As “Gotham Nocturne” has hurried toward its conclusion, it has trimmed down. Even in the mouthful of Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Gotham Nocturne: Intermezzo: Batman, Outlaw, an intermission of sorts where ostensibly the background backups enter the foreground, the cast of side characters has been significantly trimmed. With just one volume left — and, strangely, an entirely separate villain on the way — it’ll be interesting to see what writer Ram V ties together and what’s ultimately left unresolved.

Notably, what appears to have disappeared here since Gotham Nocturne Act I is the separate realm of Simon Spurrier’s backups; Dan Watters' backups have their own issues narratively, but at least they’re running parallel to the story Ram V is telling. I wouldn’t read too much in just yet — it could be that Sorrow and Earworm and Dr. Annabel Mead, even Two-Face play major parts in the conclusion, but if not, that may mark a big curiosity in how “Gotham Nocturne” unfolded.

[Review contains spoilers]

It bears noting the unusual, grotesque thing of Batman, Outlaw turning on a hanging. We see superhero deathtraps on the regular, but a hanging, with the visceral trappings — the psychological torture of the waiting prisoner, the gallows, the gathered crowd — is a different thing, fraught with connotations political, racial, historical. I wonder just how much debate went into the allowance of such, or if DC had enough confidence in Ram V knowing what he was doing — but the two-page spread of an actual hung Batman was farther than I thought DC might go, rendered with photorealistic horror by Jason Shawn Alexander. (Interestingly, for a story that seemed at the outset about Gotham turning against Batman, at the climactic moment most of the crowd appears against his death.)

The five-part story is exactly right for DC to have published every other week, being a heist that takes place swiftly. It goes as one might expect, and that’s not wrong but rather it respects the genre — Catwoman gathers a crew, everything seems lost, then we find the fix was in from the beginning. It’s a cogent Catwoman story, if only marred by pulling in one too many different directions.

As the story ramps up, the part-to-part action gets more immediate, and those “different directions” include the increasingly distracting backups. In the first chapter, if Azrael developing his “Azrabats” suit is germane, then a scene of Renee Montoya struggling with retaking her Question identity — repeating what we’ve seen a variety of other places in this series — is an early sign of trouble. Later, Watters and artist Caspar Wijngaard offer a visually attractive but wholly unrelated story of Catwoman Eiko Hasigawa; unless indeed to inform uninitiated readers who Eiko is, I can’t figure why this backup was needed at all.

Equally, Watters' later stories of Dariah Orgham and Damian Wayne are fine in the writing, but contribute little to the ongoing narrative. The Damian story rehashes information the audience clearly already knows (and Damian has been almost nowhere in “Nocturne”). Unless, again, Ram V pulls off an astounding feat of tying everything together, including the Spurrier characters not seen since almost two volumes ago, the backups will be especially egregious. Many of these seem less about the story than Detective filling its contractual page count.

The benefit of an involved, multi-volume, single writer storyline with a wide cast like this is the ability of the writer to crash the status quo — in this case, killing off the seeming main villain, Arzen Orgham. To an extent I feel we didn’t get the full, honest conversation between Arzen and Bruce Wayne that their arc needed, but leaving it unsettled enhances the loss we feel of Azren at the hands of his mother. Dariah steps into the role of “big bad,” though Ram V has Barbatos and, bizarrely, Simon Hurt(!) in the background, so who indeed Batman will have to defeat in the end remains to be seen. Hurt and Dariah Orgham and Barbatos and resolutions for Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, Earworm, Sorrow, Annabel Mead, Jim Gordon, the Question, and on and on is a lot for Ram V to cover in just nine more issues.

Batman: Detective Comics Vol. 4: Gotham Nocturne: Intermezzo: Batman, Outlaw ends with Two-Face blowing up one of Gotham’s bridges, a moment mildly too reminiscent of the famed “No Man’s Land.” Also, Catwoman Selina Kyle passes Batman’s unconscious body off to Talia al Ghul, with discussion of how “so many times he has been broken [and] so many times he has returned.” There’s some irony here, in that the last time Batman left, in Catwoman’s company, was when Bane took over and Alfred Pennyworth was killed, a mistake Batman had vowed not to make again. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, but that’s the fault of Ram V and not the Dark Knight, in a series that’s also echoed some of the beats of Chip Zdarsky’s parallel Batman.

Still, a wild ride, and that final volume will tell a lot.

[Includes original and variant covers; layouts, pencils, and inks]