Episode Title: Everyone Has a Cobblepot
Original Airdate: 3-2-15
Throughout most of this season I have been complaining about how Gotham never seems to know any subtlety. Any reference it makes it has to hit the nail directly on the head as hard as it can, which is not what I really wanted from this show. Not only that, but it goes so far over the top that it comes all the way around the horn. But if you know that’s what you’re going to get, then you can just run with it and have a good time while it lasts. This episode is one of those times where it just went so far over the top that it came back around again. It’s the much touted about appearance of the Dollmaker, a couple of the worst moments of CGI, and also a moment of questionable morality once again on the head of Jim Gordon. Overall, it was another ridiculous episode, but it had its moments here and there.
I will say that the whole Dollmaker storyline is a bit too far out there at the moment. There isn’t any obvious connection back to Gotham City just yet outside of the very loose thread of Fish Mooney herself and her rise to power through essentially this wild card in the Gotham underbelly who is a complete non-entity to the near-warring factions of Falcone and Maroni. He’s just sitting calmly in this ungoverned island off the coast (of Gotham?) freely running this illegal surgery clinic for the rich. And gets his jollies off by giving his former manager a female body along with several other body parts in the worst bit of CGI in this series so far. I don’t really care about Fish Mooney, I don’t really care about the Dollmaker, I’m just waiting for this thread to end and for Fish to die, or make her “triumphant” return to Gotham.
Meanwhile Gordon is on his own social justice warrior mission when he finds out that Flass has been released and all the charges have been dropped. Not only that, but his own partner was the one who became the “instrumental” witness that made it all possible. This leads him to lead the charge all the way to the top, taking the fight to Commissioner Loeb. Since Loeb has the closet filled with all of the officers’ skeletons which he created in the first place. Gordon teams up with the only person he figures Loeb doesn’t have in his back pocket: Harvey Dent and begins one of the weirdest games of cat and mouse that Loeb doesn’t even know he was playing. It is once again completely ridiculous the direction that this wild goose chase takes Gordon, from a ring of Asian bookies working in the basement of a Chinese restaurant who all happen to have large knives instead of guns, to an elderly couple in an old house hiding the Commissioner’s crazy daughter locked up in the second floor. I could not have made this up if I tried. It’s just so off the wall bonkers that you just have to go with it, even as Gordon uses his leverage to be in the running for President of the Police Union, whatever that means. The only saving grace is that it does have a poignant moment buried underneath all the crazy summed up by when Bullock says “You tell yourself ‘I’ll do just this one bad thing. All the good things I’ll do later will make up for it.’ But they don’t” Hands down the best line in the episode. Even Penguin gets a bit of a saving grace after he’s been running his club into the ground when he dispatches the two keepers of Loeb’s daughter.
Channel: Superhero 