#75 - Baby Doll
First Appearance: Batman: The Animated Series S03E04 (Sep1994)
"You never let the way you look undermine your self-confidence." ~Baby Doll
In a series chock full of "Best-of" episodes, "Baby-Doll" easily nears the top of that list, thanks to its unusual main antagonist. Mary Dahl is an adult who suffers from hypoplasia, that is, a disease which does not allow her to grow. Eternally bound to appear as a child, Dahl slowly loses her tether on reality when her hit TV show is cancelled and she begins to fade into obscurity. There's a lot of inspiration being drawn here from some interesting sources, most obviously the film "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?". However, the inclusion of Batman turns this into a dark morality play as a woman who has fallen prey to her celebrity must recognize and accept her inner demons.
I really loved this episode despite Baby Doll's superficially "Animaniacal" appearance. You would think such a disparate design from B:TAS would feel well out of place, but they use this fish-out-of-water look to really highlight how she lives in a TV world that is nothing like the real one. There are a lot of great uses of artistic work to help convey how her artificial world is twistedly farcical, the sort of into-the-rabbit-hole tragic character you've come to love in the Batman world, from Mad Hatter to Joker to the Riddler. The finale of "Baby-Doll" is truly a tragic moment that is perhaps the emotional highlight of the Batman series, which I'll include as my Greatest Baby Doll Story Ever Told:
A surprisingly layered and deep moment that I think plays differently watching it as an adult than it did when I was a kid seeing it for the first time. A tragedy of Wagnerian proportions.
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