario to actually happen. Jason should want to show Tim what Bruce is “really like” by perpetuating the cycle of perceived betrayal that Joker had started. While I still don’t think that character abduction is a creative plot element, it would at least make some thematic sense this way. A character that motivated by revenge should want to turn his successor against Batman as well in order to inflict the most pain before killing him. Frankly, I feel it was a missed opportunity for at least somewhat better story telling.
In the end, I’m not so much angry with Rocksteady for this poorly done story as I am very very disappointed with them. I had rather high hopes for the definitive end of their Batman trilogy and what I got fell far short of those expectations. The game is still good, it just could have been great with a more creative narrative driving it. The treatment of female characters is problematic and overlaps with the terrible reuse of the same plot point far too many times.
There are much better tellings of both Red Hood and the unmasking of Bruce Wayne followed by him faking his own death. For Red Hood, I recommend watching Under the Red Hood, since it doesn’t involve comics where Jason is brought back to life as a result of Superman punching so hard that he ripples reality. And for a good version of Batman’s last hurrah before faking his own death, try Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which also features a great Batman-versus-Superman fight to get you ready for the upcoming movie. I really, really hope that the upcoming Batgirl DLC that launches on July 14th starts on the path of redeeming this game.
