while we're talking about brilliant changes that were made in the adaptation, let's talk about john dee.
in the original, john dee's whole motivation is:
"I'll drive everybody in the whole wide world mad. And then they'll make me king."
he was imprisoned at arkham asylum by the justice league which basically makes him a second rate batman villain. and not even one of the memorable ones. he makes the patrons of the diner do terrible things they don't want to do just because "he can", and he takes pleasure from watching their suffering.
and honestly, to me, that is incredibly boring.
now, in the show, they made the brilliant choices to 1) scrap the whole thing with the justice league because it is tonally so discordant that it throws me off every time and 2) give him a backstory and a motivation that is deeply misguided but that we as an audience can empathize with.
making everyone tell the truth at all times is, instantly, the moment you think about it, a terrible idea. but it's still a compelling idea because like. haven't you ever thought that so many interpersonal problems wouldn't exist if people just stopped lying to themselves and each other all the damn time??
and then we get a whole episode of john dee learning, in real time, WHY the truth can be a terrible thing to inflict on people. we watch him get disillusioned with his own dream--and then morpheus comes along and gives us this absolutely brilliant line:
"Their dreams kept them alive. But if you rob them of their dreams, if you take away their hope, then... yes, this is the truth of mankind."
which is basically the same thing that happened to john dee. he saw his dream crushed before his eyes and he got violent and vengeful and destructive, just like the patrons of the diner moments before.
just. everything about these changes to his character and his storyline is wonderful and makes 24/7 one of my absolute favourite episodes, and i am so glad that we didn't get a batman villain of the week whose sole motivation was that he just wanted to hurt people.
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