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What I'm getting at, and what I suspect about Nolan, is that he is currently on the tail end of finishing two separate trilogies. When he was done with part one of the Dark Knight Trilogy, he made part one of his other trilogy, which was The Prestige. I will call this his Prestige Trilogy, because that was the movie in which he told us exactly what he was going to do to us. In The Prestige, Nolan told us all about The Pledge, Turn and Prestige. We saw journals within journals and stories within stories. In Inception, Nolan gave us The Turn: He took that ordinary idea of stories within stories, and he turned it on its head and made it something extraordinary. Whatever film Nolan makes after The Dark Knight Rises will be The Prestige of that trilogy. Inception was The Turn and The Prestige was The Pledge.

So what does this have to do with Batman? Well, first, I just want to be clear about the kind of storyteller I think we're dealing with: the insane and awesome kind. But it also establishes a pattern. Christopher Nolan tells us what he's going to do to us years before he makes the movie that actually does it. And Nolan has already told us in his previous Batman movies what he's going to do to us with the third. We just need to connect the dots. With Batmath.

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Two-Face(s): The Turn(s)

The love interest in the first two films was Rachel Dawes and she's (spoiler alert) fucking dead now. Rachel (Katie Holmes/Maggie Gyllenhaal) was the last connection Bruce had to his former self, before his parents died, before The Batman (BTB). She told him as much at the end of