REVERIE: Odds favor the return of Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Two-Face in a third Batman movie

"You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain," Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent said in "The Dark Knight," which continues to dominate at the box office.

But director Christopher's Nolan's latest cinematic interpretation of The Batman's war on crime in Gotham does not make it clear which of the two options determines the fate of Eckhart's character.

As luck would have it, logic, not chance, dictates that Harvey Two-Face will be back to deliver his own brand of coin-flipping justice in a likely sequel.

Whoever has not seen the movie by now will find out that Dent, who ultimately has half his face scarred, falls from a two-story structure and then lies on the ground motionless toward the end of "The Dark Knight."

Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman) in a following scene talks about the district attorney's legacy as a hero the city needed, and a memorial-like photo of Dent is shown in the background.

This is all moviegoers have to deduce whether Eckhart dies and if thus he will return.

Though it seems like a toss-up, odds are good that Harvey Two-Face will be back because his death would mean The Batman (Christian Bale) killed him in the movie, and that would mean he broke his one rule. As this is unlikely, Harvey Two-Face survived.

Was it not The Batman who lunged at him so as to save Gordon's son? Did this not cause him to fall from the two-story structure?

It is unlikely that The Batman pushed Harvey Two-Face toward a fatal drop.

Improving the odds that the character will be back is that The Batman ultimately takes the fall for Harvey Two-Face's murders, so the assumption is that he would not take such an unnecessary risk unless he believed that Dent and his reputation as Gotham's white knight could at some point be salvaged.

After all, the salvation of Dent's altruistic image and his reputation of being tough on organized crime means nothing to The Batman's mission without a district attorney to back it up.

How this would play out in a sequel is that Dent would return to the district attorney's office after reconstructive surgery and start secretly bumping off Gotham's mobsters with the help of a few remaining small-time rogues.

This is more or less what happens in "Batman: Dark Victory," the follow-up to the comic book series on which the movie is partly based, "Batman: The Long Halloween."

Chances are also good that he is not dead because no other villain could possibly carry another movie other than the late Heath Ledger's The Joker or Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul.