I watched the pilot to Gotham last night. Gotham
is a retelling of the Batman story. I cannot say that the pilot blew me
away. But the scene in which young Bruce Wayne is walking with his
parents and his parents get shot by a burglar was really sad. One
minute, Bruce and his parents are laughing about a movie that they just
saw and enjoying each other’s company. The next minute, Bruce’s parents
are lying on the ground dead.
The Spiderman story usually gets to me, too. Peter Parker did not
stop a burglar because of his own resentment, and that burglar later
killed Peter’s kindly Uncle Ben.
These events were what made the men into what they became:
superheroes, with a calling to save other people’s lives. They were sad
events, though, even if they were fictional. Too bad it took those
events to cause them to become heroes. Otherwise, would they have?
They would not have had the motivating factor of wanting to preserve
others from the pain that they themselves experienced.