Gotham - 'Mr. Freeze'

"Much used MST3K Quote."

Somewhere in Gotham, a man is freezing people with supercooled liquid helium, and one of his victims is a beat cop who catches him in the act (a beat cop who looks enough like Rookie Parks that it's starting to look like Gotham's ever more baroque underworld has it in for the black woman.) Jim Gordon, cleared of all wrongdoing with the blame for Theo Galavan's death firmly pinned to the Penguin, is back at work and tracking the killer in his own highly imitable style, while Bullock's usual ribbing almost provokes the increasingly unstable Nygma to violence.

We meet Victor Fries and his wife Nora. Usually present only as an astonishingly literal woman in the refrigerator, here we meet Nora still animate, a sickly but real woman on the verge of giving in to the pain and struggle of just keeping breathing, while Victor fights to find a way to freeze her in such a way that she can be revived without liquifying. He gives himself away, however, when a surly pharmacist refuses to refill one of Nora's prescriptions, leaving the original bottle behind with his address on and allowing Gordon and Bullock to collect his experiments and take Nora into custody, and it's Nora's refusal to flip on Victor that lifts her role, I think. She acknowledges that he's done wrong, but he's done it for her, and she won't betray him after that. Maybe she'll be giving him an earful later, but the police can whistle.

Victor tries to hand himself in so he can give the cops the pills Nora needs, but he gets lined up with the rest of the kooks claiming responsibility and then walks out when one of his victims recovers, giving him hope that he can save Nora after all. I see another appalling failure of GCPD security in the near future.

Barnes captures Penguin and hopes that he'll give him enough evidence to reopen the case on Gordon, but Penguin owns all responsibility and cops an insanity plea, winding up in Arkham under the care of the sinister Dr Hugo Strange, a man who apparently makes a practice of talking his patients into brutal self-mutilation and is running the Indian Hill research institute under Arkham. He seems very interested in word of Victor Fries' success.

Oh, and Tabitha Galavan gets all cosy with Butch, the current boss of Gotham's underworld, but it's Tabitha Galavan, so I find it hard to care.

As we enter the Wrath of the Villains half of the series, Fries and Strange at least look more interesting than Galavan, not least because they're not some Johnny Come Lately smug snakes we're supposed to take seriously because... I don't know. The Fries tragedy is playing out in front of us, which is pretty awesome, Strange is genuinely creepy, and Indian Hill is much easier to get a handle on than the Order of St Dumas, who were basically never explained in any real way. Sadly, even with a big secret, Gordon remains a bland lump of nothing, as convincingly dark and edgy as Riley Finn.