Instead, Tommy Elliot somehow (it is never really explained how, other than to throw the Riddler into the mix in a lame attempt to explain everything after the fact) got ahold of Batman's old enemies and brought them, one by one, into conflict with Batman. That's not a "grand purpose" - that's a means to an end, but the end was never satisfactorily articulated. There was never really even any explanation of why the attacks occured in the sequence they did, or what the intended "result" really was. Arguably, they should have built to some sort of logical crescendo, but there was no identifiable rhyme or reason to what happened.

"Hush" (the villain) was somehow wherever Batman was (and yes, the notion of some sort of tracking device implanted in Bruce's head was fine, but they really didn't do much with it). And "Hush" kept talking about friends and enemies and all that - maybe, just maybe, it would have been an interesting storyline if Batman had ended up in conflict with his "friends" because of all the "subliminals" from the computer system. Or that Hush somehow put all of Batman's friends at risk, or did something in an effort to strip away all of the things Bruce found important.

It's easy to nitpick the storyline, and ponder issues like how Two Face just sort of wandered in and out of the tale, appearing here and there without warning. Or why we had Batman learn the "bad thing" about the computer system in one issue but we the readers didn't until much later - very very bad form, I say, in the context of a mystery story. We should learn what the protagonist learns with him, not later. It's okay to see characters (such as Oracle) try to warn Batman about what they know (which we don't know yet) but it's really a cheap shot to have Batman know something that we don't discover until it's convenient for the author to tell us. I don't mean something like the fact that Batman brought his kryptonite ring to Metropolis with him; I mean critical investigatory information that supposedly advances the story.

I also never understood the whole thing about the bandages on the face of "Hush," or why "Hush" was the name of the series at all (I expect there is a reason, and it has to do with that word being spoken by the villian, among others, but I can't remember it right now and so it makes me wonder how well it was portrayed).

Ultimately, though, these are just minor complaints. The larger problem was the story structure itself, and I have to fault Jeph Loeb for it. The best Batman stories tend to direct our attention to a specific storyline. Here we have the "Hush" character, we have the Batman/Selina relationship, and we have all the subordinate characters, each changing every issue. There was no global consistency to the tale, no real glue to hold it together. This can be immediately spotted by raising this question: what was it that "Hush" was trying to do?