Gotham - 'Scarification', 'By Fire', 'Mommy's Little Monster', 'Tonight's the Night' and 'A Bitter Pill to Swallow'

Why is the Waynes' ancestral Space Marine combat knife kept in a vault like
a sacred relic by the family company?

As part of his continuing push against Gotham and the Wayne family in particular, Theo Galavan has Penguin hire a family of arsonists to torch  a number of properties owned by Wayne Enterprises, although when the Strike Team raid the local military-grade weapons superstore (complete with bargain announcements on a bing-bong tannoy) and blow up the youngest brother, the elders recruit their downbeaten drudge of a sister, Bridgit Pike, to be the lighter. Because taking a first-timer on a massive, multi-building arson and robbery spree is something that can not possibly go wrong.

The fact that they have a huge family organisation behind
them actually makes the Galavan's make less sense;
specifically, don't they have anyone more reliable that
Tabitha?

The Pikes also steal a knife from a safe in one of the buildings, which is enough of a clue for Penguin to work out Galavan's true identity as the descendant of Gotham's forgotten founding family, the Dumas, who were driven out after one of their number was caught with a Wayne girl and got his hand lopped off with said knife. They ran off and took shelter with the religious order founded by their patron saint and fuck me, are you saying that the backers for the Galavans' sub-League of Shadows bullshittery are the Order of St Dumas*?

Anyway, Penguin cuts off Butch's hand so he can send him to infiltrate Galavan's organisation, but when he gets rumbled Galavan has Tabitha decondition Butch. Thus Penguin is lured into a trap, his mother is stabbed, but Penguin himself escapes, as crack shot Tabitha fails to hit a limping man with an automatic at almost point blank range.

Any given Batman villain has a nickname, a suit, a real name
and a backstory. Gotham cares only for the first two.

Meanwhile, Bridgit Pike accidentally kills one a member of the Strike Team with her flamethrower. Selina Kyle tries to help her get out of town by sticking up a white slave auction, but that leads Gordon to Selina, while Pike is snatched back by her brothers and burns them to death; no-one seems to be shedding a tear on that one, nor for the white slavers she then goes after, and when the GCPD corner her they are actually super-restrained for cops facing a cop killer (nay, cop burner.) Sadly - or fortunate for a show invested in a) maximum tragic backstory and b) not having its former white knight hero go quite as far as gunning down a teenage girl - an accident leads to her self-combusting. Selina holds this against Gordon, who just takes her recrimination like a chump.

Well, this is awkward.

Speaking of Selina Kyle and people skills, she drops in on Bruce and takes tea with him and Silver, but fails to effectively warn him away from her by blurting out accusations instead of playing it cool as Silver does. I'm glad to say that Alfred does not seem taken in by little miss sunshine, dropping a sass in when she tries to show off her knowledge of tea, only to expose her ignorance of recognising different types of tree from quite a long way away.

Elsewhere and when (I binged and I'm probably crossing subplots all over the shop) Eddie Nygma suggests a double date with Gordon and Tompkins, and Lee suggests that Howard Stark favourite, fondue.

"No way I'll regret this."

"Fondue?"
"It's delicious."
"It's at your place. We can't leave; we're already home."

The evening actually goes swimmingly, but then Eddie overhears Kristen confiding that she finds him 'too sweet' to truly push her deeply dysfunctional buttons (I'm not saying that rough sex is bad sex, rather that we've established that Kristen Kringle does not have form as a woman who knows when to use a safe word.) On the other hand, Eddie's reaction is pretty knuckleheaded: "Hey! I murdered your ex for realsies!" he declares in the post-coital glow moment. Long story short, she ends up strangled and Eddie's evil brain twin (let's call him Gollum Riddler) hides the body at the precinct.

Victor's rendition of YMCA never got past M.

Galavan persuades Gordon to endorse him in exchange for promised sweeping police powers, which a victorious Galavan then leverages to send the strike force after Penguin. Gordon and Bullock try to get Butch to flip on Penguin, only to find him already flipped, but clueless as to the ex-boss's whereabouts. Then Zsasz shows up, Butch's boys run away, and Gordon and Bullock get to lay down heavy fire blindly with machine guns and feel like badasses, somehow missing not just Zsasz and all his mooks, but passing traffic and people in the surrounding buildings.

Lawks!

Penguin attacks Galavan's victory party, but even though Gordon has pretty much tumbled that Galavan is a monster he has to protect him. Another of the Strike Team is killed when he catches Tabitha taking sniper shots from the roof. Realising that Gordon needs to be kept at bay, Galavan deploys what I choose to call a 'Barb wire fence' and you can't stop me. Barbara hands herself in to play mind games with Gordon and ultimately kidnaps both Jim and Lee for a twisted parody of her dream wedding which she feels cheated of since Gordon... was dumped by her to go back to her lesbian ex? I guess she is crazy, so consistency isn't necessarily de rigeur.

Wayne Enterprises includes a secret 'evil experiments to make
super villains' facility, to which Bridgit Pike is transferred.

Anyway, all this ends up with her falling out of a window and into a coma (yay!) but not before giving Jim just enough to find Mayor James and arrest Galavan just as he is trying to buy up Wayne Enterprises so that he can clean up its corruption - he says - in exchange for cash monies and - again, he says - the name of the Waynes' killer. Truth be told, Bruce was about to refuse anyway, feeling that the Waynes' house is his to clean, but OMFG GORDON HIT GALAVAN IN THE FACE!

Most deserved face punching since Frozen's Prince Hans.

But yeah; Bruce has his soul searching moment, and even after Galavan's arrest tries to get Silver to help him find Galavan's information. Alfred, however, sends Silver packing, because go Alfred.

We'll give Michelle Gomez a role as a whimsically evil bitch
with a floofy hairdo and old -fashioned clothes. I'm sure it
won't be reminiscent of any other role she's played.

With Theo in prison, awaiting the arrival of the Order's 'warriors the like of which Gotham has never seen', Tabitha puts a hit on Gordon with the Mistress out of spite over Barbara's fate (something which Galavan gets all snitty about when he finds out, but this just once more raises the question why is a certifiable psychopath with poor impulse control in a position to ever take key logistical and tactical decisions for your generations-long superplot?) When a strangler fails, she sends a full hit squad who manage to kill a forensic tech and wound Captain Barnes. Gordon then takes on a cannibal hitman one-on-one, but resists the urge to kill him in cold blood, sensitive to Lee and Barnes' warnings that he's pushing the limits of law and morality. As a little fuck you to any sense of decency and because no good deed goes unpunished in Gotham, the hitman then manages to kill a rookie cop by biting out her throat on the way to lock up.

Murder bros.

Eddie buries Miss Kringle in the woods and stumbles on the injured Penguin. Considering this to be fate, he brings Penguiin back to his apartment to nurse him back to health so that he can mentor him in being an effective mass murderer. Their shared scenes have an interesting reversal compared to their one confrontation in Season 1, with Eddie now very much in control and looming over Penguin despite his slight frame.

And finally, shit gets real, as the Order of St Dumas arrives in Gotham, at once proving their menace as a dozen of them shank up a single Gotham Docks rent-a-cop like it was nothing! FEAR THEM! (Seriously; see The Flash's 'Legends of Yesterday' for how to make killing a dock cop badass.)

So, a ways more into Season 2 and what have we found? Gordon is still neither truly virtuous nor truly interesting; the Order of St Dumas aren't scary; Barbara is in a coma and thus more interesting than she has been in some time. Gotham harbours no redemption, knifing someone's mum is a dick move, and we should all listen to Alfred more (except, apparently, about Selina Kyle, who now looks like a swell influence.)

* I'd make a joke about how nothing is sacred, but canonically, and I quote: "no one else ever accused [Dumas] of being a saint."