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Scarecrow’s plans for Gotham City are already in motion — and he’s using the technology of another major villain to help destabilize the city.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batman: Fear State Alpha, on sale now.
Over the past few months, Batman has thrown Scarecrow into the center of the Dark Knight’s orbit. While other villains like the Joker have been otherwise occupied, Scarecrow has been laying the seeds for his most brazen attack on Gotham City yet.
Scarecrow has been moving behind the scenes for some time now, with the massacre at Arkham Asylum (now known as A-Day) operating according to his plans. These schemes were set in motion months ago, as revealed in Batman: Fear State Alpha, by James Tynion IV, Riccardo Federici, Chris Sotomayor, and Clayton Cowles, as does his surprising need for the Mad Hatter’s technology to achieve his crusade against Gotham.
The opening moments of the issue center on Jonathan Crane and Simon Saint meeting for the first time while the latter is a patient in Arkham Asylum. Using a device to speak openly without being recorded, Saint reveals that he’s a fan of Crane’s work as a scientist, and sees the potential for its use in his plans. He also reveals that he and others in Silicon Valley have become fans of a thesis Crane conceived in graduate school called “The Fear State Theory,” which suggests a “shock to its system” is exactly what society needs to willingly reboot itself. Crane becomes intrigued when Saint mentions he has billions of dollars and contacts all throughout Gotham, which both men agree would make for a wonderful testing site for the idea.
Among his demands, however, is all the captured technology of Jervis Tetch — aka the Mad Hatter. Another one of Batman’s more cerebral villains, Mad Hatter’s technology allows him to affect and even control the minds of others. Although Crane reveals that he’s always considered the man childish and strange, he also admits that the Hatter is perhaps one of the most brilliant members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery. Crane even claims that Tetch’s work is a crucial element of his own methods — and the scary thing is, Saint has the resources and funds to legally acquire the Hatter’s tech for Crane that was seized upon the villain’s arrest.
It seems that this stolen Mad Hatter technology is the edge that Crane has used against Batman in their most recent encounter. Crane was able to trap the Dark Knight in a psychologically shattered mindscape, causing him to believe that the Scarecrow was literally inside his mind, reading his thoughts. With the Mad Hatter technology and his own fear-based elements and plans, it makes sense that the Scarecrow would be able to achieve such an effect. This is also incredibly concerning for Gotham in general. There is perhaps no other villain who Mad Hatter’s technology is better suited for than the Scarecrow, with their similar methods of targeting people’s perceptions and mental state gelling well together. But this also means that Scarecrow has just become even more dangerous.
If Scarecrow can find a way to expand the scope of Mad Hatter’s technology — and given his own brilliance, it’s likely that he can — then he could effectively send Gotham City into pure chaos. He’s already left Sean Mahoney (the newly dubbed Peacekeeper-01) in a distressed and wild state, and his attack was powerful enough to shake someone as mentally fortified as Batman. There’s no telling how much damage Scarecrow could do to Gotham City especially considering how the city is still recovering from the events of the Joker War. This could be the last straw that finally snaps the Gotham populace and leads to full-blown chaos.
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