I'm not saying it should be done. I'm just saying that her role didn't seem significant enough (well-portrayed as I thought it was) to really miss her had she not been in there. Despite the fact that I read that somewhere (Wikipedia, I think) that the role was initially going to be male... Harvey Dent even, Rachel seemed a bit extraneous at times. Like, for example, you have Mary Jane being a prominent agent of action; she motivates Peter to act and Spider-Man to act, even if, in that respect, that role is damsel in distress. Bruce already has a strong enough motivating force and characters (including himself) to struggle with, that adding in a female just seemed extraneous.

You know, on an unrelated note, I was just thinking that having an overly vengeful and driven Batman really only works for a movie... i.e., in small doses. It works very well then. But in series and comics (and I admit I haven't been following the comics for years) it seems necessary to add quite a bit more humanity to him. I readily agree with that because a Batman as dour as Begins version could get to on a regular basis could just get so bogged down in emotion that it's not really fun anymore. How can such a force exist for so long? How can we believe that a soul as tortured as that could function for so many years? Once in a while, you do (or at least I do) have a soft spot for a happier Batman, leading a sidekick Robin, like in the comics from the '40s-'60s. Maybe not so campy as it was in a lot of the '50s and '60s, but, you know...