thehefner | "He's toast."

Ding-dang it.

Well, I suppose the set-up of the character was flawed from the beginning. Harvey is not a person whose story can be told in one movie, even if you make him a main character (unless you did a three-hour THERE WILL BE BLOOD style epic, and even then...). Really, the only way they could have done him justice was to make him the backbone of the trilogy. Replace Rachel's whole character in BATMAN BEGINS with Harvey, so there you could have established the "White Knight." Then you could have better spent THE DARK KNIGHT doing his downfall, and spent the third movie as the rise of Two-Face.

But that didn't happen, so really, better they leave him a dead half-baked character than risk totally messing him up. Even if we got a rushed and misunderstood Two-Face, we at least had an excellent Harvey Dent. That's the better way to go by far.

By the way, I don't know if I buy people saying, "You could totally see the darkness in Harvey's character early on!" I'm not sure I agree. The only scene that really comes to mind is the one where he "interrogates" the Joker's henchman, but even then, Harvey's totally in control. He's bluffing! He's just intimidating the bad guy like Batman would, or Jim Gordon if he got pushed too far (remember, this is the guy who authorized Batman beating the shit out of the Joker).

Really, if a punk tried to kill him like in that early scene, an issue-ridden Harvey Dent wouldn't have just punched him once and calmly walked away. The bailiffs would have had to pry Harvey off the mobster right in the witness stand. That's the Harvey Dent who would snap, because there was a monster bubbling under the surface the whole time. That's the Harvey Dent who should have been.

Ah well. Guess it's up to me, then.

EDIT: I like how, at aintitcool.com's talkbacks for this story, there are people who still call bullshit and give good reasons why Harvey's still alive. Really, who's Chris Nolan to say otherwise? He's just the artist. We're the ones who interpret the art.