Gotham

Episode: The Mask
Original Airdate: 11-10-14

Here is yet another instance of Gotham’s ability to have great moments and horrible moments within a single episode of television. As far as the good stuff goes, I mostly enjoyed the criminal investigation of the episode involving essentially a more dangerous office Fight Club where potential employees at a prestigious office are forced to fight it out for the position in an abandoned office while the rest of the office workers watch via closed circuit TV. And while I still don’t care one bit about baby Bruce, this episode gave a mighty fine moment to a young Alfred Pennyworth. As Bruce goes back to school, he inevitably gets on the bad side of the school bully and later admits to Alfred that he doesn’t know how to fight. Alfred finds the boy’s home address, give Bruce his father’s watch to use as a brass knuckle and has the greatest line in the episode “He tried to kill you; just you remember that next time you see him, and you remember that I let him try.” As for the bad of this episode, I really disliked Bullock’s “speech” where he rallied all the Gotham police to help look for Gordon as penance for not helping him with Zsasz. It wasn’t inspiring in the least, and even though it worked, it didn’t sound like it should have. There’s also the somewhat furthering of the mob scene with Penguin, Mooney, and Mooney’s Falcone spy. None of it had much weight to it, her spy seems to be getting cold feet while the audience knows that she has likely already been found out, and Penguin is just being Penguin. And once again Cat is forced into the episode right at the end. While I initially liked Cat, she seems to be moving away from what I liked about her. I thought she worked best as a mischievous agent of chaos. She is smooth, she knows what she is doing, and it’s all about her. But she gets caught robbing someplace and just once again asks to see Gordon, I just don’t see the angle.

Episode: Penguin’s Umbrella
Original Airdate: 11-3-14

It turns out my prediction for this week was wrong, instead of going back downhill as it had been going up and down the past few episodes, I was pleased to see another good episode following last week’s good episode. Last week was a bit of a cliffhanger where Gordon was arrested by the MCU for the murder of Oswald Cobblepot when Penguin himself walked through the GCPD doors to vindicate him. So this episode was all about how Gordon deals with being in deep with the wrong people. Everyone is out to get him from Falcone, Mooney, and even his partner. There is a lot of great moments where Gordon finally gets to act like a total badass even when Falcone sends one of his best men Victor Zsasz. Zsasz is a Batman villain I am actually very vaguely familiar with, while he did have a very minor appearance in the Nolan trilogy, I best know him from Kevin Smith’s Cacophony where he plays a minor role in the story. His thing is that he keeps track of the people he’s killed by carving a tally mark into his own skin. In the Batman era, his body is completely covered with them, though here he has only a handful on his arm. But otherwise he didn’t really stand out as being a future Batman villain, instead he was just another mob enforcer with a recognizable name. What I loved about this episode is how it actually started bringing together some of the threads it has been tossing around throughout these early episodes. While I knew Penguin had a larger plan in mind, it was explained quite nicely here. He is a snitch, through and through, and it wasn’t a surprise that he’s playing both sides towards the middle, but it did help explain some of Falcone’s odd actions towards Mooney and her plant in the past couple episodes. But Gotham wouldn’t be Gotham without throwing a couple headscratcher moments like the entire scene with little Bruce. It was such an infuriatingly unnecessary moment in an otherwise great episode that annoyed me to no end, that along with the complete stupidity that Barbara showed when she came back to Gotham to plead with Falcone. She’s presented as a smart and strong woman in this show, it baffled me that she could do something so completely stupid whose only purpose was to back Gordon into a corner. It would have been a better character moment if Falcone used his network or influence to find out where she was rather than this. But again, overall it was a good episode that is taking the show in the right direction.

Episode: Spirit of the Goat
Original Airdate: 10-27-14

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again, but Gotham is very uneven from episode to episode. Some episodes have a lot of over the top acting, are more on the campy side of things. And somehow the show manages to skirt the edge of gritty and campy which is a hard thing to do. At first, I thought that it was the mob politics that I liked seeing and wanted to see more, but when I got it in spades during last week’s episode, it was a big mess. What I realized with this episode is that what I like about this show is when they allow Gordon and Bullock to do actual detective work. When this show actually becomes more like one of those more typical police procedurals, only with hints of Batman in the background. And I feel like this episode hit that tone better than any before it. It also helped that it had the same visual feel of Arkham during several moments including a great shot of Penguin in the bathtub. I think what really helped win this episode over for me was the fact that it was written by Ben Edlund whose work I’ve enjoyed from his time on the Tick up through Angel and Supernatural. There was the right amount of humor that wasn’t too campy, even if there was a callback to the ’66 Batman when Bullock exclaims “Holy Ghost on a bicycle!” It was also a great subtle touch to have The Goat’s mask have a bit of the Batman ears to it. This is the kind of subtlety that I liked seeing. There were still some weak points in the episode, I wasn’t fond of Nygma’s scenes, nor the odd throwaway scene of Catwoman stealing something that I’m sure will be important a few episodes down the line from little Bruce. But aside from those moments, this was another strong episode. Unfortunately, based on the track record, I’m fully expecting next week to be another poor episode. Time will tell.

Episode: Viper
Original Airdate: 10-20-14

After last weeks episode that I actually quite enjoyed, it went back downhill hard. Where I liked the setup of the war between the crime lords in Gotham last week, it somehow had the air knocked out of it this week. Instead of having an air of intrigue to the situation, it had all the subtlety of a sack of bricks. Maroni ends up looking more like a punk thug who just wants a piece of the action, and Fish Mooney… Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on with Fish Mooney. One minute Jada Pinkett sounds like she’s doing her best Eartha Kitt impression, the next minute she’s acting like a psychopath, the next she’s acting like a caring mother to her singing secret weapon. I will say that I did like some of the seeds planted on the scheming front as we see that she is working with one of Falcone’s other lieutenants against him, and the secret weapon singer she picked up last episode and was grooming this episode is to become an inside man, so to speak, into Falcone’s intimate side. But the rest of the episode did not work at all, with little Bruce playing at detective and digging into the Wayne Corporation’s books to find all the off-book deals was just ridiculous. The Viper subplot was another way too on the nose reference to Batman when they casually mention that Venom has already been perfected. And Penguin spills the beans to Maroni in order to become his inside man, but almost dies for it and gets Gordon neck deep in Maroni’s dealings as well. It’s just all too convoluted for me, and where there were a lot of great looking shots last week, there was nothing on par this week. It’s just too up and down for me at this point.