Gotham - 'This Ball of Mud and Meanness' and 'Mad Grey Dawn'

"For identification purposes, I am not Harley Quinn."

In Arkham Asylum, the Penguin is facing his nightmares in a series of virtual reality therapies, while Hugo Strange looks on and is super creepy.

Bruce sets out to find Matches Malone, beginning with a man named Cupcake who runs an underground fighting ring. When Bruce jumps on Alfred's style, Cupcake offers the information for $50,000 and a fight with Alfred, who takes him down through sheer tenacity, imparting an explicit lesson to his charge: "To beat a big man, all you need to do is outlast him."

Damn this kid has grown.

Cupcake points them to Jerry, a Harley Quinn-looking Lori Petty, who runs and sings at a retro, Maniax-themed punk club called the Celestial Garden, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write. With Alfred laid up in bed, Bruce goes to Jerry, who despite claiming to be a friend of Matches tells Bruce 'the childish hand of fate' where to find him. With Gordon on his trail, Bruce goes to Matches' apartment under the guise of wanting to hire him, then questions him about the murder of his parents. Malone won't say who hired him, that code being all the decency he has left, and essentially begs Bruce to kill him and remove the burden of crimes unpunished.

Make no mistake; this scene, as Bruce realises that his quarry is not a monster, just a man, and that revenge is truly the most worthless of causes, is a tour de force; one of the best in the series and a huge escalation from David Mazouz's early work as the boy billionaire. As he sets the gun down and walks away, you can really start to see that this kid could be Batman.

"Riddle me this..."

We end up with Nygma looking askance at Jim's frankly half-arsed pursuit of Miss Kringle's disappearance - prompted by Lee - Penguin declared sane and released from Arkham to live as a good and normal person, and Bruce leaving Wayne Manor to live on the streets with Selina for a time, deciding that he needs to fight injustice where it lives, and that means knowing those places, not looking on them from afar and on high.

In 'Mad Grey Dawn', Nygma sets out to settle his Gordon problem. An anonymous report reopens the Galavan case, and at the same time a riddling bomber marking his work with a question mark begins to stalk the city. With considerable style, Nygma acquires an officer's signature and a weapon with Gordon's prints on it, and then guides him into a trap which ends with Barnes arresting Gordon as a cop killer. And he goes to Blackgate for it, without a reprieve in sight.

Despite this, Gordon is still about the least interesting thing in what was once his show, as the all-new Bruce Wayne gets roped into a scheme to steal cash from mob mushroom farmers working for Butch Gilzene's nephew. We get a reappearance by creepy Ivy Pepper, the gang's shroom cultivator, and a chance for Bruce to put his lessons to use, letting Sonny Gilzene whale on him until he starts to wear out. Also interesting is that when Sonny blindly insults Bruce's parents, this hits Selina's berserk button.

Paul Reubens? Did we wander into a Burton movie?*

Meanwhile, old Penguin is out and about and visiting old friends. He first drops in on Butch and Tabitha. The latter wants to kill him, but Butch insists that an eye for an eye has been served, although he does allow that some punishment may be in order. Later, coated in tar and feathers ('They talked about killing me, so... this was actually pretty nice of them, considering,') he shows at Nygma's house mid planning session, only to be asked to leave because 'the new you is kind of freaking me out.'

It is a Burton movie!

Thus the Penguin wanders to his mother's grave, where he encounters a dapper man laying flowers, who turns out to be - dun dun duh! - his father! Son of Edna's old employers, he invites his newfound son back to the family pile to meet his new family. A happy ending at last! Perhaps Hugo Strange was right and good things do come to good people.

Or, more likely, Strange is a creepy monster who manufactures semi-human weapons in the basement of his ghoulish sanitarium and Penguin's new family are a collection of terrifying, bloodless social parasites.

Oh, and Barbara wakes up. My joy be unconstrained.

All in all, the 'Wrath of the Villains' sub-season benefits greatly from the absence of Theo Galavan and an increased focus on the revitalised Bruce Wayne subplot and, in general, the many, many characters who are more interesting than Jim Gordon. Will prison give Gordon the edge that he's been lacking (as well as serving as just punishment for the murder that he did commit, at least until he is acquitted of the one that he didn't)? I doubt it, but at least the rest is looking good.

* I don't know why I associate him with Burton; I think he as only in the one.