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A major figure in Catwoman: Lonely City has found a way to turn Batman’s secret weapon into a tool to fully take over Gotham.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Catwoman: Lonely City #2, now on sale
Despite his commitment towards fighting for the greater good, there have been plenty of times Batman’s methods have been called into question. Some of his strategies and tools have been particularly dangerous in the wrong hands, proving how deadly the Dark Knight really could be. Now, one variant of a classic enemy might prove just how dangerous his security measures for Gotham might really be.
The Harvey Dent of Catwoman: Lonely City (by Cliff Chiang) is trying to gain access to a powerful device even Batman was afraid to use, giving him a weapon that’s not unlike the one Batman used to save Gotham City in The Dark Knight.
The Gotham City of Catwoman: Lonely City is one radically altered in the ten years that have passed since Batman died. Harvey Dent is in control of the city as the current Mayor, and Gotham has embraced a police-state-style form of justice with the police adopting a gun-heavy approach to Batman’s imagery. The biggest knock against his rule over the city turns out to be the return of Catwoman, who quickly ran circles around the former villain’s attempts to arrest her. Thanks to her lack of online presence, it proved to be incredibly difficult for Dent and his allies to find her. There’s little that their conventional methods could do to locate her which gave her the time she needed to plan a robbery.
But it turns out Dent might have had a secret weapon. There was a Waynetech Security AI, which utilized an array of satellites and a data aggregator left behind within the Batmobile. It turned out that the predictive algorithms — referred to as “the profiler” by Dent — could give his police force the ability to track down almost anyone in Gotham. However, even after designing the device, Batman proved reluctant to use it. Unfortunately, in the years since his death, more nefarious people like Dent have gotten ahold of the device and planned to use it to enact a greater level of control over the city. Even though his scientists were quick to admit it’s a legally dubious tactic, and the public has already called out Dent’s police force for their profiling of minority communities, Dent seems committed to using the device to crack down on opposition.
The Profiler recalls another Batman’s invasion of Gotham’s privacy — specifically, the version of the Caped Crusader who was featured in Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight. In that film, Batman utilized technology designed by Lucius Fox that allowed him to effectively spy on the people of Gotham. In the wrong hands, the device could have allowed anyone to effectively profile the entire city and hunt down someone like the Joker — or, potentially, anyone — who fit the definition of a criminal. Lucius Fox threatened to stop assisting Batman and WayneTech if the device was utilized beyond the one-time emergency of hunting down the Joker, and even Batman designed the device to self-destruct upon the completion of that mission, which kept it out of his (or anyone else’s) hands.
It seems the Batman of Catwoman: Lonely City’s reality didn’t think as far ahead, giving Dent a potentially ruinous tool to turn against the people of Gotham. Using the Profiler, Dent could effectively hunt down anyone in the city who gets in the way of his continued rule and bring them down. If he proves as ruthless as he has in the past, he could even use the device to find an opening to attack his primary opponent for control of Gotham, Barabra Gordon. In this way, the worst nightmare of the Lucius from the Nolanverse Batman universe is coming true — a figure with a warped sense of justice gaining control over the entire populace of a city, unbeknownst to them until it’s too late.
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