Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Saw the Dark Knight Rises again recently and one scene bothered me (perhaps this was asked/discussed here somewhere but I couldn't find the post):
When Bruce escaped a prison known as The Pit, he dropped down a long rope to allow the inmates to escape.
Why? Did he know for sure that all the prisoners were innocent and not child molesters, rapists and/or murderers?
I was munching on popcorn and slurping cola so I could have missed hearing something important...
Batman is a crusader for justice. Regardless of their crimes, leaving criminals to die (note the lack of guards now that Bane and his followers are in Gotham) simply isn't his style.
On top of that, several of the inmates actually made an effort to make him feel welcome including providing him with food, encouraging his escape with wise words, manning the safety rope and in the case of the Doctor, tending him back to health. It would have been thoroughly discourteous not to at least give them some opportunity to escape after he made it out.
Out of universe, obviously it's to highlight the difference between him and Bane, who escaped but then didn't help his fellow prisoners to follow suit.
All the prisoners who wanted to kill/rape Miranda/Talia and killed Talia's mother were murdered in revenge by the League of Shadows on Ra's al Ghul's orders, recompense for the murder of his beloved wife (remember the only thing that satisfied him in Batman Begins was "revenge"). All the prisoners inside the prison, other than the doctor (who was blinded and left there as punishment for the mess he made of Bane) were said to be enemies of Bane, left there in the prison to suffer and lose hope and die (he expected no one to get out, not even Bruce, making him lose hope and eventually break from seeing his city destroyed).
The original prisoners seemed to go out of their way to attempt to keep anyone from escaping (see their mauling of Bane and attempting to murder Talia as she tried to escape), while these prisoners chant in support of his climb and escape. They feed him and keep him alive (though the helper does say they paid them to do that), but Bruce is about justice. He doesn't believe leaving these people in a hellish prison to suffer is the right thing. Bruce even said in Batman Begins that he sort of lost the focus on the simplicity of good and evil and he understood how it was to be a criminal. So was it really his duty and right to leave them behind to suffer and die?
That might not be the most perfect answer, but he believed in the system, something that Ra's al Ghul and now clearly Bane scoffed about (Ra's as Ducard questioned his faith in "corrupt bureaucrats") while both Bane and Ra's simply acted as judge, jury and executioner, something that Bruce disagrees with.
ok look, they said that after the league found Bane, it was the league's prison. So they probably dumped in league enemies and after Ra's Al Ghul died, it became Talia's and Bane's prison so they dumped in more enemies of the league and eventually Bruce. So when he lowered the rope, he must have known that they were simply people that ticked off the league so that is why he ended up doing that because most were just random guys who happened to say something that they shouldn't have said.
