Batgirl (2000-2006) #11
“YOU! My tapes! You stole my tapes! Where are they?!”
David Cain manages to escape the FBI and the hospital only to return to his home covered up by investigators and scene analysts. He goes on a rampage when he realizes that the Cassandra’s training tapes are gone.
Why are the tapes so important?
Well, Batman just told him with no amount of uncertainty that those tapes were the closest he would ever get to his daughter again, sure. But if I were to be so bold as to go deeper than that suggestion (and we all know I’m quite bold at this point), tapes are just an illusion.
Film is a series of static images meant to give you the illusion of movement, of progress, and in this case growth. He watches his daughter grow from the first taped training to her first kill, where she disappeared for years and he could not find her. Cain can rewatch the same footage, dissect it, and analyze it backward and forward. He has every breath and look his daughter gives the camera memorized.
But tapes are finite. They stopped when Cassandra’s tutelage stopped, with her first kill. He is intimately familiar with a ghost who no longer exists, with a child that metaphorically died with her innocence the day she committed murder and realized what a horrible thing she had done. Cain isn’t all that terribly interested in what the years alone, on the streets, dumpster diving or more, Cassandra did between her escape and reappearing in Gotham years later. Nor does he make a solid effort to get his daughter back or convince her to come to his side once they are reunited.
He instead adopts the attitude of “If I can’t have her, no one can” and systematically attempts to destroy the relationships she has been growing through the Bat Mantle.
David Cain is obsessed with the little girl who smiled at the camera, the little girl who knew no better about their dangerous games or their savage implications, the little soldier who was his perfect protege. It is why his knowledge of Cass as a person is so restricted and limited. He cannot see her for the person she became after the reels ended, or the person at her core that could not be seen yet in her youth.
He loves Cassandra the way you love a picture, and that’s not good for anyone.
