•• Jim and the Werthers Original Killer

Gotham S02E09 “A Bitter Pill to Swallow” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E09 “A Bitter Pill to Swallow” REVIEW

•• Jim and the Werthers Original Killer

 

stars 3

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Megan Mostyn-Brown
Director: Louis Shaw Milito

Essential Plot Points

  • Tabitha walks past a newspaper stand. The headline is MAYOR GALAVAN ARRESTED!
  • She talks her way into the secret room at a bar. Which is actually an Assassins Night Club/Bureau.

• MISSY!

  • RUN BY MISSY! THIS IS AMAZING!
  • MEANWHILE, AT NYGMACIDE TOWERS!
  • Ed wakes the Penguin up who he’s nursing back to health like the angriest of all birds. Penguin is having none of this. Ed drugs him anyway.

Ed drugs penguin

  • MEANWHILE, AT GCPD HEADQUARTERS!
  • Jim gets back from seeing Barbara and is confronted by Lee. In another edition of At Home With Lee And Jim she again shows just how much of a grown-up she is and politely points out how awfully he’s acting. He agrees, kind of apologises and runs off to help Captain MachoFace search Galavan’s apartment.
  • MEANWHILE, AT STATELY WAYNE MANOR
  • Silver shows up and, because it’s Bruce’s turn to be an idiot this week, he believes she had no idea about her uncle’s intentions.

cockneyman!

  • Alfred arrives, throws her out and basically tells Bruce he’s awful at this and needs to stop. Bruce tantrums. Cockneyman is having none of it.
  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • Jim gets into an elevator with a polite, gentle man who is very clearly a horrifyingly violent criminal. After Jim turns down what we choose to believe is a poisoned caramel, the Werther’s Original Killer opts for good old-fashioned piano wire. He and Jim beat the crap out of each other until Jim drags his unconscious form into the penthouse.
  • The assassin’s phone rings, Jim answers it, they hang up. No one really does anything.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT WHAT WE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IS MISSY’S TARDIS!
  • Missy puts the call out: Jim Gordon dies. Now. She also calls Flamingo, an unusually horrible, cannibalistic assassin who was previously off her love list.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT NYGMACIDE TOWERS!
  • Ed chats to the Penguin and asks for his advice about his newfound fondness for homicide. Penguin, crushed by the loss of his mum, is having none of it and even turns down the offer of a quick brutal murder of one of Galavan’s hoods.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!

• Barnes and Parks

  • Jim beats the assassin, threatens him and hangs him out of a window. Barnes actually reacts to this and stands him down which is nice. What isn’t is the realisation that a hit team is on the way in. With only Barnes, Jim, rookie Officer Parks, a CSI and presumably a stick with an angry face drawn on it, the GCPD is in big trouble.
  • Nonetheless, they prevail. Although they lose the CSI along the way and Barnes gets knifed in the artery, meaning they’re trapped there and more assassins are coming…
  • While they wait to see who gets there first – their back-up or their killers – Jim and Barnes talk. Barnes explains, in a moment that’s actually really well done, why he’s such a stickler; he executed a young prisoner during his third tour. That awful experience, and deed, haunt him. He makes it clear he doesn’t wish that on Jim.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT NYGMACIDE TOWERS!
  • Ed plays Penguin a piece of music he was singing when he fell asleep. Penguin reveals his mother used to sing it to him every night. Again, Ed tries to bond with him. Again, Penguin vows to leave. This time though, Ed gets through; he points out that Penguin’s empty life is also his strength. He has no weaknesses now. And neither does Ed. It’s a surprisingly great, really dark scene.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!

Jim and Flamingo fight

  • The GCPD back-up arrives. Hurray! And they’re all instantly killed by Flamingo! Booo! Despite orders not to, Jim answers Flamingo’s taunting walkie talkie message and goes down to fight him. They beat the hell out of each other and Jim wins, ending up kneeling on Flamingo with his gun in the killer’s mouth. Ignoring the laughter of his opponent, he refuses to kill him and reads him his rights.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT NYGMACIDE TOWERS!
  • Ed and Penguin celebrate their new found MurderBrohood with takeout and homicide. BFFs forever!
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD
  • Flamingo is brought in, feigns illness and tears Officer Parks’ throat out.
  • MEANWHILE, IN THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF AT HOME WITH LEE AND JIM
  • Lee basically points out Jim’s a human dumpster fire. He agrees and asks why she’s with him. She jokes that she has no idea and yet again, somehow, these two are the most interesting and real part of the show. Their conversation about Jim’s astronomically huge anger issues is a real highlight. And one completely shut down by Jim getting the news about Parks.
  • MEANWHILE, AT BLACKGATE!

inmate galavan

  • Tabitha shows up to visit Theo. He tears a strip off her for hiring the assassins and points out they’ve almost won anyway. She admits she was angry over Jim hurting Barbara and he points out that, sister or not, he’ll kill her if she screws up their plans again.
  • MEANWHILE, AT STATELY WAYNE MANOR!
  • Bruce, who’s been shut down from sneaking out throughout the episode, is met by Selina. She tells him Silver’s evil and helps him sneak out so she can prove it.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE DOCKS!
  • The Monks of St Dumas arrive and proceed to murder a poor patrolman a LOT before walking slowly into Gotham…

 

Review:

After two weeks in the gutter, Gotham is back on the sidewalk.

Just.

There’s a lot to enjoy here. And, amazingly, a lot of that involves Ed. The ghastly time-wasting of the last two weeks is replaced by a plot that’s as bleak and psychological as Gotham always thinks its being. Ed “saves” Penguin and points out the pair of them have nothing left to lose, which means they have no weaknesses. It’s a horrifying, dancing-in-the-ruins style moment and it finally, FINALLY, puts the all new all-evil Ed in something other than a lousy Dexter ripoff. This is the Riddler being born; a fiercely analytical brain built on a foundation of revulsion and dreadful, curdled self-actualisation. Disturbing, tragic and genuinely funny – instead of just trying to be – the Ed and Penguin scenes are a highlight of the episode. Who knew we’d be writing that?

Elsewhere the episode also scores highly. The dismally bad action scenes of the last few episodes have been replaced with actual fights! With actual choreography! And actual meaning! It’s startling and pleasingly burly. The assassins/GCPD throwdown is especially good precisely because it’s messy. There’s something desperate, untidy and scrappy to it. It drives and is defined by the plot, just like the other two fights here and that’s such a welcome change.

Plus, no return to a gunfight carried out through a building, which is a bonus.

• At home with Lee and Jim

Even better, the episode finally turns the entire focus of the show onto Jim being an awful human being. The bad-conduct kiss from last week? Addressed. His ridiculous propensity for violence? Addressed. Ish. His getting officers killed because he’s an idiot? Addressed. To be fair that continues this week but at least it’s not under the rug anymore. All of this stuff is fun, interesting and often surprisingly well written character development and its weeks past due.

Then there’s the murder.

We go into detail about the murder of Officer Parks below. It’s very finely balanced writing, so much so it’s difficult to call if it’s good or awful. The scene is definitely within the boundaries of gratuitous at the very least. It’s also certainly a massive tonal shift from everything that went before and, depressingly, sees the show change the channel from “Pretty good action procedural” to “CHECK OUT THE AWFUL!” again.

But most of all it feels jarring. And perhaps a little mean-spirited. After an episode that’s finally honestly pretty good, ending it like that feels almost belligerent.

The Good:

  • Michelle Gomez! Michelle Gomez as the head of a Gotham Assassin Bureau/Night Club is wonderful. Much more of her please.
  • Context! We find out the awful thing Captain Barnes did. We see Jim called on his nonsense. We see him acknowledge he’s very nearly dangerously unbalanced. We even see Ed and Penguin find a curious kind of wholeness in the realisation of their bleak, empty, predatory existences. This is really good stuff.

bag fu

  • Really solid fight choreography. Gotham has been bloody awful at this for weeks now with the dire “Extras stand in position and fire off camera” attempt on Galavan’s life being an all-time low. Here we get:
    • A pretty solid close-quarters punch-up in the lift between Jim and the first assassin. The “run up the wall” move is a little OTT but it worked for Jack Bauer all those years ago. Also EXCELLENT Bag Fu Jim!
    • A nicely burly, untidy fight between the second wave of assassins and the GCPD.
    • A good, methodical duel between Flamingo and Jim. No big flashy moves, no showboating, just two guys beating on each other until one of them doesn’t get back up.
  • Tone. This feels, for the first time in weeks, like a Batman show. The balance of brutality and high drama is (mostly) spot on, the characters act far more believable than they have in weeks and the pacing actually serves the show instead of dragging it down. After the catastrophic last couple of episodes this isn’t so much a relief as it is cause for celebration, fireworks and small feral warrior bears to play the drums on the helmets of the Stormtroopers they’ve killed and, we presume, eaten off camera.
  • “Most people fight their dark side. Lately, you find ways to give into it.” Lee nails Jim to the wall every time she opens her mouth this episode but this is the best one.
  • “Getting information out of a girl like that requires a level of deception you do not yet possess, Master Bruce.” A great line because the more you read it, the sadder it becomes. Alfred is essentially paying Bruce a compliment because he’s not good enough at subterfuge to find out something to his disadvantage quiet yet.
  • “I believe in the beauty of extreme measures.” So do we, Not-Quite Missy! Come back soon!

• ed and penguin

  • “If you’re planning on killing me could you get on with it? At this point it would come as a welcome relief.” Penguin articulating our feelings about the last few weeks of the Ed plot beautifully there.
  • “I’m just a man and at the right moment a man might do anything. Any man. There is no line. There’s just the law. That’s what separates us from the animals.” This is a pivotal moment for Jim. This is the first time we’ve really seen the man he’ll become start to appear and it’s also the first time this show has come within a hundred miles of giving Michael Chiklis lines worthy of his ability. Nicely done.
  • “A man with nothing that he loves is a man that cannot be bargained, a man who cannot be betrayed, a man who answers to no one but HIMSELF! And that is the man I see before me. A free man!” This is another wonderful, horrible piece of dialogue. This is Ed acknowledging and embracing how broken he is and turning his own inner Tyler Durden on Penguin. And it WORKS.
  • “I almost crossed the line tonight.”
    “No kidding. How out of character.”
    “Scared me a little.”
    “Welcome to my world.”
    “Why the hell are you with me?”
    “Beats me.” Never change you two. Actually, Jim, change a lot you’re an enormous asshole. Lee? You’re perfect.

The Bad:

  • The GCPD arrested the Mayor. This is a case that will make or break careers and the reputation of the Force for a generation. It requires subtlety, diligence and precision. It gets: Captain MachoFace, JimJim the Hot Mess, a SINGLE CSI and a rookie. God damn it, Captain Barnes…
  • Where the Hell are the Jimshirts this week? Did he kill them all off? AGAIN?

• Flamingo

  • Flamingo. In the comics he’s not that interesting but Gotham turns the volume on him all the way up and breaks the dial off. The fact he’s a cannibal in the show but not in the comics sums up the problems with him and the show very neatly: endless excess with little regard for character.
  • For an episode filled with surprisingly well done violence there’s a really lazy tic in here. When Parks is killed we get a long shot of the cops failing to pull Flamingo off her. Barely two scenes later, we’re shown the order of St Dumas all stabbing a single watchman to death. Why? The spectacle’s obvious but like everything this show screws up, it’s not necessary. Parkes’ death is just as shocking without the pile-on; the monks are scarier if one of them kills the guard not all of them like a horde of homicidal pigeons.

 

The “Honestly Don’t Know…”

  • Right. The murder of Officer Parks. On the one hand, it makes perfect thematic sense. Jim has had his long night of the soul and chosen to let Flamingo live. He’s made a definite ethical choice and feels like he’s turned a corner. Then, his ethical choice tears the throat out of a good hearted rookie.On the other hand, the scene could, and will, be read as offensive two different ways. Firstly there’s the gratuity of it. We get three separate, extended shots of Parks’s weeping, terrified, screaming face as her throat is torn out. We see her pain. We see her blood spread across the floor. We see her terror and her helplessness.
  • Yet again the suffering of the female characters of Gotham is fetishised in a way that’s at best misguided and at worst disturbing. This is certainly the first scene in the show that’s truly got under my skin.Then there’s the confused symbology of it. Parks shares a name with civil rights activist Rosa Parks and, like everything else with this deeply weird and upsetting plot that could be read one of two ways. The positive view is that she occupies Rosa Parks’ position within the universe of Gotham; a woman whose actions ultimately change her world for the better.
  • The negative view is that even if that is the case the catalyst of that change denies her of all agency. Rosa Parks changed her country through polite civil disobedience. Officer Parks may have changed Jim Gordon by being murdered and, it’s implied, changed him for the worse too.
  • The end result is a punch that lands but feels like one that lands below the belt. You understand her death, you understand why the episode goes there but you find yourself desperately wishing it hadn’t. In some cases that’s the mark of genuinely great horror. Here it simply leaves you feeling numb.

 

The Random:

  • Not-Missy has excellent musical taste! “Peaches” by The Stranglers plays over our first view of what is very clearly not her TARDIS but just a night club full of assassins.
  • Special thanks to Nick Eden, who pointed out the infinitely more logical spelling of ‘Lee’ to me than the one I’ve been using.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

• Read our other Gotham reviews

 

 

• Bridezilla

Gotham S02E08 “Tonight’s The Night” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E08 “Tonight’s The Night” REVIEW

• Bridezilla

stars 2.5

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Jim Barnes
Director: Jeffrey Hunt

Essential Plot Points

barbara

  • Barbara walks down the aisle. Everything is fine.

organist galavan

  • The priest describes the bride and groom as “unlawfully wedded”. It’s fine.
  • The priest is Penguin. Fine.

congregation

  • The congregation is made up from  Gotham inmates. FINE.
  • Barbara pukes up a bird and… yeah it’s a nightmare.
  • She wakes up, is comforted by the sight of what seems to be bondage gear on the bed and a present from Galavan.
  • Nearby the evil twins are surveying their city. Tabitha’s… you guessed it! Bored! Theo fills her in and explains that to get Bruce to sign over Wayne Industries, they need to distract him from the fact they’re about to kill Gordon. Barbara comes in, and Theo tells her today’s the day she gets to kill Jim.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE GCPD!

Barnes

  • Jim and Harv pitch Barnes their case. Barnes is fully conscious this week and points out they have the word of two criminals against the most popular mayor in Gotham’s history. Nonetheless, they go for it.
  • Nearby, Leigh politely tells Jim to watch his obsessive tendencies juuuuust as Barbara walks in.

Jim and Barbara

  • Jim is the only one Barbara will talk to. So he interviews her.
  • Alone.
  • And then kisses her.
  • And then is somehow not instantly suspended for sexual harassment.
  • She tells him she has a surprise and they should go get it. It is so clearly a trap that in the background you can hear Detective Ackbar punching the air and yelling, “WHAT AM I ALWAYS TELLING YOU, GUYS?!”
  • In Barnes’s office Leigh points out Barbara is mentally ill and needs to be treated. But MEN are talking so that sensible idea is overruled in favour of macho nonsense. Officer Ackbar can be heard yelling, “Oh you guys SUCK!”
  • MEANWHILE, IN A SCENIC GOTHAM FOREST!

Ed

  • -Oh God. OH GOD it’s the Ed plot. Ed drives out to the Gotham Woods with a trunk that clearly has Miss Kringle’s sawn-in-half corpse in it. He digs a shallow grave, makes a picnic and salutes her for helping him become himself. A hunter appears, asks what Ed’s doing and is immediately killed. On some level, we envy him. Ed goes to get more Murderer Tools from his car and when he returns, the sandwiches from his picnic are gone and a trail of blood leads away.

• This Is A Thing

  • This is all stuff that happens. It happens throughout the episode, is all just awful and has been combined here in one block to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. We’ll see Ed at the end of the recap too. Sorry about that.
  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS!

• Bruce and Galavan

  • Bruce comes to see Galavan who pitches him an idea; sell him Wayne Enterprises and he’ll clean it up. Plus he’ll give Bruce the file he has on his parents’ killer. Bruce resists, pointing out the company is all he has left of his parents.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT A STATION FULL OF PEOPLE TOO TERRIFIED TO ADMIT NONE OF THEM KNOW HOW TO DO THEIR JOBS!

• Jimshirts the next generation

  • The GCPD tool up. Because that always ends well. Jim is introduced to new Jimshirts. Leigh calls Jim on his nonsense in a way that’s pointed, affectionate and justifiably angry. Again, Jim ignores her. AS MEN DO! GCPD! AWAAAAAYYYYY!
  • To the surprise of no one, Barbara isn’t talking. To the surprise of no one other than Barnes, Jim and Harv keep driving into a trap.

• Harve sees it coming

  • A trap is sprung.
  • Several Jimshirts are shot.
  • Jim is kidnapped. To be fair he clearly regrets many recent life choices as he’s drugged and carried away.

• JIm Regrets

  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD!
  • Barnes tears Harv apart verbally and sends him home. Harv, bearded rebel that he is, gets to work.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE TEENCAVE!

• Teen Cave

  • Bruce is brooding. Alfred comes to find him and Bruce tells him everything. He asks how long the training he’s doing will take. He weighs the years of training and life of horror that awaits him against selling his legacy. Alfred, because Cockneyman is on occasion wonderful, tells him that Bruce is the only legacy that matters. The kid breaks down, sobbing and asking if he’s weak for just wanting it to be over. Alfred assures him he’s not. For five whole minutes, this show is amazing.

• cockney man to the rescue

  • MEANWHILE, AT THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN THE CLOSING SCENES OF THE FIRST TIM BURTON BATMAN MOVIE, THE CROW AND AN ACTUAL BILLY IDOL VIDEO!

• Jim wakes up in church

  • Jim wakes up tied to a wheelchair in Gotham Cathedral. Barbara, magnificently, shows up in her wedding dress and with a sawn-off shotgun. She points out how much he lies to himself and Leigh, then wheels Leigh in to prove that this is true.

• White Wedding

  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT HARV’S STEADILY GROWING FEELINGS OF SHAME AND FONDNESS FOR OTHER HUMANS

• Harvs special thinking glasses

  • Harv does police work! Actually, he has to listen to a tape where Barbara mentions one single place twice before figuring out she went there but still, points for effort, big guy! He talks down Barnes and they roll out. Again.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT GOTHAM CATHEDRAL!

• Today

  • Barbara is pleasantly surprised, and kind of enraged, to find out Jim and Leigh are honest with each other. She reveals the mayor is still alive and at China Dock. Starting to realise that Leigh and Jim are, despite Jim being an awful human being, a legit couple, she snaps. She pulls a knife on Leigh and vows to cut her face off. At the last minute, Leigh distracts her by asking about her wedding dress.

• Leigh and crazypants

  • Yes. This actually happens.
  • And Jim, who’s been working on his bonds, rips free! There’s a face-off (not in the awful, gory way Barbara was threatening thankfully): a gunfight in which several thugs are killed, Tabitha injured and Barbara escapes. The GCPD storms the building and Jim confronts Barbara in the attic. They fight, she smashes through the cathedral’s main window and falls, after telling Jim she loves him one last time.

• Yeah we saw this coming

  • As they clean up, Leigh perfectly reasonably tells her hideous dumpster fire of a boyfriend that once this is done, they are going to TALK. He listens juuuust long enough for Barnes to sweep in and take him off to China Dock. GCPD, AWAAAAAAAY

• Mayor In A Box

  • Hurrah! The mayor’s still alive. And manages to be annoying very rapidly.
  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • Bruce is about to sign, changes his mind and the meeting is stormed by the GCPD. Jim punches Galavan and arrests him. As Galavan is led away, Bruce realises he’ thrown the file into the fire. Bruce screams at the embers, demanding to know who killed his parents.

• arrests_galavan

  • Aaaaaand for some reason the episode finishes with Ed, who follows the blood to a caravan. The door smashes open, he loses his glasses and for no reason at all, we’re supposed to think there’s a zombie coming towards him. Instead, it’s a badly injured Penguin who begs for help.

• Penguin meets Ed

Review:

Unlike last week, this is not a terrible hour of television.

It’s frequently a very, very bad one though.

Let’s deal with the rancid tea sandwich at the murder victim picnic, first. The Ed plot is now officially the absolute worst thing this show inflicts on its viewers on a weekly basis. Moving aside from his sudden fondness for dismemberment, it’s a total failure of tone and pacing. Again, this week it tries for dark comedy. Again it misses by several thousand miles. It’s not even subversively nasty; it’s just nasty. And, worse, pointless. The Ed plot destroys any pace the episode had this week and ties in to absolutely nothing we see. It looks like a blatant attempt to either fill air time or put in motion something a few episodes down the line. Regardless, the kindest thing you can say about it is that the episode has in-built bathroom breaks.

• hi hooooo

Also bad, but not entirely, is the Barbara plot. The awful stuff here is the awful stuff Gotham always does; with the notable exception of Leigh, it has absolutely no idea what to do with its female characters. Aside from a female character obsessing over her wedding as a defining life moment, there’s the fact her dialogue is shot through with the sort of things Jessica Rabbit would dismiss for being too unsubtle.

That being said, the closing moments of the Barbara plot work surprisingly well. Erin Richards has always been one of the cast members this show had no idea how to use and here at least she’s given plenty to sink her teeth into. The confrontation between her, Jim and Leigh is nicely tense and Richards succeeds in showing us the tragedy in Barbara even as the script fails to do so. At the end of the episode it’s mentioned she’s alive but seriously injured. We don’t see her taken to Indian Hill so here’s hoping the show really is done with her. Barbara deserves the rest and this is about as good a swansong as she was ever going to get.

Despite all the problems, some stuff works surprisingly well this week. The Jim and Leigh material changes gear in a really interesting way this week. Leigh points out Jim’s being stupid, Jim acknowledges that – Jim is stupid and it gets lots of people badly hurt. He’s a surprisingly awful guy in many ways and for the first time this season the show is not only showing us that but showing us Leigh seeing that. The fact she still loves him does more for Jim Gordon as a character than any episode this season and I’m honestly interested to see how this plot goes. I suspect Jim will fall much, much further before he starts the journey towards Commissioner. I hope, for his sake, Leigh is there with him.

• Cockney man ave iit

But what works absolutely this episode is the Bruce and Alfred plot. David Mazouz, like Erin Kelly, has been badly served by plenty of scripts in the past. Here he’s given something which is weightier, smarter and more poignant than anything else we’ve seen from the show this year. The deal with Galavan is a beautiful knife twist; compassion wrapped around business and vengeance and Mazouz shows us every inch of Bruce’s torment over it. The moment he breaks down and Alfred hugs him is one of the best things the show’s ever done and gives those two characters a real emotional foundation that the show desperately needs to build on. If, as seems likely, Bruce’s investigation is moving front and centre in the back half of the season, that can (hopefully) only be a good thing. Mazouz, and the ever-dependable Pertwee, are more than ready to carry the plot for a while.

“Tonight’s The Night” is a big improvement on last week but it needed to be. It’s still hobbled by terrible writing on the female characters, the toxically awful Ed plot and the show’s need to keep a dozen plots in the air at once. But it’s a start. And after last week’s disaster, that’s enough.

The Good:

  • “Doesn’t being mayor mean you can sleep in?” Tabitha gets a line about something other than being bored, horny or wanting to punch things!
  • “Galavan is dirty, I’d bet my life on it.”
    “Well DON’T!”
    “What?”
    “DON’T BET YOUR LIFE ON IT!” Every At Home With Jim And Leigh moment is great this episode. Especially every time Leigh points out what a colossal disaster of a human being Jim is. There are a lot of those.
  • “Must be killing you. All that righteous indignation with no place to go.” One of Barbara’s few genuinely great lines this episode.
  • “Her sickness and yours feed off each other.”
    “What do you mean? I’m not sick.”
    “You see an abyss and you run toward it. That’s not healthy.’” You tell him! He won’t listen but still, tell him!
  • “There’s a fine line, Alfred, between extortion and negotiation.”
    “Yes there is, Master Bruce but there’s still a LINE.” Cockneyman is on great form this week. Gotham’s take on Alfred can be child slappingly misplaced but this week it’s right on the money.
  • Hooray for the Jimshirts being gender-balanced and ethnically diverse!

The Bad:

  • Tabitha mentions how bored she is again. I swear it’s on a flash card somewhere in the writer’s room.
  • Every time the show does something good with Barbara, it rushes to do something bad. Her “naughty girl” mannerisms are bad. Saying “DO ME” to Jim in the closing scenes? In her wedding dress? Holding a knife? That’s just a perfect storm of awful.
  • Leigh distracts Barbara by asking about her dress. On the one hand, you can see her playing into Barbara’s psychosis. On the other, I hope we see a male villain distracted by someone asking if they work out later this season.
  • The GCPD are so terrible at their jobs it still astounds me. Jim being the only one Barbara would talk to? Fair enough. Jim being the only officer in the room? Nope.
  • JIM KISSING A SUSPECT?!
  • That’s a “badge, gun, cardboard box to clear your desk and another to move out of your girlfriend’s apartment” move. It’s not just staggeringly unprofessional it’s deeply disturbing and wrong. The show has made reforming the GCPD such a tentpole issue that seeing Jim do this kind of nonsense week in week out never fails to annoy and disturb
  • Also this week Jim possibly gets three Jimshirts killed, endangers the lives of countless officers and is rewarded by making the arrest of his career. But hey at least he doesn’t fire heavy weaponry through walls kind of in the direction of the bad guys this week.

• Ed Kills The Hunter

  • After the horrendous rolling catastrophe of last week’s Ed plot you’d think this week would be an improvement, right?
  • Yeah.
  • No.
  • There’s nothing good here and increasingly there’s nothing salvageable either. The suddenly dismemberment happy Riddler is a bum note. The “comedy” murder he perpetrates and the dialogue, to himself, explaining why this is weird is so far beyond terrible it defies description. Cory Michael Smith does heroic work here but this entire plot is just straight up and down awful. And, unfortunately, not going away. Which is a shame as, without that plot this episode would have gone up at least a half star.
  • Silver. Not that she’s bad this episode she’s just completely pointless and as ever more than a little skeevy. What’s terrifying is how likely this show is to do the ‘Silver seeks revenge’ plot, probably involving hysterical crying in the rain, stabbing and a prom dance. Because let’s face it, after Barbara’s “wedding”? We’ve found the level.
  • Boo for no names for the Jimshirts!  Also, Barnes got two brand new recruits killed by putting them in awful situations. WHY ARE THE ACADEMY STILL SENDING HIM PEOPLE?!
  • Mayor James is back.
  • Oh joy.
  • To be fair, Richard Kind is a massively well-respected actor and they need an authority figure now Galavan’s under arrest. But Kind tends to come at this kind of role with one=note and that note is LOUD AND SLIGHTLY INCOMPETENT! He’s annoying with maybe a minute’s screen time.
  • What the Hell is up with the “Oh, is it a zombie?” fake-out when Ed meets Penguin at the end? Of course it’s not a zombie! Zombies hate sandwiches!

The Random:

  • Richard Kind really is a very well-respected character actor. His “slightly crap, slightly evil” politician schtick was at its best in the remarkable Spin City but he’s also been seen in Glee, Leverage, Burn Notice and Elementary among others. He’s also a regular voice actor for Penguins Of Madagascar and American Dad. And he absolutely nails it as BingBong in Upside Down.
  • Oh, BingBong…
  • Sniff.
  • Shot Of the Week could be anything from the interrogation scene. This show, even at its worst, is shot with incredible beauty and this episode is no exception.

• Shot of the week

  • But the winner is this; Barbara and Leigh, separated, but occupying the same space.

• other shot of the week

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

• Read our other Gotham reviews

 

Jim and Galavan

Gotham S02E07 “Mommy’s Little Monster” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E07 “Mommy’s Little Monster” REVIEW

Jim and Galavan

stars 1.5

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Robert Hull
Director: Kenneth Fink

 

Essential Plot Points

  • Penguin to the rescue! He, Butch and what seem to be the two guys who were nearest him at the time, roll out to rescue Penguin’s mom. They succeed.
  • Right up until Galavan shows up. Butch has been deprogrammed and it was all a trap. Butch kills the other two goons. Penguin begs for his mother’s life, she’s released and then…
  • Killed anyway.
  • As Carol Kane gets her money’s worth out of her final scene (you’re a national treasure, Ms Kane! You deserved so much better than this!), Galavan gloats. Penguin goads him into getting his hands dirty and Galavan temporarily loses all reason and agrees. He holds a gun on Penguin, leans in for some premium gloatage and Penguin slashes his neck and escapes.
  • No he’s not right by the window.
  • No he can’t move any faster.
  • Look, just go with it okay? That is the least of this episode’s sins.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT NYGMACIDE TOWERS!

• Tyler DurdNygma

  • Ed wakes up and is greeted by his other personality. Tyler Durdnygma tells Ed he’s hidden Kirngle’s body at the GCPD and sets him a series of riddles to find it. Clearly this won’t go South in any way at all…
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • Galavan is on course for a landslide victory. Tabitha is bored. I wonder if next scene she’ll be murderous? That’d be a twist. Silver arrives and assures her uncle/pimp that Bruce is wrapped around her little finger.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD!
  • Harv and Jim are watching the election victory pre-broadcast. Jim, refreshingly, is no longer sure Theo “Eyes of a Killer” Galavan is quite on the up and up. Even better they tell each other things! Relevant to the case! And listen!
  • Then Galavan rolls in along with Harvey Dent, who looks as surprised as we are. Galavan calmly explains that once he’s mayor the GCPD will be authorised to go door-to-door looking for the Penguin.
  • Across the entire city.
  • Because law.

Captain Macho Face

  • Jim and Bullock are not okay with this. Captain MachoFace looks like he may weep manly tears of joy. Tears that, were we to lick them, would undoubtedly taste like bourbon and black coffee.
  • As Galavan leaves Jim basically asks if he’s a baddie now. Galavan points out Jim came to him and leaves.
  • MEANWHILE, AT STATELY WAYNE MANOR!
  • Selina visits Bruce. Silver arrives and asks her to stay for lunch. Silver then gets Bruce out of the room and threatens Selina. Selina then gives Alfred sass through lunch and confronts Bruce about Silver who then throws her out. It’s all terrible. All of it. Let’s move on.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD!
  • Ed looks for clues. He eventually realises his other personality cut off one of Kringle’s hands and left it in the vending machine.
  • This is played as comedy.
  • Ed leaves with it hidden in his jacket. They may as well be playing “Yakety Sax” as he runs off.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • The Galavans are preparing for their victory celebration and Tabitha, because amazingly, she’s bored, begs to be allowed to kill Penguin. Theo assures her that Penguin will deliver himself to them.

penguin enraged

  • MEANWHILE, AT THE PENGUIN’S HIDEOUT!
  • Penguin and the last few guys he has watch Galavan’s victory speech. It includes a just epic Penguin-specific burn to camera. Cobblepot goes strange colours of rage.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE GCPD!
  • Jim and Harv get word Butch has struck out on his own and is holed up downtown. They roll out and as they do, this week’s episode of At Home With Leigh And Jim begins. Leigh teases Jim about the awful state of his apartment and how often he’s at her’s, while giving him a key. It’s sweet and cute and funny and is the best part of this episode.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT DAWSON’S CREEK!
  • Selina then gives Alfred sass through lunch and confronts Bruce about Silver who then throws her out. It’s all terrible. All of it. Let’s move on.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE WORST EPISODE OF DEXTER EVER RECORDED!
  • Ed is looking at the hand of his murdered girlfriend. Tyler DurdNygma shows up and helps him realise there’s a clue. A clue that leads to the ME’s office. Because Tyler DurdNygma has hidden the rest of Kringle’s body in a drawer that Leigh could open at literally any time. Because crazy!
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE OK CORRAL!

Jim with an M60

  • Jim and Harv decide the best possible way to break into Butch’s hideout is to follow the pizza guy in. No just go with it. They do so and find Butch holed up with several thugs.
  • And two machine guns.
  • Just go with it.
  • Zsaz immediately arrives and gives everyone inside 60 seconds to flee. Butch’s thugs all do so and Jim and Harv threaten Butch for info as the clock ticks down. Butch confesses Galavan was behind the fires at the Wayne properties as Zsaz and his hilariously dressed kill team open up.
  • From outside.
  • 30 feet away.
  • Just go with it.
  • Jim and Harv then return fire. From inside. Using the machine guns.
  • So to be clear, this entire fight takes place between two groups of people trying to shoot through a building.
  • Just go with… Actually, you know what – don’t. This scene is so unutterably stupid Butch even leaves early. Go go prosthetic hand!

hand

  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS
  • Bruce shows up to apologise to Silver. Galavan goes full Emperor Palpatine manipulative on him and Silver bats her eyelids and totally isn’t evil.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE PENGUIN’S HIDEOUT
  • He prepares for war, vowing to kill Galavan.
  • THEN, AT THE VICTORY CELEBRATION!
  • Jim is in charge of security which means he has Martinez on the roof with a rifle. Harv does some checking and figures out Butch may have been telling the truth.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE PLOTLINE CRIMINAL MINDS DECIDED AGAINST!

ed and leigh

  • Ed finds the rest of Kringle’s body in Leslie’s office. Leslie comes in. She notices he’s upset. Ed says he and Kringle had a fight and they go for coffee to chat about it.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE VICTORY CELEBRATION
  • Galavan pumps Jim for info about Butch. He refuses to give anything up. Martinez spots incoming people and identifies the Penguin in the lead. Jim orders him to stand down and the Penguin is shot and killed. By Tabitha. On the roof with Martinez.
  • Martinez spots that everyone in the Penguin’s team is dressed and walking like him. Jim tells him to engage. Seconds later the Penguins leap through the windows and start gunning people down. Jim sends Martinez to locate and apprehend the other shooter. Tabitha kills Martinez.
  • Downstairs, in the middle of another surprisingly badly choreographed fight, Jim and Bullock evacuate the mayor.
  • The Penguin gets their location and a three-way standoff ensues. It finishes with Tabitha shooting Penguin and him making his getaway after begging Jim to let him go so he can discover Galavan’s end game.

• galavan wins

  • LATER, IN SEVERAL LOCATIONS!
  • The evil twins watch Galavan’s victory speech.
  • Silver kisses Bruce. Selina watches from outside, vengeance in her eyes and rain in her goggles.
  • Jim, realising Galavan is totally a bad guy, confronts him and vows to take Galavan down. Mayor Galavan all but says “Bring it on.”
  • “Aaaaand back in the lab, Ed confronts Tyler Durdnygma over why he made him jump through hoops. Tyler forces Ed to admit he feels amazing after taking all those chances and the pair merge. Ed (and Ed) pull Kringle’s body out of the drawer and pick up a bonesaw, smiling as the episode ends.

 

Review:

This is a terrible hour of television. It’s almost irredeemably bad.

We go into a lot of detail about this below but there are two points that really need to be emphasised.

Firstly, the Nygma plot is a catastrophe. Last week, even the accidental murder, had surprising emotional weight to it. Ed is far and away one of the weakest links in this show’s mammoth list of characters but he’s been vastly improved this year. Cory Michael Smith has frequently been dismally served but here, at last, he was starting to get some stuff to do.

Ed and the hand

And in fairness he’s great as the warmed-over Fight Club trope that is Ed’s other personality. He’s slick and confident and everything Ed isn’t. The acting isn’t the problem here. The writing, and what it says about the show as a whole, categorically is.

Gotham’s female characters aren’t so much a weak spot as a gaping hole in the centre of the city. Kringle’s transformation from victim to punchline here proves that. In an amazing piece of tone-deafness Ed’s search for her body is played as a comedy. A woman who one episode ago was a living part of the show is reduced to an object to be hidden. The casual mutilation of her body is bad. The show’s desire to use that as a springboard to turn Ed into a psychopath is much worse and something no amount of good acting can solve.

Secondly, there’s the fact that any time the show needs something to happen it shaves 100 points off the GCPD’s IQ. Jim and Harvey’s surreal blind machine gun fight is a series low for sure but the ending is a better example of everything the show’s doing wrong. Geography, timing and common sense are sacrificed as we get a single sniper on the roof, a group of hobbling assassins who can suddenly cover huge amounts of ground in five seconds and the offhanded murder of another member of the StrikeForce. In a way, we should add, that manages to push Tabitha Galavan even further into the “Cookie Cutter Sexy Lunatic” trope.

sniper

Worse still, it’s DULL. There’s no snap to the action; no sense of purpose or direction. Just a bunch of extras with no idea what to do, hitting their marks as the second stupidest-looking group of assassins in Gotham’s history hobble around killing them in a parade of bloodless carnage. Sound and fury signifying almost nothing.

The energy and dark humour the show had a few weeks ago has been replaced by idiotic choices, pointless action and horror that’s as disturbing as it is misplaced. The bounce back can arrive any time it wants to.

 

The Good:

  • For an episode absolutely chock full of terrible, there are some good lines here. Such as:
  • “Knew you’d wake up all boo-hooey. Probably have half a mind to turn yourself in. Luckily, I have the other half.” The Ed plotline is a hot mess but at least Ed’s other half has a couple of zingers.
  • “If I was you and… I sort of am, I’d get crackin’.” See?
  • “Looks like you backed the right horse. You trust him?”
    “Gotham politician? About as far as I can throw him. But if he gives the GCPD what he needs, he’s alright by me.” This is one of several points where Jim and Harv feel and act like actual policemen. None of these scenes involve them firing M-60s.
  • Edward refers to Leigh as “Doctor Thompkins” for, I think, the first time this season. That’s a nice indicator that he’s off his game. See? I found the one single nice thing you can say about that festering dumpster fire of a plotline.
  • “A man not even a mother could love.” OHHHHHHH BURRRRRN!

LITTLE squirm

  • “Do you want a key to my place?”
    “Not even a little bit. Wait do you HAVE a place?”
    “…think so.”
    “I love to watch you squirm.”
    “I was not squirming.”
    “LITTLE squirm.” We would honestly watch an entire episode of these two messing with each other. It’s like the show enters a fugue state where it’s clever and funny and sweet for five minutes every week.
  • “Do you believe Galavan’s story?”
    “Questions like that are above my pay grade and below my sense of wonder.” This line is transcendentally perfect. It’s Harvey Bullock to a tee. It’s the best line this show has produced all year. It’s the reason the episode has 1.5 stars and not one.
  • “Nobody’s telling the truth. This is Gotham.” See? The few occasions when this script actually shows up for work it does a good job.

 

The Bad:

Kringle hand

  • Oh God where to begin?
  • Oh yeah, with the physical destruction of one of the show’s female characters and her transformation into a set of bloody LEGO that, when found, will help Edward Nygma hug his inner Chuck Palahniuk novel. Let’s start there.
    That’s HIDEOUS. And not in a good way. Gotham has patently had very little idea what to do with most of its female characters for a while now and this is a new low for a series I was no longer sure could find one. The genuine pathos and operatic, Batman-esque tragedy of Edward accidentally killing Kringle last episode is replaced by a comedy scavenger hunt, perky music and a woman’s hand in a vending machine as a punchline.
  • It tries for absurdity. It misses. It tries for profundity. It misses. Instead all you get is a bad photocopy of a played-out trope, elements of Dexter and Fight Club jammed into a TV show already bursting with too many tonal shifts and unexplored ideas. There’s no emotion here, no engagement, not even any horror. Just growing anger at a TV show that thinks that idiot brutality is the same thing as horror, and that buries its female characters in the foundations of its male characters’ new selves.
  • The shootout between Zsaz’s elite hit team and Jim and Harvey is… just… How does that pass edits? How does a scene like that pass first draft?
  • Here are just some of the ways that apocalyptically stupid five minutes destroys your brain cells:
  • Zsaz has vastly superior numbers. He does nothing with them.

Zsaz kill team

  • That building has at least two exits. Zsaz, one of the best hitmen in the business, doesn’t send any of his “escaped from 1985 Duran Duran backing dancer kill team” to cover it.
  • HE DOESN’T GO INTO THE BUILDING. This highly trained death machine who we’ve seen demolish entire rooms of people, stays 30 feet away, IN THE OPEN and empties his guns into the building. What if they were on the second floor? Or lying down? OR HAD ALREADY LEFT THROUGH ONE OF THE EXITS HE HADN’T THOUGHT TO COVER?
  • In a kinder world that would be the stupidest thing this season. Possibly in the history of this show in fact. But no, it’s just the entre. Let’s skip over Butch getting his hands on those two machine guns (he has people who know people, that’s justifiable). But what’s done with them needs to be broken down into steps:
  • 1) Jim and Harvey grab the machine guns.
  • 2) Jim and Harvey empty them in the direction of the gunshots WITH. THE. BUILDING. BETWEEN. THEM. AND. THEIR. TARGETS.
  • So in other words, Zsaz doesn’t bother going in and the GCPD don’t bother coming out. That in itself is just barely justifiable. They, and Zsaz, have forgotten that back doors are a thing so it makes sense to bottleneck their opponents in the doorway.
  • But NOTHING else does. These are two senior GCPD detectives. They are men who’ve staked their lives on keeping the peace in a city which is both perpetually one step away from open war and still remarkably full of innocent people.
  • Some of whom will live on that street.
  • Bullets are murderous chaos. If they don’t hit their target they will keep going until they do hit something. If they do hit their target they may keep going anyway. If they hit anything their path will become impossible to react to or predict.
  • Jim and Harv empty two infantry support weapons into an urban street. Yes there are no people out there other than Zsaz and his little Five*Star cover band. But what about in the buildings behind them? Or a block away? That sort of astounding negligence should be the last thing on the mind of the GCPD detectives.
  • This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen a TV show do. Any TV show. Possibly ever. It’s a perfect example of the gaping chasm between spectacle and drama that the show continually leaps into and every time they do this stuff it just makes Jim’s “we must be paragons of virtue” speeches even more ludicrous. Please stop.

multi penguin

  • Martinez sights the horde of Penguins. They’re still in open ground, which makes sense because he’s on the roof, has some elevation and a decent angle of fire. Jim gives him the order to engage and five seconds later the Penguins are smashing through the windows. HOW?! Did they speed waddle?!
  • Also what was the briefing with them like: “Gentlemen, they will be looking for me. They want me dead. So you’re all going to dress, and walk, like me in single file down an open driveway and ACT AS CANNON FODDER!” “…Okay, boss.”
  • We’re down another member of Strike Force. Because Martinez was a smart, highly trained and principled officer who didn’t think to call for back-up before engaging an unknown threat.
  • Oh no, wait we’re actually down a member because Tabitha likes whips and stiletto heels! Because she’s evil! And sexy! Hey Tabitha, it’s been five minutes! Tell us you’re bored again!
  • “If we start kicking down the doors of average citizens and policing through fear, we’re no better than he is.” But beating suspects and working off a debt to a mobster? Totally cool.
  • “Let’s show this city what it means to carry a badge.” Being able to indiscriminately fire heavy calibre in the vague direction of criminals? Is that the answer?

And The Random:

  • The first track on Riddler’s debut album: “Now That’s What I Call Music To Follow the Clues Left By My Demented Other Personality to the Remains of the Woman You Murdered, is Closest to the Bone” by Louis Prima.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

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Must be Tuesday

Gotham S02E06 “By Fire” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E06 “By Fire” REVIEW

Must be Tuesday

stars 2.5

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Rebecca Perry Cutter
Director: TJ Scott

Essential Plot Points

• butch

  • Butch is having his entrance interview with the Galavans. It’s going well. Less so for the chap behind him in the noose, balancing on a pile of books. Butch gets the job, the noosed gentleman, who turns out to be a Congressman, gets to live in return for backing Galavan for Mayor. Cautious yay!

• Jim in pursuit

  • On the mean streets of Gotham, Jim Gordon is chasing his man down! His man in this case being a disfigured former arsonist who, in the first of several dreadful lines this week, tells Jim that a female arsonist is “Mad real, like a unicorn.” Jim beats the guy up to get this non information.
  • The Strike Force members who are accompanying Jim tell him Captain Barnes has ordered them to write up all infractions of conduct, even with superior officers. Jim Gordon doesn’t care! He gets results!

• Selina and Bridgit 2

  • At Selina’s squat, Bridgit is hiding out. In fact, Bridgit is cleaning up because she doesn’t know what else to do. Selina suggests they do some crime and takes them to a human trafficking auction. Bridigt is adamant that they should help the women being auctioned off but Selina’s all about the money. They rob the place and make a pretty good team. In fairness as well, the fact that combined they weigh maybe 150 lbs and there are only two of them is offset by the fact Bridgit HAS A FLAMETHROWER and clearly enjoys using it.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE GCPD!

• Captain MachoFace

  • Jim Gordon’s results include a note in his file. Barnes writes him up and Jim fights him on it. Jim argues that Gotham requires grey areas, Barnes believes it’s black and white. He also, intriguingly, hints at something very bad in his past that gave him this black and white world view. He tells Jim they have a lead and shows him security footage of Selina and Bridgit escaping from the human trafficking auction. He then tells Jim they’re going to take down the killer. Which sounds a lot like executing the killer. Which, if that’s true, means Barnes is a colossal hypocrite or has no short term memory.
  • Jim recognises Selina and goes to talk to her. Harv suggests he take the Jimshirts, sorry Strike Force, but Jim decides to go in quietly.
  • MEANWHILE, AT STATELY WAYNE MANOR!

• Alfred and Bruce box

  • Alfred and Bruce are boxing. Alfred is in the process of tucking his young ward up like a kipper when Bruce bites him. Complementing his student/boss/ward for fighting dirty, Alfred tells him Silver invited him over for dinner. Bruce blisses out.
  • Alfred punches him in the face.
  • Bruce accepts that he maybe needs to focus a bit more and goes back to training.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD!

• Nygma

  • Yay it’s the Ed scenes for the episode. Ed overhears Leigh and Kringle talking about Dougherty and himself. Kringle admits that she wants Ed to be a little more forceful and he steps in, maximum suave, and tells her what they’re having for dinner that night. It is, in fairness, actually quite sweet.
  • Nearby, Harvey interrogates Ivy Pepper. Remember her? In return for a candy bar (which Harv may have stolen and be eating himself in later scenes), Ivy gives up Selina’s location and then patiently waits to be used again in another ten episodes time.
  • MEANWHILE, NEAR THE GOTHAM BUS STATION

• The Pikes

  • Selina walks Bridgit to the bus but is interrupted by the Pike brothers. Boo! They are both evil and awful awful characters! They kidnap Bridgit and Selina, despite kicking one brother’s ass and getting his gun off him does precisely nothing other than look a bit sad as her friend is driven away.
  • The reason? The guns she had at home were better, apparently. She’s tooling up when Jim shows up and they have a standoff. Selina explains Bridgit’s past and Jim orders her to stand down. She refuses and Jim promises he’ll do everything he can to bring a wanted cop killer in. I’m sure this will go excellently.
  • MEANWHILE! BACK AT THE PIKES!

• Joe tortures Bridgit

  • Bridgit is chained to a radiator and her brother throws firecrackers at her until she agrees to work for them again. The Pikes, because they’re idiots, are overjoyed and tell Bridgit to fix dinner. Instead, she decides to fix VENGEANCE.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT PENGUIN GARDENS!
  • Penguin is very amused by Butch’s new hand and not at all amused by how little finding Penguin’s mother he’s done. He sends the big guy back into the fray and Butch isn’t happy.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE PIKES!

• Firebug

  • The Pike brothers stand very still while Bridgit incinerates them to death. Not long after, Harv and Jim arrive and find the corpses. One of them wakes up, spits the word “BITCH” and is kicked the rest of the way dead by Harvey.
  • This actually happens.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!

• Butch and Galavan

  • Butch finds the remote cunningly hidden on Galavan’s desk and discovers nothing that Penguin didn’t already know. Galavan arrives, good naturedly sees through Butch’s lies and figures out Penguin is controlling him. He offers to “help”.
  • Tabitha comes in and beats Butch up unconvincingly.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GCPD!
  • Jim is now completely on board with bringing Bridgit in alive. Barnes wants her, its implied, dead.

• Hug

  • Selina meets Bridgit at the pigeon loft they used to hang out in. She asks why her friend doesn’t just leave and Bridgit says she wants to stop the people who hurt them, like her brothers. Selina hugs her friend and leaves her to her fate.
  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • Bruce has dinner with Silver and the Galavans. Tabitha arrives late and has WHAT IS CLEARLY BLOOD ON HER FACE. No one says anything.
  • MEANWHILE, AT NYGMA TOWERS!
  • Ed and Kringle have dinner. Ed confesses he likes her. She feels the same. They kiss and head off to the bedroom.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE HUMAN TRAFFICKING AUCTION!

• firebug justice

  • Jim gets a call from Selina saying she thinks she knows where Bridgit is going. She’s right. Bridgit goes back to the auction, torches a guy and lets the victims out.

• the budget

  • The GCPD arrive and Jim tries to talk her down. Barnes orders no one to fire and, of course, someone does, opening a leak in Bridgit’s suit. She then, for no reason other than the plot requires it, torches a GCPD car until it explodes and sets her on fire too.
  • MEANWHILE, BACK AT EVIL TOWERS!
  • Galavan talks to Bruce. He assures him his father was a good man and if elected mayor, he’ll help Bruce clean up Wayne Industries. Bruce is very cool with this.
  • MEANWHILE, AT PENGUIN GARDENS!

• Butch and Pengy

  • A bloodied Butch staggers back to Penguin, sans mallet and tells him he’s found his mother. Penguin is overjoyed and, maybe, not paying attention. Butch may not be under his control anymore…
  • MEANWHILE, AT HOME WITH JIM AND LEIGH!
  • Selina is holding a gun on Leigh. Just go with it, Leigh does. When Jim comes home she demands to know what’s happened to Bridget and Jim tells her she’s dead. Selina goes for Jim, telling him he promised and Jim defends himself very very badly. He even, in arguably the most callous moment in the last two episodes, tries to get Selina to flip on who employed Bridgit. She lets slip it was Penguin, refusing to believe Jim will go after his “friend” and leaves in disgust. And you can’t blame her for it either.
  • MEANWHILE, AT LOVENYGMA TOWERS!

• ed and doughertys badge

  • Kringle, in a genuinely sweet moment, opens up about being frightened of Dougherty. Ed reassures her by first confessing and then proving that he murdered Dougherty. Kringle panics, tries to flee and Ed inadvertently suffocates her to death while trying to explain he’s not a murderer.
  • And montage!
  • Ed cradles Kringle’s lifeless body, sobbing hopelessly.
  • Penguin and his boys tool up to go get Mrs Penguin.
  • Nearby, Selina cries for her friend.

• Indian Hill

  • At Indian Hill, a Wayne Industries facility, two interns explain the plot to us as Bridgit, very much not dead, is wheeled into a room lit like a pop video. She’s a monster now, she’s fireproof! Her suit is melted to her skin! Dramatic music!

 

Review:

The short version of this review is, “This is a bad episode of Gotham.” The plots stumble over one another, things happen for no reason other than they need to and there’s some dismally bad dialogue.

Here’s the long version. This episode demonstrates everything that’s wrong not with Gotham individually but as a concept.

Firstly, the ludicrously big cast. While it’s always nice to see Cockney Butlerman and his amazing sidekick Billionaire Boy, we get Alfred for maybe two minutes here. Those two minutes are entirely expository. He’s not the only one either; poor Leigh is reduced to being the foil for Kringle and Selina in her two scenes.

This happens every week, as I mentioned last week. But this time it’s different. This doesn’t feel like a natural collection of characters. It feels like a show working off a tick list of who is scheduled to be in this week’s episode. Some of it works but some of it, a lot of it, really doesn’t. It feels disjointed and choppy, like you’re changing channels inside the TV show.

Then there’s the wildly uneven tone. I’m increasingly thinking of Gotham as a 1990s action movie filtered through the old Adam West Batman TV show because there really is that amount of tonal movement inside every episode. Sometimes inside scenes too. We get jet black comedy, sickening violence, moments of impressive character work within seconds of one another and the whiplash that leads to is difficult to sit through at times. Witness the massively uneven Galavan stuff this week, veering from the cartoon lunacy of Tabitha showing up to dinner with blood on her face to Galavan sweet talking Bruce and Tabitha “deprogramming” Butch. That’s horror, psychological drama and badly-staged action all in the space of 43 or so minutes.

That brings us to the action. For a show that promises one gunfight a week or your money back, Gotham’s actually getting worse at staging fights. Selina vs the Pike brothers is nonsensical, Bridgit vs the GCPD (Round Two) is a bad cover version of their first, also badly-staged fight. Worst of all, the Butch and Tabitha scene exists to do nothing other than remind us that Tabitha likes whips because it’s sexy and that the show has no idea what to do with the one-note gag of Butch having a mallet for a hand. Inside this season, we’ve had the genuinely impressive fight between Gordon and Aaron, the terrifying havoc the Maniax wreaked and Alfred and Gordon taking on a room full of thugs in a manner that was brutal, practical and character driven.

This week? No snap, no spark to the action and very little point.

Worst of all though is the show’s tendency to get in its own way. There’s actually a lot of good stuff this week. Selina and Bridgit’s plotline is great. Their similar upbringings and different world views are the most Batman-like thing in the episode and Selina in particular benefits hugely from this plotline. She feels. She doesn’t want to, and denies it, but Selina cares about people. The seeds of the woman she’ll become and the razor line she’ll dance between hero and villain are sewn here and done so in a manner that’s subtle, organic and impressive.

Then Bridgit’s carted off to the monster factory as Intern Exposition explains the screamingly obvious.

Gotham isn’t a good show. It’s not a bad show either. It’s about five wildly variable TV shows struggling to gain your attention and constantly being pushed aside by their siblings. Most of the time, the fun elements come to the fore. Sometimes all you hear is five different voices screaming for attention. That’s this week. Next week, who knows?

 

The Good:

  • “I tried to help her it just went a different way.” “IS THAT WHAT YOU CALL IT WHEN SOMEONE DIES?!” This is great Jim’s a sanctimonious ass who has no idea of the consequences of his actions a lot of the time. It’s way past time someone called him on it.
  • “Ah yeah, my kicks did it maybe it’s because he was FRIED LIKE A TAQUITO!” Nice line. Awful characterisation.
  • “There’s a line. I learned that the hard way.” “Respectfully sir, this is Gotham. There are grey areas. I learned that the hard way too.” I love this. It’s one of the smartest things they’ve done with this version of Jim Gordon. He’ll go toe to toe with anyone, including a man who’s basically him in 30 years just minus the ’tache.
  • “Hey! Last time we saw this chick she had a shotgun pointed at us. Maybe you should take the Fascist Youth huh?” I think Harv might have a problem with the Jimshirts. Hard to tell.

• Butch's new hand

  • “Dear me, a mallet.” THIS IS PERFECT. It’s a ludicrous plot that gets even more ludicrous this episode but Penguin’s delivery, along with Butch’s Barney Bear-esque glower is wonderful.
  • “You’re cute. For a Doctor.” “Thanks, you’re cute. for a gangster.” Despite having no apparent reason for existing, the Selina and Leigh scene is actually rather sweet.
  • “Hi Selina. Sorry about this Leigh.” “Oh hey no problem.” Again, the At Home With Leigh & Jim sitcom within Gotham gets the best moments. You can almost hear the laugh track on this and I mean that as a compliment.

• at home with leigh and jim

  • The Captain Barnes/Jim ethical do-si-do at the centre of the episode is interesting ground. I really want to see this build to a head, either with Barnes forced to compromise himself or Jim forced to do something for the greater good long-term not short term.

 

The Bad:

  • The Pikes aren’t characters they’re walking cliché machines. Not only are they playing snaps when Bridgit comes in but they stand there like idiots for a good ten seconds before she incinerates them.
  • You’re two of the only honest GCPD cops. You’ve just found a crime scene with two deeply charred bodies. Do you…
    A) Confirm they’re dead?
    B) Call the paramedics immediately?
    C) Make an off-colour gag about barbecue and then kick the one survivor the rest of the way dead while panicking?
    Yeah. Thought so.
  • There’s a lovely moment of fight psychology where Selina uses her smaller size and lower centre of mass to flip one of the Idiot Brothers and take his shotgun. It is instantly negated by her doing nothing with the loaded weapon in her hand as Bridgit is driven away.
  • The lingerie model human trafficking auction. The one that Bridgit liberates. The one where, the way the episode is cut, it looks like the cage the slaves are being kept in IS NOT LOCKED.
  • Why exactly was Selina holding Leigh hostage? Was it to try and force Gordon into bringing Bridgit in alive? If so could she maybe have told him that?
  • “They tell people she’s dead. But that’s a lie.” In an episode dotted with staggeringly bad dialogue, Interns Rosencrantz and Guildenstern explaining what the Secret Facility they’re in is for is a new low.
  • Tabitha Galavan sits down to dinner with three other people, one of whom is very clearly not evil, with blood on her face. It’s very very clearly blood. There is nothing else it could be. It’s treated like she has spinach in her teeth. I’d love to think Bruce notices, notices that no one else is making a big deal out of it and is suspicious. But let’s face it, the chances of that aren’t high.
  • The Butch/Tabitha fight is lousy in a couple of dozen ways. The choreography’s awful, the selling is worse and the story behind the fight is completely lost in the half-assed way it’s blocked out.
  • “Oh snap, Bridgit’s gonna get it!” STOP.TALKING.
  • “Damn. I hate how it smells like good barbecue.” Much like Captain Barnes’ line about the exploding arsonist last week this is a pretty good gag. Exactly like Captain Barnes’ line about the exploding arsonist it’s also a ludicrously callous, unfeeling thing to say that makes a previously sympathetic character look like an enormous tool.
  • “There’s a freaky firefly chick on the loose with a flamethrower. Let’s start there.” No! Bad Gotham! No alliteration for you!
  • “It’s mad real! Like a unicorn or something!” The really sad thing isn’t that this is a Godawful line that should never had escaped from first draft. It’s that his point about women getting to do anything meaningful in Gotham is pretty much true.
  • This episode Leigh talks to Kringle about boys and is held hostage. I can only assume Morena Baccarin is catching up on her reading during the vast swathes of nothing to do.
  • It’s tempting but too early to call Bridgit’s story as yet another, “You who are hideously disfigured must become a monster for only handsome people are good!” story. That particular framework has blighted comics and related media for decades. Remember how every time there was a slightly alternate or non-squeaky-clean kid on Smallville’s first few seasons they’d be the meteor freak of the week? Yeah. That.
  • Anyway it looks like whoever’s running Indian Hill is building their own little monster farm and that may not go well. But we’re not there, so let’s give them a shot.

 

The Random:

  • Shot of the week is this gorgeous silhouette of Selina’s brief moment of badassery during the fight. Shame the episode didn’t do anything with it.

• Selina kicks ass

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

• Read our other Gotham reviews

 

Jim and Barnes

Gotham S02E05 “Scarification” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E05 “Scarification” REVIEW

Jim and Barnes

stars 3

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Jordan Harper
Director: Bill Eagles

 

Essential Plot Points:

• the galavans

  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS! Penguin begs for his mother’s life and is rebutted. As he storms out Tabitha complains that she is bored. See? She really HAS been reading her scripts. Theo comforts her with the discovery of nasty Mr Bundeslaw from Wayne Industries in a box and asks Mr Bundeslaw if they can borrow something. That something, it turns out, is going to be removed from him via Tabitha’s favourite, very curvy knife…
  • MEANWHILE, AT A ROOM FILLED WITH MEN IN PANTS! The Strike Force storm one of Penguin’s money laundering operations. They are accosted by a man with a rocket propelled grenade launcher. They deal with him in the only way the Barnes GCPD knows how and Captain MachoFace expresses astonishment at the weapons they’re up against.
  • Gordon explains that there is a big box store in town called The Merc where all the criminals shop. They were never allowed to hit it but now they can. The poster boy for no due process and his amazing friends saddle up.
  • A messenger arrives to tell Penguin about the money laundering. Butch, who’s been here before, gets clear as his boss beats the guy half to death with a poker.
  • MEANWHILE, AT THE PLOT NO ONE CARES ABOUT! Jim arrives back at the precinct and Leslie reminds him it’s date night. Nygma immediately arrives and talks his way into a double date with them. Leslie agrees to make fondue and Jim complains. Comedy GOLD. Seriously it actually is, they make this face at each other and it’s adorable.

the look

  • Theo shows up at the precinct and bonds with Jim over killing a man. He oh-so subtly slides this into asking for an endorsement for mayor and Jim rebuffs him. Theo plays it cool.

• Tabitha visits Penguin

  • At Penguin’s still amazingly nice house, Tabitha shows up. She tells Penguin they need some places burnt down and hands him a box with something horrible in it. We know it’s one of Bundeslaw’s eyes but the show is weirdly coy about showing us it, just lots of hardened criminals going “EWWWW” whenever they look inside.
  • Penguin sends Butch to Selina’s crashpad and he asks her to take him to see the Pikes, the best arsonists in Gotham. The one problem is, they’re Fish loyalists and Selina, who Fish loved, is needed to vouch for Butch, who shot Fish. Kind of. It’s complicated. They barter a while and she agrees.
  • The Pikes listen to Butch’s pitch and accept. They’re also abusive tools to Bridgit and Selina notices and comforts her as well as she can.
  • The youngest Pike goes off to the Merc for more napalm. The Merc is AMAZING. It’s an actual store with labels and branding and staff and shopping baskets. IT’S THE BEST. He however is the worst and shoplifts some C4 which gives you a clue as to how bright he is. The GCPD storm the place and he runs, Jim and Barnes in pursuit. They corner him, he pulls a gun on them and they kill him a LOT.
  • Then he explodes.
  • No, we know that’s not how C4 works.
  • Fondue night is, amazingly, not awful and weirdly charming.
  • With their brother exploded, for some reason, the Pikes are out of luck. They blackmail Bridgit into becoming their new partner and, faced with a choice between risking her life and being homeless, she accepts.
  • Her brothers mess with her relentlessly and she’s burnt on the way out of the first job but they retrieve what they were sent for thanks to Bundeslaw’s eye and the vault it unlocks; a knife, with the Wayne family crest on it…
  • Bridgit, still hurt, realises she likes the work. She begins building herself a fire resistant suit when Selina arrives and tries to reason with her. Bridgit argues she belongs, Selina argues that she’s a slave and leaves.

flashback

  • Penguin is desperate for information on the knife, sensing that it’s something that matters to Galavan and a potential weakness. Butch, because he’s amazing, knows a guy. Or rather, a lady. Edwidge, an old lady who runs an antique store in his neighbourhood. She, reluctantly, explains that the knife was used 200 years ago when the city was ruled by five noble families. One, the Dumas, were erased from history after Caleb Dumas was found consorting with Celestine Wayne. The punishment for this was the removal of a hand, using the knife and the obliteration of his family’s name from Gotham. The family fled to a religious order they’d set up and changed their name.
  • To Galavan.
  • TWIST!

penguiy and bush

  • Later, Penguin invites Butch to have a drink, proving to them both the conditioning is still working. He explains that Butch will go to Galavan and explain that Penguin has thrown him out. He’ll infiltrate Galavan’s organisation, find Penguin’s mother and rescue her. Butch, who is so clearly not cool with this, points out it’s a basic play. Penguin “reassures” him that they can sell it by cutting Butch’s hand off with a cleaver. BUTCH, NOOOOO!
  • Jim and Harv figure out the buildings hit were all Wayne Enterprises properties and stake out the next possible target. They find Firefly, looking pretty great in her suit and she panics. She lays down a wall of flame between them but her flamethrower malfunctions and Garrett tackles her. They struggle, Garrett is soaked in fuel and she accidentally lights him on fire. As Jim and Harv try and help their guy, she escapes with the help of Selina who followed her.
  • After the catastrophic fight with Firefly, the Strike Force are back at the precinct. Harv tries to make Jim feel better about Garrett at the same time as pointing out how cynically Galavan is using the photo op.
  • Barnes informs them Garrett died and that he won’t stop until the cop killer is brought to justice. The other Strike Force members, who it’s pretty clear are this show’s redshirts, are devastated.

Gordon and Galavan shake

  • Jim goes to Galavan and asks if, should he become mayor, he’ll help in the war on crime. Galavan agrees, Jim gives him his endorsement and they shake on it. And the moment Jim’s back is turned? EVIL GRIN. Honestly we expected him to go, “MOOHOOHAHAHAHA” on his way out of the building.
  • Galavan returns to Evil Towers to find he’s not alone… It’s F Murray Abraham as Father Creel the evil monk and head of the Dumas family order. He has plans for Gotham and is pleased with how Theo’s work is progressing. Now they just need to murder Bruce Wayne…

 

Review:

It’s good news/bad news whiplash this week.
Bad news! The Pikes are AWFUL characters with the exception of Bridgit. Incompetent, abusive, stereotypical and dull.
Good news! Bridgit is ace. She’s really smart and weird and dark in the Burtonian way this show sprays automatic gunfire at on a weekly basis. Her story is close to Jerome’s, that of a kid broken by the hideous city they live in and it’s got the potential to be as much of a highlight of the show.

Bridget at the safe

Bad news! If Bridgit’s origin is done well, her clash with the GCPD is very much not, for reasons detailed below.
Good news! Selina gets stuff to do and it works. There’s an interesting divide shaping up here between the old and young characters. Selina and Bridgit work well together. Selina and Bruce work well together. The kids and anyone other than Cockneyman the superbutler? Not so much.
Bad news! No Alfred at all this week.
Good news! There’s a Nygma scene that’s actually great! The show’s doing a good job of balancing multiple plots this season and the fact some people get weeks off now really helps.
Bad news! This episode is AMAZINGLY violent. Ludicrously so in fact. Someone explodes, two hands get chopped off, a guy gets set on fire. Gotham is still aiming for Tim Burton era Batman but it’s still landing on late ’90s Clint Eastwood action movie. That’s sometimes a good thing. When it turns Barnes, supposedly a paragon, into a violence crazy oorah machine, it’s a bad thing.

• penguins sass

Good news! Lots of Butch and Penguin stuff this week, and the Penguin has a plan. An awful plan. That will probably work. Gotham does a lot of things wrong, repeatedly, but the Penguin reimagined as a barely under control furious psychopath is actually brilliant. He feels dangerous here. And again, within sight of the Burton era, especially DeVito’s definitive Penguin turn.
Bad news! The Strike Force need characters and arcs, and plots. Soon.

So, as is becoming common, a curate’s egg of an episode. Some very good stuff, some terrible awfulness. But, if nothing else we’ve got a villain origin with emotional weight, Selina and Butch off the bench and one of the show’s most gloriously crazed ideas ever all in one episode. It’s not enough to balance the ludicrous violence and terrible decisions but it’s damn close.

 

The Good:

  • “Read ’em their rights. Doesn’t say squat about pants.” Nathaniel Barnes, a cop for whom Due Process is less a code, more a set of guidelines.
  • “Belay that order, no one gets pants!”A lost line of dialogue from the weirdest Star Trek episode EVER.
  • “We can’t leave, we’re already home! TRAPPED” The Jim and Leigh, amiably rubbish couple stuff really shouldn’t work but it’s adorable. Mackenzie and Baccarin are straight-up delightful on screen together and Leigh may be the only woman on the show regularly written as something approaching an actual character.

• The Merc

  • The Merc, the criminal version of B & Q or, for our American friends, Costco. THEY HAVE SIGNS! THEY HAVE CARTS! The Merc is the BEST. It’s also ridiculous which just makes it bestier.
  • The increasingly bizarre occult history of Gotham City has been one of the highlights of the current Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo run on Batman. It’s nice to see that translated here. Not only does it fit the bat’s-arse lunacy of Gotham but it gives the show the weight it at times desperately needs.
  • Yay Selina getting stuff to do! Gotham this season is starting to look like later seasons of Scrubs, where one or two characters would regularly sit out on a rotating schedule. Selina’s been benched for the first quarter of this season but her relationship with Bridgit is one of the most interesting things they’ve done with her so far.
  • Michelle Veintimilla is very good as Bridgit. She lands the character’s combination of terror, trauma and increasingly brittle joy. A lot of Batman’s best villains are operatic in their tragedy but Veintimilla and Harper’s script play Bridgit’s tragedy as small scale and intimate. It’s an amazingly welcome change and pays off massively.

fondue night

  • The Nygma scene is actually kind of nice. I mean you’ll get that “WHAT? NO! GO AWAY ED!” response for the first few seconds as usual but it plays out weirdly sweetly. Which means we’re maybe two weeks off that whole thing assuming the shape of pear.

 

The Bad:

  • Good God the other Pikes are terrible characters. The greatest arsonists in Gotham mess with their stepsister by almost getting her blown up? One’s a cigar-chomping escapee from The Departed whose accent arrives with the third commercial break? Come on, Gotham.
  • No cockney butler! Booooo!
  • So all the Strike Force members have full names… except Josie? Seriously? The really depressing thing is Josie is apparently Josie “Mac” Macdonald. First introduced by Judd Winick at the top of the century, Josie Mac was a plain clothes GCPD detective with very odd low level superpowers. She was also one of the best characters in Gotham Central, the amazing GCPD-based comic that Gotham is essentially a 1980s hairmetal cover version of.

Barnes

  • Nathaniel Barnes, ex soldier! Nathaniel Barnes, hard charging GCPD chief of dxetectives! Nathaniel Barnes, Man with NO IDEA HOW TO DO HIS JOB! I know the GCPD having to go all wild west is a big part of the show but the sequence with the money launderers left a nasty aftertaste. The police storm in, don’t announce themselves, don’t control the situation and are surprised when a guy from central casting fires a rocket launcher at them.
  • We’re not saying the GCPD should be perfect… actually no that’s EXACTLY what we’re saying. And so is the show. We’ve had the idea of the Strike Force as the best of the best rammed down our throats for two episodes now and seeing them kicking the door in and yelling, “No trousers for you matey! We’re the Sweeney and you’re nicked!” is ridiculous. There’s a ton of dramatic potential for the show in these cops trying to stay true to themselves too and so far it’s doing exactly none of it. I talked before about this maybe being the point with Barnes and I only hope it is.
  • The amazing exploding arsonist. Firstly it’s horrible science. This show treats C4 like it’s magic exploding fairy dust. C4 is triggered by a detonator. It can be shot and not go off. So exploding arsonist? Not so much.
  • Also that is just a horrible scene. It’s pointlessly gratuitous, further reinforces the GCPD as cowboys and exists to do nothing but give the episode yet another deeply nasty moment and Barnes a line that makes him sound like a desensitised, callous bastard.
  • “What the hell are you packing?” SEE?
  • We find out the name of a strike team member just as he gets killed in a profoundly stupid way. BEST OF THE BEST.
  • Garrett’s death. I can just about buy that he’s a rookie and has maybe been hit in the head a few times so thinks tackling somebody wielding a flamethrower is a good idea. The fact he doesn’t react to being doused in fuel or is able to easily take down a significantly smaller, not even a little well-trained opponent? BEST OF THE BEST. MOSTLY.

 

The Random:

  • Hi F Murray Abraham! Welcome to Gotham playing an evil monk! You were great in All The President’s Men, Scarface, Amadeus, By The Sword (SUCH a great movie!), Star Trek: Insurrection, Mimic, Muppets From Space and everything else you’ve been in!
  • Jim and Leigh are just the cutest. Seriously I would watch a sitcom about them.
  • Isn’t Leslie a doctor? If so, Nygma referring to her as Ms Thompkins is a nicely subtle, sexist character note.

aaaaaand evil

  • Shot of the week. This is so great, I can almost hear him saying, “AAAAAAND EVIL!”

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

• Read our other Gotham reviews

 

• penguin court

Gotham S02E04 “Strike Force” REVIEW

by with No Comment Reviews

Gotham S02E04 “Strike Force” REVIEW

• penguin court

stars 3

Airing in the UK on Channel 5, Mondays, 10pm
Writer: Danny Cannon
Directors: TJ Scott

 

Essential Plot Points:

  • Penguin is holding court and it looks FABULOUS. Like a Duran Duran video exploded inside a Mad Max knock-off. He demands to know who was responsible for recent events and decrees that no one undergoes any major criminal activity without checking with him first. As the meeting disperses, Tabitha Galavan, probably grateful to be in more than one scene this week, tells him her brother would like to chat…

• CHIKLIS

  • At the GCPD Gordon is yelling at a corrupt cop. Must be any day of the week, ever. The argument is disrupted when Captain Nathaniel Barnes arrives, breaks a chair, screams at the cops and tells everyone that if they don’t feel ashamed now is their chance to quit.
  • No one quits.
  • Barnes reads out the names of the officers he knows are corrupt and Harv visibly looks for exits. Barnes reads out six names, none of them Harv, lines them up and fires them. When one cop resists, Barnes arrests him inside his own precinct.

• JIM IS SO EXCITE

  • He then calls Gordon into his office and explains he’s also ex-military. He makes Gordon his second in command and tells him they’re going to clean up Gotham. Gordon is super pumped about this. Harv, we suspect, less so.

• JIM IS SOMEHOW EVEN MORE EXCITE

  • With the mayor and deputy mayor both varying flavours of dead or in the wind, an election is needed. We see Theo Galavan watching a news cast that mentions the two other candidates – Janice Caulfield and Randall Hobbs – but says the election is really about him. He is of course delighted.

• Galavan plots

  • He’s even more delighted when Tabitha, now in two whole scenes and counting, shows up with Penguin. They chat and Galavan unveils his plan for Gotham.
  • Which looks a surprising amount like Delta City from RoboCop.

• metro city-wait what

  • Penguin, who’s seen those movies, points out that the new development involves bulldozing residential homes.
  • Galavan agrees and asks him to be his executioner, murdering the other mayoral candidates so he can stand unopposed. Penguin refuses, showing rare and honestly touching civic pride in his horrific Dante’s inferno of a city.

• The Galavans have Penguins mom

  • Tabitha points out that they have Penguin’s mother. Penguin agrees, reluctantly, to do it.
  • Leigh answers the phone the next morning to Captain Barnes. He asks for Jim, tells Gordon to meet him at the Police Academy and reassures him that “everyone knows he’s banging the ME”. This is a thing that happens.

• True Detective season 3

  • At the Academy, Barnes tells Jim his plan; a new Strike Force of fresh recruits who haven’t been tarred by the city. Along with one of Gordon’s old training officers, they interview a group of elite recruits. Barnes names them Strike Force Alpha and places them under Gordon’s command. There is obviously nothing that can go wrong here.

• diverse redshirts

  • Galavan gives a press conference and is asked to run for mayor. He’s halfway through denying to when a driveby hurtles past and he saves everyone. Galavan almost literally says, “Oh, okay then…” and the campaign is on.

• steampunk penguin

  • Elsewhere, Penguin murders Caulfield at her campaign headquarters. It’s a nasty, off-kilter scene. But Butch being avuncular and threatening to her staff is kind of nice.

• thug

  • MEANWHILE AT GOTHAM PREP! Alfred is waiting for Bruce. As is Selina. Until Alfred slaps her for killing his mate Reggie last season. He, disappointingly, does not tell her to sling her hook but the intent is clear.

• Alfred

  • Splendidly, Alfred hands Bruce his PE kit and tells him to run home. After all, they are training again…
  • Nygma agonises over asking Kringle out. Again. He then asks her out.
  • Barnes gives the Strike Force a pep talk. Gordon is totally pumped. Harv could not be less pumped. The GCPD get word that Caulfield is dead and roll out to the crime scene. There, Gordon intimidates a witness and they finally get a description that’s clearly Penguin.
  • Elsewhere, Galavan takes Bruce out to dinner and promises to help him investigate the murder of his parents. He also all but promises him his ward, Silver St Cloud. Yay, Gotham women.
  • Penguin drops Zsaz off to murder Hobbs and, because he’s a great henchman, Butch asks his boss what’s up. Penguin comes clean about his mom and Butch reassures him. Bless.

• zsaz

  • Zsaz has big fun in Hobbs’s house and dismantles his guards with his usual ease. He’s about to finish the job when…JUSTICE WAGON! Gordon, Harv and the Strike Force roll up and do surprisingly well. They see Zsaz off, save Hobbs and the only bad thing that happens is Josie gets shot because women can’t be competent in this show.

• the date

  • Kringle and Nygma have dinner. Nygma lets slip he’s glad her former boyfriend is dead. This is news to Kringle and when Nygma yells “GET OUT!” she thinks he means her. He, in fact, means Tylder DurdNygma and, amazingly, he tells her this. Even more amazingly, she’s okay with it! Even more amazing still, it’s a Kringle/Nygma scene this season that’s actually good!
  • Jim goes to see Penguin who calls him on his sanctimonious nonsense and points out Barnes would throw him off the force if he knew the truth.

• Go team strikeforce

  • The Strike Force is celebrating and ribbing Josie about taking one in the vest because ha! Girls right? Harv points out how dead they all nearly were and Barnes gives them their first target: Penguin.
  • Jim is not pumped.
  • MEANWHILE! AT GOTHAM PREP! Bruce and Silver bond.
  • MEANWHILE! IN THE SLUMS! Selina is haunted by her encounter with Alfred.
  • MEANWHILE, AT EVIL TOWERS! Galavan plans his campaign.
  • MEANWHILE, AT PENGUIN’S HEADQUARTERS, he rages as the search for his mother continues.

 

Review:

Okay, first off: there is nothing on Earth that is not improved by Michael Chiklis. His arrival as Captain Barnes kicks a hole in the speaker, pulls the plug and busts the show for corruption while yelling about being a warrior. He’s GREAT, like some colossal justice bulldog and that goes from fun, to charming, to kind of terrifying, to actually terrifying.

Barnes is a very tough, very competent cop who is horrifically naïve and I think we’re going to see Gotham break him if it hasn’t already. There’s a crucial moment in here where Gordon quietly raises concerns about sending rookie cops into the line of fire and Barnes basically goes, “Enh! Most of ’em will come home!” The look on Gordon’s face is the same as the one on ours; the sneaking suspicion that this immensely good-natured, well-meaning guy is also a terrifying naïve Dudley Do Right who is going to get a lot of people killed.

That whole plot is big fun, although as you’ll see below the Strike Force suffer awfully from the needs of TV drama. A good chunk of this week’s other major plot is fun too, with Galavan attacking the city on multiple fronts. One of those, his mayoral campaign, is surreal in its rapidity. Seriously, he sets up the most obvious press opportunity in human history and… it… works. It’s an immensely weird scene, the whole thing shot like Tim Burton got his hands on an unused Adam West script and violenced it up. It’s fun, certainly, but it is patently ludicrous.

The other half of Galavan’s plot, well, that’s just skeevy. We see him cosy up to Bruce and in doing so essentially pimp out Silver St Cloud, Galavan’s ward. It’s played breezily but Galavan is, at best, weaponising a child here. At worst he’s shoving her into Bruce as a means of wrapping the Wayne heir around his little finger. It’s certainly an evil move for an evil man but if it’s done wrong – as, let’s face it, it might very well be – it’ll be a disaster. Galavan right now is teetering on the edge of pantomime villainy and if anything knocks him over the edge it’ll be this.

Elsewhere we get some nice business with Alfred teaching Bruce how to get fit and a deeply nasty moment where he slaps Selina in the face and tells her to take a hike. Selina remains horribly underused this season but her reactions to that moment, not to mention Alfred’s own, sell it as the one piece of violence that feels like it has real weight this episode. I’m interested to see where that will go and if nothing else that’s a promising do over for one of season one’s most difficult plotlines.

But while the core of this episode is fun, the cracks are showing everywhere else. Penguin being blackmailed into being Galavan’s hit man feels rushed and unearned, with Carol Kane reduced to an on-camera cameo. Worse still, the show continues to have absolutely no idea what to do with its female characters. Josie is deliberately set up as the weak link of the Strike Force, the only female mayoral candidate is the one we see die and the regulars are reduced to bit parts or single lines. It genuinely feels like the writers’ room has no idea what to do with the female characters and, in the case of Tabitha in particular, seem genuinely annoyed at having to write her. Compared to the occasional flashes of nuance and complex stuff you get in the Gordon/Barnes relationship it stands out a mile. And, I get the nasty feeling, it’s only going to get worse.

Gotham is still the fastest-paced, often nastiest, hour you’ll see on TV. That’s carried it through the first month of season two with none of the glacial pacing and unwieldy character arcs of last year which is a really good thing. I just hope that new-found focus hasn’t come at the cost of anything for the female characters to do. And, right now, that’s exactly what it’s starting to look like.

 

The Good:

  • The direction and art design. Just stunning throughout the episode. This, shot of the week, is one of a dozen gems.

• penguin enraged

  • Harv not bothering to stand to attention is a lovely, meaningful character beat.
  • The Strike Force being ethnically diverse, and no big deal being made of it is brilliant.
  • Zsaz’s growled, “UNEXPECTED!” in the fight with the Strik Force is great. As is his clear annoyance at having to deal with these kids.
  • Hightower was corrupt?! You son of a-I WATCHED ALL THOSE POLICE ACADEMY MOVIES! EVEN THE ONES YOU WEREN’T IN!
  • “You’re a troublemaker, a fighter. That an accurate description?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Good.” Barnes is a touch macho.
  • “Welcome to my unit you sadass army hump. Tough is what we eat for breakfast.”
    “Jarhead huh? Who woulda guessed?” Did we mention Barnes is kinda macho?
  • “Gotham doesn’t have straight lines.” Harv has been here before and it never ever ends well.
  • “You need an assassin! This is Gotham you can find them in the phonebook, under A.” Some good Oswald stuff this episode, this being his finest moment.
  • “You’re a warrior, Jim. So am I.” Hey Barnes! Mention war again! It’s been about ten minutes!
  • “I remember this guy, he argued a lot.”
    “I like to think I was raising questions.” There’s a subtle sense of relief to Gordon’s interactions with the Academy staff, like mutual relief he’s not there anymore.
  • “Gotham gun range. One of my mother’s three jobs was cleaning it. When she died the owner let me go there after hours and practice till I worked out my anger. I still go there.”
  • “Why are you doing this?”
    “Darlin’? I got no freaking idea.” Oh, Butch you’re so sweet. Everything he does in this scene from the slightly too tight arms round the witness’s shoulders to moving them out of his boss’s way is a delight.
  • “So you do yourself a favour, treacle and JOG ON!” ’AVE IT Alfred Pennyworth! None more cockney innit!
  • “…So they move well.” Harv’s grudging admiration of the Strike Force is adorable.

 

The Bad:

  • “Get ready to get real busy. We’re going to be sending you a whole lotta dead bad guys.” Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Let’s break this down: you are woken by your boyfriend’s new boss who good-naturedly yells at you, then politely informs you that your job is about to get way busier because he’s going to clean up the GCPD by essentially turning a blind eye to the shooting of suspects. HOW IS THAT NOT TERRIFYING?
  • One single female officer qualifying for the Strike Force is rubbish. Especially as she doesn’t even qualify for a second name, an interview or any personality other than “Good at badly staged TV boxing”.
  • We desperately hope Barnes’s gung ho, “Send the kids in to a meat grinder! OORAH!” approach is going to bite him on the ass very soon. Judging by Jim’s facial expression at that moment, he’s certainly expecting it to.
  • Tabitha Galavan, Queen of the Four Lines or Fewer Per Episode.
  • In fact, every single female character gets a crappy deal this week. Again. Silver is pimped out by her Uncle, Leslie gets to be good-naturedly yelled at by Captain MachoPants, Kringle gets to do nothing because Kringle is a plot hook rather than a character, Tabitha gets to be grumpy and bisexual and Barbara gets to hand a male character a drink, explain she’s bored and leave.
  • Oh and Josie gets shot. And, apparently, has no last name. Because Gotham.
  • Penguin’s mom being entirely off-camera. Did they only have Carol Kane for half an hour or something?
  • Also there are two mayoral candidates; one man, one woman. Guess which one gets horribly killed. Yeah.
  • Galavan’s, “Me, run for ma… GET DOWN!” *MACHINE GUN FIRE* “WELL OKAY THEN I WILL!” approach is possibly the single stupidest thing this show has done. And remember, this is the show that thought Tabitha Galavan having a whip fetish for a whole entire scene was a good idea. That bar is LOW.
  • The single female team member being the one Zsaz gets the ego boosting hit in on is sexist nonsense and even this show should damn well know better.
  • Fight nerd moment: Josie’s heroine moment in the boxing ring at the Academy shows that even in this ridiculously good age of TV there are still limits. Firstly, the choreography is a mess, chock full of movement to disguise the fact that neither actor is as well-trained as their characters. Secondly, there’s the fact that any trainee boxer anywhere ON EARTH throwing punches that hard is going to get warned, warned and then thrown the Hell out, let alone two trainee police officers.
  • And finally? HEAD. GUARDS. Concussion trauma is a thing that happens A LOT. It’s the dirty little open secret of every contact sport on the planet and this sort of nonsense just perpetuates the belief that you can take full force shots to the noggin with no lasting effects. It’s not irresponsible, quite, but it is a really bad call. Do better, Gotham. Especially given what a great job the show did a couple of weeks ago when Aaron turned Gordon into bloody pulp.
  • Speaking of that, where the hell is Aaron?
  • HEY! TEAM ALPHA! *HEADGUARDS*! I get it, I really do. You’ve got lots of actors on screen, you don’t want their faces covered. But it’s a bum note the episode just doesn’t recover from. Gordon and Harv lead a group of kids into an insanely dangerous gunfight with no headgear and face off against the best hitman in Gotham. It’s a miracle they’re not all dead.

 

And The Random:

  • I choose to believe Penguin’s mom is going to survive this ordeal, move to the other side of the city and became Kimmy Schmidt’s landlady.
  • Galavan’s “Oh YOU!” moment at the TV when he’s getting positive press is adorable. Which makes his pimping of his teenage niece even skeevier.
  • The music over Nygma’s cooking montage is “Just A Gigolo” by Louis Armstrong. I suspect it was his choice and not Tyler Durdnygma’s given that it’s a) kind of dorky and b) chipper.
  • Natalie Alyn Lind who plays Silver here has appeared previously in One Tree Hill, The Goldbergs and Flashpoint amongst others.
  • Butch is back this week! Yay! Drew Powell’s amiable, over-articulate teddy bear of a thug is always a pleasure to see. Powell’s always great, and he’s turned in memorable performances in two episodes of the excellent Leverage, one episode of the also excellent The Librarians and was a recurrent player on The Mentalist.
  • Fellow kick-ass Big Guy Character Actor, Michael Chiklis makes his debut this week as Captain Barnes. It’s a nice piece of casting as Chiklis is best known for his role in The Shield. An excellent and staggeringly nasty cop show it starred Chiklis as Vic Mackie, the sort of cop Barnes would fire and who would return later that night to burn the precinct to the ground.

Review by Alasdair Stuart

 

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