As I've previously mentioned, one of the challenges of this series is going to be keeping a grip on all the myriad sub-plots. The weekly format obviously helps, but, with a story as big as this one, it's still a challenge.
As I hoped, Vicky Vale finally enters the scene. Although Vale doesn't exactly state the obvious problems with the Gordon case, like I figured that she would do, it's clear that she's not sold on the idea of Gordon as a reckless officer. In fact, Snyder and Tynion slyly confirm that we've got more than meets the eye on the case when they make it clear that even Vicky hasn't managed to find the truth. Bored with the varying stories that her contacts keep feeding her, she takes up the offer of the "Gazette's" crime editor to start delving into the gang war that his contacts say is brewing in the Narrows. Separately, Red Robin discovers that the children that Professor Pyg infected were actually exposed to the "virus" before his attack, not during it; moreover, the virus is actually swarms of nanobots, and it's pretty clear that Bruce knows more about them than he tells Tim. Tim discovers that the infected children all came from the same building, which just so happens to be in the Narrows, which just so happens to be the same building where Harper Row lives, who just so happened to bring Vicky and her protégé there after saving them from some angry gang members. When Red Robin accidentally activates the nanobots as he stands in the bedroom of one of the infected children and falls through the floor into Harper's apartment, chaos ensues.
Putting aside the coincidences (in part because Snyder and Tynion make it clear that they might not actually be coincidences), this issue flows well. It's frankly a nice diversion from the frustration over the slow-burning and still unbelievable Gordon story. We wind up getting an entirely new series of questions. The most obvious one is why someone infected the children in the first place. The nanobot swarms that emerged from the kid in Harper's building and an equally infected Cullen don't really seem to do much, other than (conveniently) knock out the gang members who followed Harper to her apartment. The next obvious question is why the creator of the nanobots would be so obvious to infect kids from the same building. Snyder and Tynion make it clear that Bruce is involved in several ways, beyond just Bruce's mysterious silence: the kids all live in a Wayne Foundation building ("the Phillip Kane Memorial Projects"), and, most obviously, we see the creator tell his pet monkey that he "trained" Bruce. At first, I thought that he might've done it just to get Bruce's attention, but he actually dismisses that idea. So, again, what's the point of the nanobots?
The problem is that these questions feel the same as the ones related to Gordon: questions simply to be questions. It's hard to see Gordon still in prison or the nanobots still a threat by the time that we get to issue #26. These plots are obviously set pieces meant to move characters into certain positions; the problem is that they're so poorly constructed that you can see all the wiring. It's clear that Snyder and Tynion are trying to build multiple outer layers of the plot to create the sense, in unravelling them slowly, that this conspiracy is incredibly far ranging. But, again, they're just feeling like mysteries for mystery's sake. I know that we've still got 47 issues left in this series, so we clearly have time. But, we need to start seeing questions connect to other questions or questions that are legitimately questions. Otherwise, this series is going to be more frustrating than it is intricate.
*** (three of five stars)
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