Gotham - 'Beasts of Prey', 'Under the Knife', 'The Anvil or the Hammer'

Behold! The three-episode arc! It's that guy, from Heroes.

In 'Beasts of Prey'*, Gordon gets handed a case that the original detectives let slide. He drags along a reluctant Bullock, who is able to identify a key piece of evidence as the calling card of the Ogre, a serial killer that no-one knows exists because whenever a cop goes after him, he kills their loved ones. Being creepy-protective boyfriend as he is, he tries to get Thompkins to leave town, but she refuses and instead tells him to protect her by catching the guy. At least she didn't try to talk the villain out of doing bad things, which is a step up for Gordon's love interests.

Meanwhile, Bruce and Selina are tracking down Reggie Payne, as Alfred is still reopening his stitches if her smiles too hard. They get the names of his employers, but when he threatens to tell what they know, Bruce is tempted to push him out of a window, and Selina actually does.

Having witnessed her kill a guy and decided that that
isn't on, Bruce naturally invites Selina to a swanky
dance.

Penguin is planning to send assassins to kill Maroni, in a plan which begins with intimidating a musician to get him to dump the daughter of the woman who owns the diner where he plans to have the deed done. There has to be a simpler way to whack a mobster.

Also, Fish escapes from the Dollmaker by using the heavies in the cellar as a meat shield while she and her real allies get to da chopppa. She takes a bullet in the process, but the oh-so terrifying Dollmaker is trampled by accountants. Fearsome.

Bruce proves that he has no clue in 'Under the Knife', not because he invites Selina to the Wayne Foundation Charity Ball despite her having killed someone, but because he sends her this puffy fail of a dress when her whole vibe cries out for classical elegance; something in simple black, perhaps, and a more modest set of heels.

Some things can never be unseen.

The Ogre calls Gordon out, and Gordon responds with a press conference announcing his existence to the world. Thompkins is under protection, but the Ogre is working from old news and targets Barbara instead. Oh no. What if Gordon can't save her. Woe. But wait! She comes off all spiky and angry and likes the look of his Fifty Shades of Gotham sex dungeon-cum-armoury. The Ogre is so into that, so while he does kidnap her he's doing it because she's, like, totally his soulmate.

Maroni strikes at Penguin's limited feels, romancing his mother all night before brutally dropping the extent of her boy's viciousness on her. Penguin strikes back by murdering a florist.

Finally, Edward Nygma sees the signs that Miss Kringle is being knocked around by her meathead cop boyfriend. He tries to warn the meathead off reasonably, eliciting a lecture on how women need to be 'managed', especially someone like Kringle who 'has a mouth on her'. While the audience is still reeling from the level of masculine inadequacy needed to perceive Christine Kringle as threateningly mouthy, Nygma confronts Officer Meathead again and stabs him repeatedly in the chest.

You know I can't go on,
Thinking nothing's wrong...

I confess, I was disappointed by this turn of events. While we've been expecting him to snap and murder Officer Meathead for a while now, the fact that it was the same sort of impulsive stabbing that we've seen so often from the Penguin was a let-down. One feels - I feel - that the Riddler should maintain a distance from his crimes, killing - when he does - with his mind and not a knife. He is pathologically obsessed with his mental superiority and his victims die because they're not smart enough. Having his inciting incident be one of opportunistic violence feels off kilter. He didn't control the environment, didn't outsmart his opponent; he just surprised him with a small knife for peeling fruit.

Much more than this, however, it makes him too similar to the Penguin, where they need to be clearly distinct.

We may never know if it was the drugs or the lack of
substantial character traits that led Barbara to go so
spectacularly Stockholm.

But anyway, this brings us to 'The Anvil or the Hammer', in which the Ogre investigation leads to a swanky roving sex party. It's all a bit silly, but we do get a splendid scene of Bullock trying to look all fancy.

Nygma uses his forensic lab to dispose of Officer Meathead's body, then composes a farewell note for Kringle to make it look like he just ran off. One wonders if he also composed a resignation letter and whether the first letter of each line in that also read 'Nygma'. I'll let him off; he's just warming up.

Bruce tries to steal incriminating files, but bad guy Totallyhasaname is onto him and spins him a line about 'the talk', which all Wayne heirs get when they become interested enough to realise that their company is as corrupt as the GCPD. Fortunately a young executive called Lucius Fox is on hand to assure him that while the Board might have thought Thomas Wayne was on, err, board, he wasn't who they thought. This leads to a heart-to-heart with Alfred and an admission of his role in Reggie's death. I am once more led to feel that Gotham would be more successful if it would pick one of Bruce and Gordon and follow one of them, instead of trying to do both, since they require radically different pacing.

The Ogre persuades Barbara to name his next victims, leading to a fatal confrontation over the bodies of her parents. Oh no! Barbara's parents! They... disapproved of Gordon and... were in that one scene that time and... And we have not a reason in the world to care about this shit. We don't know the parents as anything more than momentary victims, and Barbara has been such an inconsistent presence that she barely feels like a character. When the Ogre turns her it's impossible to know if it's the drugs, the trauma, or just another writer with a different spin on the character. Some have suggested that she will end up as the series' Joker, since they just throw them at us from all angles. I think that everyone is the Joker and the whole thing will turn out to be a dream he had while Harley was taking a shower.

* It's like 'Birds of Prey', but totally devoid of awesome female characters.