Gotham - 'A Dead Man Feels No Cold'

"Well; sure glad I don't..." Ah, you know how it goes by now.

After last week's subtle and touching start to what the TV movie will later call 'Freeze: The Nora Fries Story', Victor decides that with mere hours left to save his wife, what he needs to do is create a professionally finished suit and gun, kills ome more cops and demand Nora's release. Enraged, Barnes orders Nora to be taken to Arkham and used as bait, with Lee insisting on accompanying her patient, because she is the GCPD's one stop shop for medical services. Oh, this once she gets back from visiting Bruce Wayne to talk about his trauma. Bruce claims he feels more alive than ever, and insists that he wants to see 'M. Malone' brought to justice.

To get the Bruce stuff out of the way, he promises Alfred no more secrets and that he'll let Alfred kill Malone, and in return gets a file Alfred has acquired on Patrick 'Matches' Malone. Then he asks Selina to get him a gun so he can break yet another promise. He tells her this won't be like when he couldn't push whatsisface out of the window, because Malone killed his parents. Some day he may work out that Alfred also matters, but it might be too late by then. I hope so; when he gets like this I kind of want to see the little snot realise what he's thrown away in all his self-righteous whining.

At Arkham, Penguin begs Jim to help him escape the torture they are putting him through, but Jim blows him off, because Jim is an idiot. He knows that Penguin came into Arkham fundamentally sane and lying for his sake, yet treats him as if he were genuinely crazy.

Ol' blue eyes is back.

Fries breaks through the police cordon (because the GCPD are shit, remember) and smashes through walls. Hugo Strange locks the police in and guides Fries, offering to exchange a cartridge of his cryo fluid for a free pass and keys to a car. Fries accepts and gets Nora, taking Lee as well as she won't leave her patient. Seeing that Victor will never stop while he is trying to save her, Nora swaps the cartridge in his gun so that he kills her when he tries to preserve her, and he attempts suicide by freezing, only to wake in Indian Hill... changed.

Like so many Gotham two-parters, 'A Dead Man Feels No Cold' squanders most of its set up on a swift and flashy conclusion. I could have watched the good man Victor cat and mouse with the diabolical Doctor Strange for weeks before the final surrender and transformation, but instead we get a very linear resolution and the unequivocal death of Nora. The only real up point of this week was Lee unloading some venom on the comatose Barbara. Oh, and Jim gets all high-handed about Lee risking the baby. She gives him an earful in return, partly having talked so much to Nora about how Nora saw the path Victor was on, but let him continue because she loved him. Did I mention that I find Jim to be a deeply unlovable character?

And that's the uiltimate flaw of Gotham; I don't really care about anyone, at least not the people it wants me to care about. I just want the series to be replaced by one in which Bullock and Alfred open a pub-come-PI business in Bludhaven. The fact that Strange seems to have Theo Galavan, Jerome, Fish and any other irritating villain who actually had the decency to die and get out of the series in cryonic storage is not encouraging.