We finished the first season of Batman, and started the second…and holy jumping the shark, Batman. The two initial episodes with the Archer were by far the worst in the series.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. There were a number of funny jokes — the Pow! and Bam! were replaced with “Poweth!” and “Bameth!” to reflect the Archer’s pseudo-Shakespearian diction, for example, and there’s a great line where Alfred is imitating Batman and Robin tells him to stick out his chest and be virile. But the episode as a whole just had no snap or joy; the actors seemed lost, wandering from campy bit of dialogue to campy bit of dialogue like tired, underpaid drones.

If I had to identify one thing that really undoes these episodes, I’d point to the villain. Art Carney, as the Archer, is pretty flat — again, the thees and thous are the main joke, but he doesn’t have anything like the manic goofball energy of Frank Gorshin as Riddler or Victor Buono as King Tut, nor Burgess Meredith’s bravado mugging.

More than that, though, the Archer is too effective. He’s got a pack of trick arrows (a la Green Arrow) and they all work really well; the first thing he does is to legit take out Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson from afar and steal their stuff. He goes on to mount a very reasonable plot involving robbing the Wayne foundation with the help of an inside man. Along the way, he turns the citizens of Gotham against Batman and Robin. He just comes across as a real, legitimate threat, with achievable, fairly well-conceived goals.

This throws everything out of whack. Most Bat villains are way more interested in goofiness for its own sake than in criminality; in subsequent episodes, Catwoman steals a catalog for reasons, or King Tut reanimates beatles trapped in amber to create a secret mind control formula and then has Chief O’Hara dance on a flagpole. The plot zigs and zags around the villain’s obsessions and neuroses, rather than around their actual efforts to steal something. That allows Batman and Robin to race from here to there more or less inefficiently and still save the day, because there wasn’t a whole lot of day to be saved anyway.

The show at its best is really a kind of masquerade; it’s a dress-up game, where everyone pretends that they’re good and/or evil; it’s a collaborative pantomime of bat nonsense. In the Archer, episode, though, the Archer doesn’t quite seem to be in on the joke; he actually wants the money. He’s bad according to genre conventions, rather than using the genre conventions to signal “bad” while wandering off to play with beetles or leave riddles scrawled on bat undies or what have you.

There were other problems too — the soundtrack, usually a delight, was weird and off, as just one example; the sets and backgrounds looked fake and clunky in a half-hearted way, rather than winningly, as with Tut’s preposterously ersatz crocodiles. But the show’s real incompetence is in making the Archer competent. Real villains are boring; they take the joy out of life.