Today I watched the Poison Ivy episode of Batman The Animated Series; Pretty Poison. And I gotta say, Ivy was right.
Harvey Dent spearheaded a project to use Wayne Foundation funds to turn a field of wildflowers into a penitentiary. The twist: That field contained the last surviving specimens of the Wild Thorny Rose. Poison Ivy, a chemical botanist, saves the last rose and uses it for revenge. She kisses Harvey with a poison made from the rose on her lips. Batman grabs a sample and tried to synthesise an antidote, but doing so requires a sample of the origin of the toxin: the wild thorny rose, extinct. So he goes and fights Poison Ivy for the antidote and saves Harvey.
But I think Harvey is the bad guy here. He destroyed a piece of nature to build a prison. And he didn’t even conduct an environmental survey to look for ecological damage first! If he’d have hired Ivy, she could have warned him about the rose, and he could have come up with a plan to save it. Also, prisons are bad! Harvey is the district attorney, he’s part of the power structure. And he has Bruce Wayne’s money behind him. Ivy had nowhere to turn for justice other than vigilantism. I stand with Ivy.
That was probably the last show that consistently had morally grey situations that children could understand. Entertainment is so black and white now with clear good and bad. It creates the expectation that people are only good or bad and one bad choice forever dooms a person to being bad. “Good” becomes an unattainable goal that fewer and fewer people can become until people stop trying.
Batman was one of the few shows that explored the consequences and recovery after bad choices.
You should watch Infinity Train. It’s an animated series from 2019 about a train. I’d say more, but it’s best to go in blind. And it shows the recovery after bad choices.