Hunters Season 2 Enters the ‘Nightwing’ Era

by #AI January 13, 2023 · Automatic

This story contains spoilers for Hunters.
There’ve been a few successful live-action iterations of Dick Grayson, but arguably none as beautiful as Logan Lerman’s. In Hunters, Prime Video’s series about a fictional band of Nazi killers reacting to real-life Operation Paperclip, Lerman plays a kid a lot like Batman’s first sidekick. Jonah Heidelbaum (Lerman) is introduced in the series as a Jewish teen whose meekness masks his quiet strength. After losing his last living guardian, he meets Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), a wealthy man who leads a group of underground Nazi hunters. Through Season 1, Jonah becomes Offerman’s protégé and learns to turn his quiet strength into heroism, standing alongside his leader on their covert mission. The comparisons to the first Robin are apt, with Jonah becoming the wealthy black-clad leader’s sidekick, but now with Offerman on the other side, and Jonah having pivoted his inward strength outward, Season 2’s Jonah isn’t Robin anymore. He’s in his Nightwing era.
Though Batman is not overtly or canonically Jewish, many of his character traits and story moments are.
Showrunner and creator David Weil baked Bat-stuff into his series with intent. As he has said, many Golden-Age comic creators were Jewish, reacting to the atrocities they witnessed in the second world war. Batman and Robin creators Bill Finger and Bob Kane were Jewish Americans and their ethos is present in their characters. It’s easy to describe Batman as Jewish by referencing his penchant for black clothing and living to mourn his parents’ deaths (Jewish people are meant to mourn parents longer than anyone, and many Jewish traditions like Yahrzeit and Yizkor are centered around honoring passed relatives). Though Batman is not overtly or canonically Jewish, many of his character traits and story moments are. So, it made sense for Weil, who was leaning on comic books for his story, to reflect Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson with Offerman and Heidelbaum.
The Jonah of the first season is a young comic book fan who only imagines becoming a brave crime fighter himself. When chatting with his friends, he explains how he prefers characters grounded in realism, the type of superhero he might become. And when his reality is ripped out from under him, the reader does become the sort of hero he imagines. After he loses his safta (grandmother), Offerman takes Jonah in and introduces him to his vigilante gang. The Bat Family comparisons are obvious, despite the show sometimes leaning on the Justice League. Offerman is a rich guy who provides a hideout and tools to his family of underground warriors, and he even works alongside those who uncover his targets, and buddies up to a conflicted policewoman. Each member has their own reasons for participating in justice outside the law, and while they have individual leanings, they’re loyal to the benefactor who takes the lead. Despite having his own reasons for seeking vengeance, Jonah stands meekly beside Offerman while slowly learning who he is as a hero.
As the first season waned, Jonah’s trajectory drifted past the role of sidekick and on to something more. In that same early conversation about superheroes with his friends, Jonah and his chums considered whether Batman would have been pulled too far into the dark side without his Robin. This directly mirrors how Jonah’s relationship might have begun to level out Offerman, who is later revealed to be a member of the dark side. As his sidekick, Jonah is slapped into the role of being Offerman’s source of light and balance. In trying to break free from that role, Jonah learns to kill on his own, slowly turning on his leader, and taking his place as a hero in his own right. While Batman is a heroic but complicated leader, Jonah’s would-be-Bruce Wayne is something completely uncomplicated. He’s evil. Offerman is a Nazi in disguise. When this is revealed to him, Jonah kills his superhero maker. No longer acting as a good-boy-balancing-act for a dark leader, Jonah is ready to emerge as Nightwing.
Taking time away from reporting to a complicated leader, Jonah becomes something new. In the period between seasons, he commits an atrocity in Spain, breaks up with his group, grows out his hair and takes on a new identity to settle in England. There are many iterations of Nightwing in comics canon, with Grayson taking on the Nightwing mantle for different reasons. In one, Grayson, as Nightwing, travels to England and works to prevent an attempted ethnic cleansing after discovering that the Crown Prince of Kravis might have been responsible for his family’s death. The happenings in Hunters are analogous to these events. In England, Jonah not only discovers new information about the death of his safta, but he also works to prevent a rise of neo-Nazism and focuses on locating Hitler to make him answer for genocide. In his stories, Nightwing has resigned from Bruce’s employ, working on his own as a hero, much like Jonah who left Offerman in the dirt before ending up in Europe.
While Hunters pushes this a step further by revealing its version of Batman to be a Nazi in disguise, Jonah is still able to learn the value of a complicated leader when he meets Chava
There’s a lot to the ethos of Nightwing and Batman’s other sidekicks that can’t be reduced to a singular quality, especially in a character as rich as Dick Grayson. But for much of Nightwing’s canon, he’s disillusioned about Batman but sometimes learns to understand and adopt what made Batman an effective mentor. While Hunters pushes this a step further by revealing its version of Batman to be a Nazi in disguise, Jonah is still able to learn the value of a complicated leader when he meets Chava (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Chava, like Jonah’s previous leader, works with a group of secret killers to hunt Nazis and has a distinct her-way-or-the-highway approach. Jonah, now an independent fighter on his own, struggles to cater to her whims. Though not explicitly toggling between being Batman and Nightwing, Jonah slowly learns to thrive under his new leadership while balancing that with his own version of what it means to be a hero.
Dick Grayson is a beloved character not just by virtue of being a great sidekick, but by having his own complicated loyalties and feelings. These take him through his own difficult journey in ways that sometimes mirror and sometimes differ from Bruce Wayne’s. Grayson’s messy growth was ready to be laid atop Jonah Heidelbaum, another youngster who has it all and loses it, and has to learn what version of vengeance makes sense to him. The beginning of Jonah’s story for Hunters’ audience was that of a teenager forced to grow into a soldier, and as the story treads on in Season 2, Jonah has become his own leader, and like Grayson, sometimes dresses up as Batman but is best as himself, Nightwing.