Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Titans season 3.
If there was ever any doubt that Batman can barely function without Alfred, Titans season 3 removes it. Whatever iteration of Batman you care to select, all of them share a heavy reliance on Alfred Pennyworth - the Wayne family's ever-faithful butler, who takes a freshly-orphaned Bruce under his wing. While Alfred is excellent at making tea, running baths and answering the door, his duties take on a whole new dimension when Bruce decides to become Gotham City's vigilante. Suddenly, Alfred is preparing weapons instead of bed linen and sewing wounds instead of suits, and he does it all without a word of complaint... more or less.
DC fans have long accepted how vital Alfred is to the Batman operation. Indeed, Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne was recently heard quipping "I work for him" in Zack Snyder's Justice League. Titans season 3 makes the same point in an altogether less subtle way. Set during Bruce's twilight years as a superhero, Alfred is currently six-feet under the Wayne family's burial plot. But as Iain Glen's Caped Crusader gradually shows more and more psychological cracks, it becomes more and more obvious that losing Alfred was the triggering point of Bruce's downfall.
In Titans' continuity, Bruce Wayne has never been blessed with a balanced psyche - evidenced by his training method of having a young Dick Grayson chased through woods by a hungry wolf. But, at some point, Bruce was Gotham City's glorious hero - a role model to Dick, his Titans team, Barbara Gordon, and many more. In the present day, Bruce's already damaged mentality has become fully unhinged. The manipulative tendencies that Batman has always possessed are amplified tenfold, with Bruce maneuvering his various young students as he sees fit, rarely revealing to them his full intentions. And though Batman isn't known for freely sharing emotions, rarely has he been quite this cold. He's already plotting a new Robin with Jason's "corpse" barely cold in Titans season 3, and holds a funeral without Jason's Titans allies, either because he doesn't care, or because he's hiding a secret. To top it all, Bruce then breaks his long-held, iron-clad rule by killing the Joker in retaliation.
In the past, Bruce's personality defects were largely overlooked because he remained such a skilled crime-fighter, but in Titans season 3, Batman is a shadow of the hero he used to be. Bruce neglects to notice that Jason Todd has been corrupted right under his pointy, black nose. When Joker breaks out of Arkham, Bruce isn't home. Scarecrow begins schmoozing the GCPD, Bruce helped it happen. Red Hood begins tearing up the streets, Batman goes missing. In season 2, he let a dangerous metahuman battle go ahead while sipping a cup of tea. Rarely has any version of Batman been so spectacularly unhelpful, and Barbara even points out how he should've at least figured out how to stop Joker escaping by now.
And it all traces back to Alfred's death. During a tense conversation between Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson in Titans season 3's first episode, it's revealed that Bruce barely said or did anything at Alfred's funeral, repressing his emotions like a pro. Later in the episode, Bruce begs Dick to retake the Robin mantle, because the Dark Knight simply can't face protecting Gotham alone. There's a pathological drive to avoid loneliness inside Bruce, and this only would've emerged after losing his ever-present companion since childhood, Alfred Pennyworth. More than just assisting his master's crime-fighting, Alfred tempered Bruce's worst instincts, nurtured his humanity, and steered his moral compass even as an adult. With the butler dead, Bruce isn't only consumed by a crushing isolation (made worse after losing Jason Todd), but he very clearly has a looser grasp on right and wrong.
There's a chance that everything happening in Titans season 3 has been orchestrated by Bruce Wayne. Perhaps Batman sensed Jason was embarking on a downward spiral, figured out his sidekick hadn't died, and then pretended to kill Joker as an excuse to "retire" while Dick sorted out the Red Hood. But even if Bruce isn't as incompetent as he currently seems, that just means he's crueler and more manipulative by treating the Titans like pawns. Under Alfred Pennyworth's wing, Batman wouldn't be either.