Gotham, I’m very happy to say, did not drop off in quality again as it has a tendency to do from week to week.
We’re in the middle of an upswing and that’s good news with Azrael about to make his big appearance as we head toward the end of the season. The writing remained pretty consistent between last episode and this one. Even though he cleared his name, the narrative remains pretty Gordon-specific. And he’s becoming a very interesting character to watch, finally. We start off the episode by quickly wrapping up the cliffhanger from last week. Gordon and Barbara talk and it’s surprisingly engaging. I’m happy with it. His total apathy toward whatever’s going on with her, which he admits he doesn’t have time for with everything else he’s dealing with, fits what Gordon has gone through this season and also mirrors the general audience’s opinion.
I still feel like they have no idea what to do with this character. Even if she’s actually kind of engaging to watch through most of the episode—her obvious plan halfway through is actually kind of fun and creates an interesting interplay between Barbara and Gordon—I have no doubt that whatever redemption path the writers have her on will be extremely short-lived. Either she’ll return to villainy almost immediately, which is the direction they seem to be taking, or they’ll simply forgive her past transgressions and move on. Whichever of those two directions they take, it would sort of render her whole arc this season somewhat pointless.
Bruce continues his investigation into his parent’s murder and even though we’ll never see him suited up as Batman on the show it is extremely cool to see him down in the cave with Alfred and Fox, relying on their assistance while he searches through data, but thinking two steps ahead of both of them. That’s great stuff to see. In general, Bruce gets a lot of good moments. We’ve been seeing a lot of what he’s gone through emotionally and we’ve been watching Bruce’s developmental understanding of what a morally grey world he lives in and all of that’s been good and necessary, but this week we got to see a side of young Bruce Wayne we haven’t been shown too much of.
We got to see him be a good guy.
Yes, he needs something from this poor woman his father died trying to help. There are other factors and a million reasons why he could want to help her, but once he makes a promise to keep her safe, Bruce does everything in his power to keep that promise and he can’t. It’s not enough and it eats him up and it should. That stuff is incredibly important for his character. Bruce wanted to help her and instead his actions got her killed and he knows that. The guilt weighs on him, but there is so much heroism in the way he deals with that.
The best moment with Bruce, though, comes right at the end. Things wrap up a little too quickly, when you get down to it, because they really only have a few seconds of sitting around thinking they have no more possible leads before Lucius Fox happens to walk in and tell them everything they need to know. The immediacy of that reveal could have killed the episode for me. It almost did, but what saved it and actually made it great was Bruce’s reaction to the news. The whole episode made it very obvious that “The Philosopher” was going to turn out to be Hugo Strange.
What’s much more important about that reveal is that Hugo Strange was a friend of Thomas Wayne’s. Bruce doesn’t know who Hugo Strange is and that’s actually kind of important. He’s not shocked by the reveal and that distracts the audience away from what a less-than-shocking reveal it is. He’s never interacted with Strange before. What he cares about is that this person was a friend of his father’s and that this person betrayed his father and had him murdered in cold blood. Just hearing Bruce say “he was his friend” really got to me and sold that moment in exactly the way it needed to be sold.
All this and we get to see Mr. Freeze in action for the first time, too. The costume isn’t perfect, but it’s about what I expected from a TV supervillain in 2016. It honestly looks like the exact same costume I would expect him to wear had he appeared on The Flash or Arrow instead of Gotham. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done. The blue lights are a nice touch and I love seeing the goggles, but I would have preferred the man to have a pastier face.
Still, any episode of Gotham where I walk away with only minor discrepancies is a win in my book.
