Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: arrow, Batman, dc entertainment, entertainment, gotham, tv

What We Learned From DC TV Last Week

By Hilton Collins

A heapin' helpin' of DC Comics-inspired television shows are on the air now that the fall season's underway, and so far I've been watching all of them. Events in Arrow and Gotham struck me the most last week, for different reasons. They're basically "wow" and "what the hell!?" moments, but they definitely left an impression.

1. Starling City Vigilantes Should Wear Protection: No, not that kind of protection. The Kevlar and bulletproof kind of protection—so they won't die from getting shot like poor Canary did in Arrow's "The Calm" episode. A mystery killer fired three arrows (or was that like, sixteen? Seriously) into her torso while she was on a rooftop, and then she fell off, hit a dumpster on her way down, and landed dead right in front of her sister Laurel. It was a shocking ending to the episode for dramatic reasons, but it was also shocking because—really? Homegirl fights people who carry guns and knives and stuff, and she wasn't wearing some Kevlar? At least Batman has body armor because he knows what's up. Let's hope Oliver Queen starts preparing better for his street patrols, or else he's going to be in some big trouble. It is possible that Canary was indeed wearing protection, so maybe those arrows were designed to be deadlier than standard arrows, but if they weren't, she would be ashamed of herself… if she were still alive, that is.

2. Without Balloon Man, there'd be no Batman: Bruce Wayne may have been scarred for life when he witnessed his parents' murder, but that alone wasn't what set him on the path to masked crime fighting. Nope. It was Gotham City's first vigilante, the Balloon Man, who inspired him to become the city's most famous defender. In Gotham's "The Balloon Man" episode, social worker Davis Lamond donned masks, attacked crooks, and handcuffed them to weather balloons. The bad guys crashed to their deaths after the balloons popped, Lamond's method of punishment. Gotham's writers even foreshadowed that more vigilantes would follow in his footsteps. When he's being wheeled away on a gurney after being apprehended, Lamond says to Det. James Gordon, "There will be more like me detective. You know that, don't you?"

The media dubbed Lamond "Balloon Man" for his bizarre behavior, and the news reached young Bruce. The boy read a Gotham Gazette article about him in one scene, mesmerized, and in a later scene, Bruce watched a television news report about Balloon Man's capture. Bruce says to Alfred that Balloon Man was a killer himself, and thus no better than the murdered criminals, but the vigilantism appeared to leave an impression. The television reporter utters another line of cryptic dialogue to Gotham City viewers, "Now that the Balloon Man is gone, who will defend the people of Gotham?" as Bruce watches, and the audience knows that a fateful seed has been planted in the boy's mind.

And like, seriously. One of the most famous, bad ass masked street vigilantes of all time was inspired to be that way by a guy whose hook was killer weather balloons. Killer weather balloons. I'll bet Gotham's writers weren't 100 percent sure that the producers would approve that storyline.

Writer and videographer Hilton Collins loves sci-fi and fantasy wherever he finds it, whether it's in comic books, movies, books, short stories, TV shows, or video games. On the video side, he studies filmmaking, motion graphics, and animation; and on the writing side, he covers what he loves for Bleeding Cool and on his own blog, Imagination Unplugged (www.imaginationunplugged.com), a website about entertainment and self-help for creative professionals. He is @HiltonCollins on Twitter.

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