How Long Riddler's Plan Had Been In Works Revealed By The Batman Director

Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Batman

In Matt Reeves' The Batman, several of Gotham City's most dangerous players have come out to play—including The Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz)—but only one of them wants to play a truly deadly game. The Riddler (Paul Dano) poses a dangerous threat not just to the criminal elite in Gotham City, but to Batman's secret identity, as he enacts his complex plan to uncover the truth about Thomas Wayne's Gotham Renewal Corporation.

Before The Riddler was The Riddler, he was a simple accountant by the name of Edward Nashton who had grown up an orphan just like Bruce Wayne. Only he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth or a gilded mansion protecting him from the cruel reality of the world. The film doesn't delve very deep into his backstory, but it makes clear that something happened while he was working as a forensic accountant that triggered his desire to commit himself to bringing the rats into the light. When talking to Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Reeves discussed just how long The Riddler had been planning to expose Gotham City's corruption:

"There's so many comics where you see that the Rogue Gallery creates themselves in response to this appearance of this masked vigilante called Batman in Gotham. And so, he's sort of, in a certain way, inspired by the presence of this vigilante and that's happened within the last two years. So this has been the desire to understand what's happened to him since he was a child and why this place was such a rough place for him and why he had such a dark sort of existence and a brutal existence in this brutal place. That goes all the way back to him being a kid, and that's where the Ave Maria sort of stuff comes in. But his plan and the idea that he could somehow use what he had discovered as a forensic accountant when that word renewal came across his desk.

It wasn't even on his desk. He looked across and saw something that haunted him from his childhood. And suddenly, because his one strength ... He's not like Batman, who sort of works on himself physically so that he can become very powerful and can endure, and he can take almost anything, but he is that way mentally. And when he sees the patterns of things, it starts to make sense of his life. I would say that has probably taken place over the last couple of years and that the presence of Batman caused him to see a way that he might be able to reveal the truth, in a brutal way, about this city. So it's been going on for ... Paul and I talked for a while about this idea, about how he came across that evidence, how he sort of, without anyone knowing, started going on this kind of forensic path and learned the truth of this city. And then, he's kind of trying to take Batman on that same path and expose the depth of corruption of this place."

As he points out, throughout the history of the Batman franchise, Bruce Wayne's desire to find justice in an unjust world as Batman unintentionally inspires his own enemies. With The Batman, the script draws a hard line of correlation between Batman's brand of "vengeance" being corrupted by The Riddler's radicalized followers, particularly when the line is parroted back at him during the showdown at Gotham City Garden.

While Reeves doesn't give a specific timeline for when The Riddler launched his thorough investigation of Gotham City's mismanagement of funds, it's clear that the plan was a culmination of a number of factors—trauma, work experience, and his natural-born ability to solve puzzles.

Watch what Reeves had to say in the player above.

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