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There are bodies in Arkham City.
The crews have been clearing them out for days. The corpses, each zipped into its own body bag, are stacked inside the prison intake area to be carted away. The medical examiners have been working full time, matching bodies to prison records.
It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that turning a city into a prison is a bad idea. The survivors have squirreled themselves away into all the nooks and crannies, and even after teams of police have gone through—always in teams of at least four, for protection—and collected all the prisoners they can find, there are over two hundred prisoners unaccounted for.
But they’re still digging out the bodies, so.
Batman stalks the parapets. Sometimes he’ll spend hours perched on a gargoyle or a building ledge, scanning the buildings with his goggles. He can see the faint blue outline of people moving around. Police, searching for survivors. DMORT, searching for anyone else. They’re working on the museum now, sifting through the rubble. Batman had left the Penguin in there.
There are a lot of people Batman had left in this city, and told them he’d be back.
There are shouts below. After a moment, a paramedic bundles another corpse into a body bag. One of Two Face’s men, by the uniform he was wearing. It’s just another criminal that Batman will never have to fight again. There are over six hundred criminals being carted out of this city who will never again hold a knife to someone’s throat, or beat someone to death with a crowbar, or dangle someone over a vat of acid. Assuming, of course, that that’s what they were in for in the first place. Assuming that they weren’t political prisoners who had got in Strange’s way, or people who’d been victims of Gotham City’s corrupt legal system. Hugo Strange’s Protocol Ten didn’t seem too concerned with figuring out which prisoners were likely to be recidivists.
Of the prisoners who are proven recidivists, most of the highest profile ones survived to kill another day. Maybe that was the biggest flaw in Strange’s plan. The rest of the inmates, all those followers, may have been terrible people, but they were nothing without the likes of Two Face and the Penguin and the Joker. They were the sort of people you could find in any prison, and if they’d been left in Blackgate, they would have served out their sentences without much fuss. It’s the big names that cause the most damage. If Strange had really wanted to save Gotham City, he could have carried out a few key assassinations. If Two Face and the Penguin and the Joker had been killed back when they first started causing trouble, Arkham City would have played out differently.
Which brings Batman back around to the Joker, and that’s one place he hasn’t wanted his thoughts to go.
See, the thing is, Batman doesn’t kill people. He operates outside the law, yes. He is, technically, a criminal. But his aim is to take out the criminals that the law can’t catch, and deliver them to be sentenced. He would be more of a criminal if he tried to enact his own justice by killing the people he caught. He could never make the choice that Strange did, to stop crime by slaughtering the bad guys. That’s murder, no matter how you look at it. He isn’t the law, which gives him the benefit of not having to pay much attention to Miranda rights and extradition treaties, but it also means that he has no right to execute anyone. Maybe some people don’t understand the line he draws, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that there is a line Batman will not cross.
So, the dilemma: the world might be better off if some super villains died. But Batman, the only one who can stop them, doesn’t kill.
Wasn’t it lucky that, in the end, the Joker killed himself?
He keeps thinking about the voicemails that the Joker left him. Batman had been the Joker’s only hope at survival, although in the end, the Joker hadn’t trusted him enough. Yes, the Joker had injected himself with Titan back in the asylum. Yes, he did decide, with no evidence, that Batman had gone back on their deal, and he made it as hard as possible for Batman to actually go about saving him. And yes, in the end, his attack on Batman was what caused the cure to drop and shatter.
“Oh, now you want to talk,” the Joker had said.
Batman wonders if things would have been different if he’d answered the phone.
The real reason why Batman doesn’t kill is because he doesn’t trust himself. Maybe, at some point, he could have decided to end someone’s crime spree permanently. After all, incarceration was only ever a temporary measure. But if he killed one supervillain, there was nothing to stop him from killing the next. And then how would his definition of “supervillain” be defined? Would there be a threshold? A certain body count after which a criminal’s life would be forfeit? A certain type of crime that weighed more heavily? A certain type of victim? If Batman defined ‘supervillain’ as someone who murdered more than, say, fifteen victims, he’d have to decide whether that he himself was exempt from the definition. And once he started fitting his own definition of super villain, what then?
But then there was the opposite argument. If he never killed anyone, yet also knew that any criminal he put in Arkham Asylum or Blackgate would inevitably escape, then was he an accessory to those future murders? If he let Crane be dragged into the sewers by Killer Croc, or let Ra’s al Ghul stab Hugo Strange through the chest, or even watched Talia stab Clayface-as-Joker—in other words, if he stood by while others committed the murders he was unable to do, was he responsible for their deaths?
How many people have to die as a result of his inaction before he becomes the criminal with the highest body count in Gotham?
The first time he’d seen Joker’s corpse—the fake one in the steel mill—he’d been so shocked. This wasn’t the way these things happened. For the Joker to misstep in their eternal dance, and just die—
But of course it was a trick. It had almost been a relief, to know that things weren’t that far from the status quo.
In the theater, watching the Joker frantically try to scoop spilled medicine into his mouth, he’d had a moment to think that it was another trick. The Joker always made it out okay somehow.
How many people would never have died if Bruce Wayne had never become Batman?
How many people will die if Batman retires?
He’s trapped. He’ll never get out of this endlessly cycling world of beating criminals down just far enough that they can still bounce back again for the next round. Someone else needs to end this for him. Someone who isn’t restrained by his cowardice and attempted morality. Someone like Hugo Strange, or Ra’s al Ghul.
There’s a lazarus pit under Wonder City. He’d stopped the Joker from getting into it. An immortal Joker is a terrible thought, but the immortality only comes with regular maintenance. Just one dip in the pit could have been enough to save the Joker, and as long as it only happened once…
If he has the means to save someone’s life, even now, days after their death, is it wrong not to? The Joker is dead and gone. He will never kill again. If Batman believes he has the responsibility to save lives, no matter who they are—and he does believe this. He would have given the Joker the cure—then how can he let the Joker remain dead? Is letting someone die the same as keeping them from living? And if he saves someone as despicable as the Joker, is there anyone he shouldn’t try to bring back from the dead?
Maybe he should leave well enough alone. He is no god, to judge who lives and who dies. And he’ll try to stop others from making that judgement as best he can.