Warning: this article contains minor spoilers for the first episode of The Penguin! Check out IGN’s spoiler-free review for the new series . The first episode of The Penguin has arrived on HBO, and there’s one character who’s conspicuous by his absence. Robert Pattinson’s Batman is nowhere to be seen, despite the series taking place in the immediate aftermath of 2022’s The Batman.
And if star Colin Farrell is to be believed, we won’t be seeing the Dark Knight at all in this series. “This story takes place over five or six weeks, so it seemed to make sense to the creatives, to Matt [Reeves] and to Lauren [LeFranc], that he didn't need to appear in this,” Farrell told IGN in a new roundtable interview with the show’s cast. “And it's a very different side of Gotham, as well.
Not that Batman doesn't get his hands dirty in the shadows, of course, but it's a very, very different part of Gotham that I've never seen before. It's really the underbelly of the city and it's down in the gutter.” How can a Batman series get away with not featuring Batman, especially when one of his most memorable villains is the star of the show? Where is the Caped Crusader right now, anyway? Here’s what we know about Batman’s whereabouts after the first episode.
As much as it might seem silly to do a spinoff of The Batman without Pattinson’s Batman, Farrell’s comments make sense. This series explores a very different corner of Gotham City from the one Batman inhabits. Literally.
Based on the first movie, Bruce seems to focus the majority of his attention on Gotham’s downtown area - the places where innocent citizens are most often the victims of crime. That’s where the lion’s share of the robberies and muggings and attempted murders are happening, and that’s what Batman has set out to stop. By comparison, The Penguin is showing us the parts of Gotham Batman doesn’t normally patrol.
We’re seeing the slums that characters like Rhenzy Feliz’s Victor Aguilar and his friends call home. We’re seeing the relatively quieter and more remote suburbs where Oz’s mother Francis (Dierdre O’Connell) still lives, waiting for her son to whisk her away to a life of luxury. And we’re seeing the wealthier side of Gotham, where the elite like the Falcone family bosses enjoy their mansions and carefully manicured grounds.
These are all places Batman isn’t likely to set foot. One thing the first movie established about Pattinson’s Batman is that he’s not the most efficient crimefighter. He’s a very reactive force.
Again, in that movie we see him focusing on stopping muggers and roving gang members before being sucked into the Riddler killings. He’s not really focused on targeting the root of Gotham’s crime and the men like John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone who pull the strings of the city, at least until Riddler puts him on the trail of “El Rata Alada.” This is why, even after two years on the job, Batman laments that he doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference in his city.
Compare Pattinson’s Bruce to Christian Bale’s Bruce in the Dark Knight trilogy. By the opening of 2008’s The Dark Knight, Bale’s Batman has been on the job for roughly a year and is making great progress in systematically dismantling Gotham’s underworld. He knows how to target the corruption at its source, whereas Pattinson’s Batman is still figuring out how to do more than savagely pummel criminals into submission.
If anything, The Penguin reinforces that idea by specifically focusing on the parts of the city Batman ignores. Batman really should be more interested in men like Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobb, the ones jockeying for power in the vacuum left behind by Falcone’s death. We’re seeing the slow rise of a man ambitious and scheming enough to become the new kingpin of the Gotham underworld.
A better, more experienced Batman would be working to nip this problem in the bud. But that’s not really the modus operandi of Pattinson’s Dark Knight. Gotham City After The Batman To be fair, though, there’s also the fact that Batman has other pressing problems to deal with in the aftermath of the first movie.
Let’s not forget that The Batman ends with Riddler sabotaging Gotham’s sea wall and flooding the downtown area. There’s no telling how many hundreds or thousands of citizens are either dead or missing, to say nothing of the countless people displaced by the flooding. We have to imagine Batman’s biggest priority right now is helping those people and easing Gotham’s suffering.
Saving the city from Riddler and his fellow terrorists taught Batman that he can be more than just vengeance incarnate. He can also be a force for justice and hope in a city that has precious little of either. Of course Batman is going to focus on aiding first responders and saving more lives over keeping tabs on a mid-level mobster like Oz Cobb, even if that creates more problems for him down the road.
That all being said, there’s an even better reason why Batman isn’t showing up in The Penguin. He’s gone missing. That revelation is one of several tidbits included in a faux-newspaper created as promotional material for The Penguin .
The paper includes a political cartoon that shows a dejected Commissioner Gordon standing by the Bat-Signal while an officer tells him, “It’s been weeks, sir...
” It would seem that Batman has suddenly vanished from the spotlight, even as the city cries out for its protector more than ever. Despite having discovered the positive influence his actions can have on the city, Batman has for some reason gone to ground and stopped assisting the police and emergency crews in the cleanup. Why would Batman abandon Gotham when it needs him most? We can only assume Pattinson’s character is currently learning another important lesson - he can do as much or more for his city as Bruce Wayne than he can as Batman.
That’s something characters like Andy Serkis’ Alfred and Jayme Lawson’s Bella Reál tried their best to impress upon him in the original movie, and it’s a lesson that may finally be sinking in. As Bruce sees the mass display of human suffering in Gotham, he may realize that Bruce Wayne’s money and influence can have a far more profound impact than Batman’s fists. As Batman exposed the corruption inside Gotham’s government, he came to realize how much his own money made that corruption possible.
His father donated a billion dollars to the city as part of the Gotham Renewal Fund, money that was promptly hoarded and embezzled by gangsters like Falcone and corrupt city officials like Rupert Penry-Jones’ Mayor Mitchell. If Bruce is going to make a real difference, he needs to take a more active hand in ensuring his family wealth is spent properly. That means doing the thing he wants least - putting Batman on the back burner and venturing into the daylight as Bruce Wayne again.
Adapting Batman: No Man’s Land Reeves’ Bat-Verse may be drawing inspiration from the 1999 DC Comics crossover Batman: No Man’s Land. In that storyline, Gotham City is dealing with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. Gotham is so badly damaged that the US government evacuates the city.
The only people left are criminals, costumed villains, and those civilians too stubborn or unable to flee. Even Batman is MIA at the beginning of the crossover, leaving a handful of heroes like Commissioner Gordon, Oracle, and Huntress to try to maintain some semblance of law and order. The reason Batman is missing in No Man’s Land is the same reason we assume he’s missing in The Penguin - he’s too busy focusing on being Bruce Wayne for a change.
In No Man’s Land, Bruce lobbies the government for aid and fights to save the city from being written off as a lost cause. He becomes embroiled in a high-stakes battle with Lex Luthor, who sees the disaster as an opportunity to swoop in and buy up property for himself, effectively rebuilding Gotham City in his own image. We doubt that Luthor has a part to play in Reeves’ The Batman universe, but the same idea probably holds true.
Batman is missing from Gotham because Bruce Wayne is too busy trying to save his dying city. Right now, Gotham needs Bruce more than it needs Batman. And if that leaves Batman unable to respond to the new turmoil breaking out within the Falcone crime family, then that’s a problem he’ll just have to deal with in The Batman 2.
For more on The Penguin, learn 7 things you need to know about The Penguin , and find out why Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone is such a big deal . Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter .
.
