“Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club”
Written by Stanford Sherman
Directed by Oscar Rudolph
Season 3, Episode 19
Production code 1719
Original air date: January 18, 1968
The Bat-signal: Gordon is being rewarded for his twenty-five years of service to Gotham at a luncheon at the Gotham Astoria. Gordon sits at the head table along with Barbara, O’Hara, Bruce, and Dick—and there are seats for Mayor Linseed and his wife, who arrive late. When they do show up, they’re arguing.
The argument ends, and Linseed presents Gordon with a 24-carat gold watch—and then discharges him, replacing him as commissioner with Nora Clavicle, a staunch advocate of women’s rights. Clavicle then enters with a woman beating a drum that says “WOMAN POWER,” and she then discharges O’Hara and appoints Mrs. Linseed to be the new chief of police.
Linseed later explains to Bruce that his wife refused to cook or clean or wash his shirts until he appointed Clavicle to be commissioner. He laments that he’s worn the same shirt for weeks and hasn’t had a decent meal in months. (Clavicle’s platform is that women can run Gotham better than men, and if the mayor doesn’t know how to operate a washing machine or get his staff to provide him with clean clothes and food, you can kinda see her point…)
Clavicle cuts off the bat-phone in the commissioner’s office, after informing Batman that his services will no longer be required. After she congratulates Chief Linseed on her reorganizing of the police department, she cackles diabolically, as this is all a plot to start a crime wave. She needs to get Batman, Robin, and Batgirl out of the way, so she has her henchwomen lure them to a bank robbery—said robbery goes off without a hitch because the policewomen are too busy fixing their makeup or discussing recipes to actually stop the crime. The dispatcher is sending all the cars to sales rather than crimes, though the bank robbery gets an offhand mention.
Batman, Robin, and Batgirl are listening to the police frequency, and so they check the bank robbery. They use the portable bat-computer in the Batmobile, which leads them, er, somehow to the Dropstitch & Co. warehouse, manufacturers of knitting needles. But Clavicle is waiting for them, and ambushes the trio, putting a knitting needle to Batgirl’s throat.
The henchwomen tie the three of them into a human Siamese knot. Any movement will tighten the knot and strangle them and/or break a bone or six. Clavicle reveals her master plan: She has taken out an insurance policy on Gotham City itself—so once she destroys it, she’ll be rich.
She’s going to destroy the city with little windup mice that will explode half an hour after sunset. She and her henchwomen wind them up and set them loose.
Batgirl gets a leg cramp, and the muscle contraction of that cramp combined with Batman wiggling his ears and Robin wiggling a finger enables them to untangle themselves. Sure.
They find one of the mice (two policewomen shrieking and standing on a lamppost in fear at the sight of it, because all women are afraid of mice, of course), and the explosive inside it. Batman has Robin call Chief Linseed to have her mobilize the police force, but they’re all standing on desks and chairs and fainting at the sight of mice.
However, Batman gives tin whistles to Robin and Batgirl and has them all play the same tune, which leads the mice to them. Batgirl takes the east side, Robin takes the west side, and Batman does midtown. They converge at the docks, trailed by windup mice, leading them into the river. Well, except for one that won’t go in—Batman plays the tune at the mouse until it falls in, it not occurring to him to pick the stupid thing up and throw it in.
Alfred, O’Hara, and Gordon were alerted by Batman to Clavicle’s likely fleeing of the city, where she exceeded the speed limit, so they made a citizen’s arrest. Somehow this is enough to put Clavicle and her henchwomen in prison and the men all get their jobs back, even though there’s no proof that Clavicle did anything wrong (aside from exceeding the speed limit, which is a fine-able offense, not an imprisoning one).
Still and all, somehow, Gordon and O’Hara are back to work—and then the Penguin calls Gordon with a threat…
Fetch the Bat-shark-repellant! The Batmobile has a mobile bat-computer, which makes you wonder why they’ve driven the fourteen miles back to the Batcave to use the one there so many times in the past. Batgirl laments that she has nothing so sophisticated in her Batgirl-cycle. Batman also keeps three tin whistles in the Batmobile, apparently. (Maybe they were in his utility belt. Whatever.)
Holy #@!%$, Batman! After listening in on the police radio to the dispatcher discussing sales more than crime, Robin grumbles, “Holy bargain basements.” After Batgirl is captured by Clavicle and threatened with a knitting needle, Robin cleverly cries out, “Holy knit-one-purl-two!” After they’re tied into a human knot, Robin laments, “Holy hamstrings!” After finding out that Clavicle took out an insurance policy on the city, Robin says, “Holy underwritten metropolis.” After Batman suggests a way out of the Siamese knot, Robin utters, “Holy slipped disc!” After realizing how many windup mice there are, Robin yells, “Holy mechanical armies!”
Gotham City’s finest. After the mass firings by Chief Linseed, the Gotham City Unemployment Office has a special line for ex-policemen, on which we see O’Hara and Gordon standing.
Special Guest Villainess. The great Barbara Rush does the best she can as Nora Clavicle, bringing a certain elegance to the role. Rush is still alive, and was still acting as recently as a decade ago, with a recurring role on 7th Heaven while in her eighties.
Na-na na-na na-na na-na na.
“As the new police commissioner, I intend to carry on my crusade for women’s rights, and to prove that women can run Gotham City better than men. Much better.”
—Clavicle’s statement of intent. Given the competence level shown by the people who run Gotham City, she could hardly do worse…
Trivial matters: This episode was discussed on The Batcave Podcast episode 62 by host John S. Drew with special guest chum, Chris Franklin, cohost of The Super Mates Podcast.
The two policewomen who discuss recipes outside the bank are played by twins Alyce and Rhae Andrece, who also played the Alice robots in the Star Trek episode “I, Mudd.” One of the great comic character actors, Larry Gelman—who’s pretty much the Platonic ideal of the shnook—plays the bank manager. Byron Keith makes his first of two third-season appearances as the mayor (he’ll be back one last time in “The Joker’s Flying Saucer”), while Jean Byron, late of The Patty Duke Show, plays his wife.
Apparently the name “Nora Clavicle” was supposed to be a play on Gloria Steinem, the women’s right activists who would later found Ms. magazine. I only know this because IMDB mentioned it in their “trivia” section for this episode, because I totally missed it. I guess Stanford Sherman thought “Steinem” was pronounced similar enough to “sternum” for the joke to work, but it really doesn’t…
Pow! Biff! Zowie! “This is torture at its most bizarre and terrible.” It’s easy to lament how little progress we’ve made as a civilization. Women still make less than men for the same work, women are still treated like crap and discriminated against on a regular basis, and every bit of forward progress seems to be marred by regression.
And yet, if you need to be reminded of how far we’ve come as a culture, just watch this episode.
Or, truthfully, any random episode of a TV show from this era. “Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club” isn’t any kind of outlier or radical notion. While it’s exaggerated the way everything is exaggerated on this show, portraying women as goofballs who stand on desks at the sight of a mouse and who are more concerned with fixing their makeup or discussing cooking or finding a sale than doing anything important, was considered normal and mainstream at the time, as is the horror expressed by Gordon and O’Hara that they’re being replaced by women.
Making this misogynistic disaster all the more appalling is the presence of Batgirl, who seems to go along with the disdain for Clavicle’s takeover, even though she should be in the heart of it, since she’s already done what Clavicle claims to be doing.
On top of that, when Clavicle shows up at Gordon’s luncheon to take over, all I can do is nod my head and say, “RIGHT ON!” when she says that women can run Gotham better than the men. I mean, c’mon, the authority figures of Gotham are Gordon, O’Hara, Linseed, and Warden Crichton, under whose tutelage we have goofily dressed criminals running around wreaking havoc on a weekly basis, and who are paralyzed with fear any time one shows up, leaving some random dude in a bat-suit to do their job for them.
Leaving aside the horrible misogyny, how far has the show fallen when the death trap is tying the three heroes into a human knot, pretty much the textbook definition of a low-budget trap, as it requires only the three actors contorted into what have to be uncomfortable positions? Plus it’s totally unclear how our heroes were led to the Dropstitch & Co. warehouse where Clavicle was waiting for them in ambush, since the bat-computer consulting happened off-camera with no explanation.
Clavicle’s scheme is actually entertaining, both in the use of windup exploding mice, and in doing it for the insurance money. I have to admit to being tickled by the policewomen being armed with brightly colored rolling pins, and am only sorry we didn’t get to see them wielded and used. Adam West, Burt Ward, and Yvonne Craig are obviously having a great deal of fun cavorting about with tin whistles on the unconvincing dock set, and Barbara Rush and Jean Byron both do quite well as Clavicle and Chief Linseed.
But these are not enough to redeem this offensive piece of crap. On top of everything else, because Clavicle and her help are all female, there’s no fisticuffs, because it’s unladylike for women to engage in such (which is why Batgirl never once threw a punch on the show), so the climax is very anti-.
This episode is an appalling relic of a bygone era. Some episodes of this show have aged like a fine wine. This one has turned into rancid vinegar.
Bat-rating: 0
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be one of the readers at the Line Break reading series tomorrow, Saturday the 5th of March, at 3pm at QED in Astoria, Queens, alongside Emily Alta Hockaday, Barbara Krasnoff, Jonathan Sumpter, and Andrew Willett. Come see him!
Besides all the problems krad already has enumerated, consider that the character of Nora as written makes little sense.
The expository dialogue makes it clear she has built a reputation as a noted feminist. Most likely, that reputation wasn’t acquired overnight, which leads to two possibilities for her behavior in the episode:
1. She is a patient opportunist, who spent at least a few years building a reputation as a crusader for women’s rights simply as a clever cover so she eventually could pull off the caper of destroying Gotham City and collecting a ton of insurance money.
2. Or she IS a true believer in feminism who apparently went off the deep end and concocted this evil plot. In any event, it’s worth noting that much of her plan is based on women not named Batgirl being completely and stereotypically incompetent. That hardly sounds like a plan devised by a person who truly believes women are superior to men.
And not that I’m complaining about the appearance of the gorgeous Inga Neilson and June Wilkinson, but why would an alleged feminist have her assistants dress in outfits which would be considered objectifying to women? The only good explanation would be if, for evil purposes, they are being used to distract men to gain access to secure locations. But that’s not how they rob the bank–they walk in with masks and guns.
Nora actually could have been an interesting character if written properly and acted with a bit more nuance than Rush does here. Rush’s performance vacillates between cool, calculating menace and Snidely Whiplash mustache twirling, IMO, although sitcommy director Oscar Rudolph may have had a hand in that.
Some episodes of this show have aged like a fine wine. This one has turned into rancid vinegar.
Couldn’t have put it better myself, Keith.
(And suddenly I’m very grateful this show never got the possible fourth season, lest it occur to some other hack to do an episode about race riots & segregation…)
I really have to wonder about one thing, though – the other TV shows of the era might’ve portrayed women’s-libbers as stupid, shrieking, unattractive, insane, and/or every other unflattering thing under the sun, but was evil ever a part of the equation? As TV Tropes notes, Nora Clavicle may well be the vilest villain on this show; not even Riddler or Joker at their most cold-blooded tried to murder the entire city for a friggin’ insurance policy.
(Two awful stereotypes for the price of one! Nora is actually a sociopathic black widow who’s just pretending to be an unreasonable feminist!)
A strange little epilogue to this entry: a while back, Scott Kowalchuk actually tried to revive Nora in the Batman ’66 digital comic, meaning to make her one of the many aliases of Talia al-Ghul. Part of me was morbidly curious, but the part with sense says no amount of good intentions could turn this character into anything worthwhile.
Yeah, Nora’s plan does seem a bit disconnected, though it’s more coherent than a lot of the villain plans this season. (I’m still trying to figure out what the Joker was trying to accomplish in “Surf’s Up! Joker’s Under!”)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3/krad Or, for that matter, the Riddler trying to take over boxing, when the better plan would have been Siren commanding the boxers to take dives and Riddler betting on the certain winners.
What? There’s no “No sex please, we’re superheroes”? That category should be filled by the Siames Human Knot!
@1 – JP Pelzman: Feminists can wear revealing outfits if they want: the whole point of feminisim is to be treated equally and be free to do as you choose.
In college, I had three pet mice I named after the Bronte sisters. I have never been afraid of mice, or any kind of rodent.
I don’t why that’s what I glommed onto from this episode. I think maybe I’m just too disgusted to touch anything else here.
Oh, I have looked forward to this rewatch ever since it first started. I agree completely with krad’s rating for it; this is the positive worst of the Batman ’66 episodes.
The only real difference between my take on it and krad’s is that krad thinks it was written as a send-up of the then-nascent women’s liberation movement. I always took it as the male chauvanist writers moving from satire to downright hostile attack on the subject. Maybe that’s just me. I just always looked at it as the writers saying, “This is why women’s liberation is ridiculous!” When you look at not only Batgirl and her career, but all the other female arch-villains in Gotham City starting with Catwoman and going on through Siren, Black Widow, Queen of Diamonds, etc. then claiming that women aren’t being given a fair shake in the city falls a bit thin.
As krad said, however, if she merely wanted to make a case that Gotham’s political and police structure were run by incompetents, she would have had lots of ammunition there.
As for what crime she committed other than exceeding the speed limit, surely, enlisting the aid of the mayor’s wife to basically blackmail the mayor into essentially suspending law and order for the entire city is illegal on some front? Shouldn’t it count as fraud on some front? And unleashing explosive mice on the city in order destroy it should count as a terrorist act, one would think.
Surely the show’s lowest ebb. Not bad enough that the idea of women holding any sort of power is treated as an intrinsically bad idea by the male characters, but the story unambiguously affirms their patriarchal assumptions by painting all female police officers in the worst, most stereotyped light possible. And it’s offensive that the plan of woman-power champion Nora Clavicle depends entirely on women being totally ineffectual when given power. And Batgirl isn’t allowed to have an opinion about any of this, just obediently tagging along with Batman and praising him on his superior mobile Bat-equipment.
On top of which, Barbara Rush just isn’t all that impressive as a Bat-villain. Even with a different story, she wouldn’t have left much of an impression. Although her henchwomen did. I am amused by the idea that these two statuesque blondes in golden Romanesque gowns believed they could go unrecognized just by putting domino masks on.
The whole Pied Piper bit at the end was weird… I’m not sure whether I like it or not. I generally don’t like the way the third season tended to get a bit too blatantly sitcommy, and this sequence was just a bit too goofy. I guess they had to do something instead of a Bat-fight, given that there were no male villains to beat up. (This and “Zelda the Great”/”A Death Worse Than Fate,” both with female villains, are the only ones without Bat-fights.)
The “Siamese knot” sequence is kind of fun, though, a clever and offbeat idea. Although I’m pretty sure I saw Adam West cop a feel of Yvonne Craig when they slipped out of the knot.
And why would Penguin call the Commissioner to warn him in advance of his next plot? That makes less sense than most of their preview tags this season.
Christopher: the henchwomen wearing domino masks is no weirder than Joker and Penguin doing so in the movie. And Riddler called Gordon to warn him of his plot back at the top of the season, also….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
dpeattie: There is no evidence, none, that she is the one who unleashed the explosive mice. And the fraud charge should have been levelled right away…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
A better episode would have been her trying to make Gotham City an all women town.
I thought it would have been good to team her with The Siren. Nora runs for mayor and during an election eve address has Siren come on and sing her stunning note ordering all men out of the city so only women are left to vote. Her plan comes undone because she didn’t realize Mayor Linseed always won because of the women’s vote.
This ep was the culmination of the chauvinism the series has always shown. ‘Poor deluded girl!” ‘Crime fighting isn’t exactly women’s work” etc.
Terrible episode, but come on, Keith! How can you not adore the absurdity of the Siamese Human Knot? Especially the endearing sight of even the actors having trouble taking it seriously? It is honestly one of my favorite moments in the entire series.
This is what bigotry looks like when it crosses over the border into outright hatred: you become so obsessed with destroying your perceived enemy that you tag him or her with negative attributes that are mutually exclusive. So in this episode, women have to be both cleverly destructive connivers and absolutely incompetent overgrown children. The whole thing is an exercise in should-be cognitive dissonance.
krad: but, when she left Batman, Robin and Batgirl tied up in that Siamese Human Knot, she admitted her whole plan to them. Consequently, all three could testify to that at her trial (as they did in part two of the Joker-Catwoman outing not two weeks previously). They could likewise testify to Clavicle’s threatening to kill Batgirl by cutting her throat if Batman and Robin didn’t surrender, and to felonious assault with that whole human knot shenanigan. So I’d say there were ample grounds to charge her with more than a traffic violation.
And to be even more of a Debbie Downer, allow me to complicate a bit krad’s thesis that we’ve come very far from those days. 20 years later, one of the subplots in The Dark Knight Returns concerned the absurdity and implied emasculation of Gotham City hiring its first female police commissioner. The message was a little less overtly stated, but still clear: this ninny is out of her mind in thinking she could protect Gotham City as well as virile, masculine types like old Bats – – a miscalculation she herself acknowledges near the story’s climax, when she finds herself unable to bring down the Caped Crusader because he is “too big.” Phallic-centered paranoia doesn’t get more blatant than this.
And just a few years ago, the same Hub Network that would not air the first Egghead episode nor the second Shame one had no problem showing this installment, though it’s more offensive to 50% of the population than those others are to Native Americans.
@5/ Magnus:
“@1 – JP Pelzman: Feminists can wear revealing outfits if they want: the whole point of feminisim is to be treated equally and be free to do as you choose.”
That’s third-wave feminism, which didn’t emerge until the early 1990s. The feminism this episode attacks is of the earlier, Betty Friedan school, in which images that were seen as pleasing to men in their traditional femininity were generally considered to be symbols of oppression. Which means that the attire of the characters in question was simply an ignorant choice on the part of some ignorant men who couldn’t even be consistent and coherent in their misogyny, as has been pointed out here.
I wonder what did all the molls for the male villains (not to mention Catwoman!) think of Clavicle’s new status quo for Gotham. Considering molls are pretty much as expendable as any mook despite overall seeming to hold a higher rank than them, and no villain spends more than a single story sticking with the same henchgirl, you’d think those girls would eventually feel hurt about the way that system of sorts works.
It’d have been interesting to see a confederacy of former molls trying to take criminal affairs in their own hands, but then again that would have been too progressive for this era and, let’s be brutally frank, too out of the box for this show.
Come to think about it, Harley was pretty much the first recurring female minion in Batman lore, wasn’t she? I’m reluctant to quote Talia as an example, since she’s a daughter follower figure rather than a henchwoman with romantic designs on the male villain.
Oh wait, I guess Black Mask’s Circe counts? Nevermind then?
@15/Steve Schneider: I don’t think you can necessarily use the misogyny in a Frank Miller comic as evidence of the typical gender attitudes of the era. I think it’s become very clear by now that his misogyny is very much his own, and if anything it’s only gotten worse since then.
I’m also reluctant to speak up for Miller (especially where women are concerned), but Commissioner Yindel never struck me as particularly incompetent or mock-worthy… even before she ultimately “turned” on the Batman issue, Miller made it pretty damn clear that she was the only government official (Gordon, having retired, doesn’t count) in America with even half a brain.
It took a moment, but I recognized the Andrece sisters.
Steve Schneider@16- What are you on about with 3rd wave 1990s stuff? Miniskirts were viewed as empowering by wearers at the time, not 25 years later.
Yeah, wow. I guess you could try to argue that Clavicle filled the police force with ineffectual girly-girls, since her actual plan was to destroy Gotham. But that’s a highly inadequate fig leaf and far more of an attempt at justification that this abomination deserves.
As to sternum sounding like Steinem, maybe if you pronounce it with a really heavy New York accent (Archie Bunker, Curly, that sort of thing). Then it would be something like “stoinum”. It’s still a hell of a stretch.
DemetriosX: speaking as a lifelong Noo Yawka, no, it wouldn’t sound like that. Steinem’s last name had a Y sound as its first vowel. The heaviest Brooklyn accent still wouldn’t make it sound like “sternum.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22/krad: Well, pun names don’t have to sound too close to the source — for instance, “Governor Stonefellow” doesn’t sound much like “Governor Rockefeller,” but you can see the thought process that led from one to the other. I can see someone trying to make fun of Gloria Steinem’s name thinking of “Gloria Sternum” and taking it from there to “Clavicle.”
Christopher: Yes, pun names do have to sound close to the source if they’re going to work. Stonefellow isn’t actually a pun name as such, it’s a play on words. The jump from Rockefeller to Stonefellow works just fine — rock to stone, feller to fellow. Clavicle only works if Steinem sounds like sternum, and it really doesn’t.
dpeattie: She didn’t admit the whole plan, she just said she was going to destroy Gotham City. She didn’t say how. There’s no evidence connecting her specifically to the exploding mice, and even an incompetent lawyer could raise reasonable doubt that one of the 947 other costumed criminals with a predilection for weird-ass schemes was responsible…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@krad: Well, I meant sternum would sound like stoinum. Bad referencing on my part. But like I said, it was a hell of a stretch. It’s certainly not obvious like Stonefellow.
@24/krad: They’re both St__n_m, pronounced the same except for one phoneme. If he’s actually called her, say, Victoria Sternum, then I think the pun would’ve been clear enough to the audience, as much as “Chet Chumley and David Dooley” in “Dizzoner the Penguin” were clearly based on Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. But he took it one more step to Nora Clavicle, so you couldn’t deduce the intervening step. That’s why the pun doesn’t work — because it depends on that intermediate step that only the creator of the pun is aware of. It’s a conceptual pun derived from a loose phonetic pun on the actual name, and that change-up in the type of pun being made is what makes it indecipherable. Which I suppose is what you’re saying — that the connection between “clavicle” and “sternum” wouldn’t lead the listener back to “Steinem” because they aren’t close enough. Although I’d add that, with dozens of different types of bone in the human body, the listener would have no way of knowing which bone “Clavicle” was meant to be a play on. The clavicles and the sternum are contiguous, but by that standard it could just as well have been the scapula. Or the ribs, or whatever.
In any case, I think we can agree that as wordplays go, it wasn’t very humerus.
@24 – even if her henchgirls won’t squeal, she had to have gotten the mice from some manufacturer or another. Start there and see if you can root out someone willing to testify (there’s also the possibility Batman kept one or two of the mice, with her fingerprints on it).
And if worse comes to worst I’m pretty sure “Batman wants you arrested” is a pretty effective charge in ’66 Gotham. At least a couple Golden/Silver Age stories actually did “resolve” on that note.
krad: well, not to be overly argumentative, but if Nora didn’t disclose the entire plot to our heroes in person, then I’m at a loss to recall just how they learned it was the exploding mice. I haven’t watched the episode in years (mostly because I can’t really stand it) so I guess I’m missing a part of the puzzle. And I still say that her threatened violence against the Terrific Trio counts as provable felony in court, with them testifying against her.
dpeattie: They found one of the mice in question on the street after they escaped from their human knot.
Christopher: I’m afraid that after that horrible pun you ended #26 with that I have a bone to pick with you………….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Krad: ah, then that mouse should have been tangible evidence against her.
I’ll agree that some word about how the case was being build against her would have been nice, but I think we’ll both agree that anything approaching logic had gone completely out the window by this time as far as the writers were concerned.
Tried to post earlier and it wouldn’t let me for some reason. Trying again.
Glad someone figured out clavicle. I thought it was a skeleton reference, which didn’t make any sense.
It would have been great to see the Mayor win with only women voters because he’s paid attention to their concerns, I can think of some tweaks that might have helped this mess. For example, the policewomen could have been delayed in getting to the bank robbery because:
1) Whenever there’s a crime, the message goes directly to the commissioner, bypassing them, so Batman and Robin can be called. Now the batphone’s been cut, they still aren’t getting messages. They have to reroute the the entire system before they can even find out robberies are happening.
2) They’ve also been busy coming up with new training and a procedure manual on how to do something other than stand around doing crowd control while waiting for Batman and Robin to show up.
Then, when they got the news about the mechanical mice, it could be after they’ve been getting tons of crank calls based on sexist stereotypes. A very angry officer assumes this is just another joke based on the assumption that women will run screaming at the idea of attacking mice (whether or not they’re loaded with explosives).
This might have also been a good moment for Batgirl to save the day. She could have had a bunch of tin whistles from children’s storytime at the library (not that she’s telling Batman that part). She could also quote the poem The Pied Piper and, when Batman looks bewildered, say something about how, surely, the caped crusader’s memorized the complete works of Robert Browning?
However, I don’t have a problem with Batman now having a batcomputer in the car. Obviously, someone got an upgrade.
A few more observations:
Batgirl actually had more to do in the original draft of the script, although she merely is pretending to side with Nora. Here’s a link:
http://www.batgirlbat-trap.com/twof1/ncatlccfirstdraft.html
I have to admit, I did like the Siamese Human Knot, despite its absurdity. It was a welcomed change of pace from the giant fill-in-the-blank traps which had become overused by that point. But in keeping with the treatment of women in the ep, note how when the third act begins and it’s Nora talking to the Trio with only Evelina accompanying her (Angelina is outside), the Trio’s position has changed slightly, and Yvonne’s chest suddenly is more prominent in the shot. Hmmmmm.
@11/Dwillett It’s interesting that you should suggest a Siren/Nora teamup, considering it always seemed as if Nora’s assistants should have been working for Siren, given their similar Greco-Roman gowns. At the very least, it seems Siren, Angelina and Evelina shop at the same clothing store, although Joan’s gown was cut differently.
@32/J.P.: I love it that “BAT SPIN TO:” was an actual script direction!
Seems that the first draft was a bit less sexist. It still had the stereotyped, inept policewomen, but it also had a more proactive Batgirl, and the statuesque henchwomen were pro wrestlers who overwhelmed Batman in a fight (though presumably his chivalry wouldn’t have let him fight back). And the henchwomen’s skill and competence at least implies that Nora must have deliberately chosen to stack the police force with ineffectual women as part of her plot, rather than all women being intrinsically ineffectual. Or maybe the reason she installed Mrs. Linseed as police chief was because she knew Mrs. Linseed was a rich socialite who’d give positions of authority to women from her social circle rather than choosing them based on qualifications. (Holy Betsy DeVos, Batman!)
@31 It could have worked if the Policewomen had been feminists working with Clavicle who were turning a blind eye on purpose. Clavicle could have been trying to raise the insurance money to fund feminist causes or destroying Gotham to strike a blow against an, obviously incompetent, male establishment. The episode could have ended with Batman sympathising with her motives, if not her methods, and with Gordon taking steps to recruit more female officers.
But all of that would have required the writer to not be a misogynist.
@34/Christopher–Yes, I’ve seen that direction in other Bat-scripts too. Very interesting.
Explosive mousebots? That’s absurd. Even the single ladies, who don’t have husbands to take care of the mice for them, have cats to take care of the mice. Right?
Right?
Okay, I’ll see myself out.
@37/bkd69: Oh, what a neat feminist twist that would’ve been! Maybe Nora and her Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling could’ve overpowered Batman and Robin, and it would’ve been left to Batgirl to save the day by teaming up with Catwoman! After all, Catwoman can’t rob Gotham of its precious feline-themed treasures if the whole city gets blowed up, and as a cat fancier, it’s a matter of pride not to let mice win out.
Definitely not one of the better episodes.
Another goof is the way they resolve the exploding mice problem:
If, as explained, the mice follow the sound of the pipes, why do they drop into
the water when the trio stops at the side of the pier?
The mice should change the direction and turn to them, instead of moving straight on.
@39/Batfan: Maybe their turn radius is too wide?
This is the worst batman episode by far. They could have done much more with it–given that the police chief etc actually cannot/does not solve crime and has to always call in batman to save the day. Nora and company would have a point here. Would have been a very interesting episode w halfway decent writing
On the other hand. honoring Gloria Steinem, years before she would be mass recognized in the 1970’s was interesting. Wonder how Batman knew about that!!
@41/Robin: It was hardly “honoring” Steinem — more like mocking her.
Steinem wasn’t completely unknown prior to her 1969 breakout article; her 1963 expose of Playboy clubs was probably her earliest claim to fame.
“… much of her plan is based on women not named Batgirl being completely and stereotypically incompetent. That hardly sounds like a plan devised by a person who truly believes women are superior to men.”
@1. J.P., I concur. From the first time I saw this mess, I thought the same thing. Her plan is wholly dependent on the gullibility of Millie Linseed and on the ridiculous idea that an all-female police force would be completely ineffective because of most if not ALL women’s preoccupation with department store sales and makeup, fear of mice, and the colossally stupid inability to recognize that real mice aren’t green, orange, pink, yellow and purple. And that brings up something that has had me scratching my head for decades: What did she do with the policewomen who already were on the force? This episode implies that the GCPD is all-male. We know it isn’t. First of all, we’ve already met Policewoman Mooney, and second, there’s the policewoman who leads Catwoman out at the end of “The Cat and the Fiddle.” I highly doubt that either of these women would be afraid of mice. Plus, just three episodes earlier, at the conclusion of “The Ogg Couple,” Catwoman steals the designs for the policewomen’s new uniforms, meaning that there WERE women already serving (and most likely not afraid of mice or obsessed with finding the nearest shoe sale). I know, I know, those “teaser tags” often have to be ignored because they make no sense in context, but still …
Another thing: At the conclusion, when Gordon, O’Hara and Alfred show up with the truck bearing Clavicle and her goddess goons, I have to wonder how Alfred explained his presence to everyone involved while simultaneously keeping all the secrets secret. How, for just one example, did he explain to Gordon and O’Hara why he was there to help them apprehend the women?
Finally: After the mice dropped off the pier, shouldn’t there have been some kind of big splash or something to indicate they detonated underwater? There wasn’t. There are now thousands of unexploded bombs at the bottom of Gotham Harbor. That can’t be good.
I kind of wanted to see nora get punched in the face by batgirl but it shows how useless the women are in this episode take catwoman 100% pure evil at least catwoman tried to kill batman
As stupid and sexist as NORA CLAVICLE would be considered by modern TV standards, I still don’t think that the fake dock set (while still a far cry from realism) looks QUITE as phony as it appeared when I originally saw this episode years ago. That’s NOT to say that it looks great, though.
One of the last episodes in the series, the show had been canceled by the network and by the time Barbara Rush got to the set the show was pretty much in the process of being dismantled, leaving poor Barbara Rush with almost nothing to work with. The producers seemed to have lost interest and it showed in these last few episodes, all of which were weakly produced and scripted.
Miss Rush makes a great entrance and the Siamese human knot was cute but not very well executed. Not enough to save the episode though.
The bone punsters here need to knock it off with their skullduggery.
As a kid I hated this episode for it’s lack of a bat fight, as an adult hate it for its sexism, which strikes me as excessive for even those times! When I first began to watch with an adult eye, I was almost expecting Batman to moralize how while he may have agreed about equality and the budding movement, he would point out there would be better ways to reach their goals. I will say watching recently, I did pick up the gangster voice tones accents from the two henchwomen which was a nice touch, and I didn’t mind the camp elements of the Pied Pipering. Incidentally KRAD, Gellman to me will always be Vinnie from the Odd Couple…