Gotham - 'Pinewood', 'Azrael', 'Unleashed', 'A Legion of Horribles' and 'Transference'

Karen Jennings: An original character who is interesting, sympathetic, and
therefore dead.

Okay, so it's time to wrap up Season 2 of pre-Batman quality rollercoaster Gotham.

'Pinewood' leads Bruce and Alfred to investigate the titular Wayne Enterprises programme, long-since shut down, which conducted genetic experiments which killed most of the recipients and left a girl named Karen Jennings with the hand of a velociraptor. Jennings, who had been in Blackgate for murder after killing her abusive father, was rescued and placed in hiding by Thomas Wayne, and could identify the head of the programme, a man known only as 'the Philosopher'. As it happens, this is the same name that Barbara - of all people - helps Gordon to get from the Lady (Michelle Gomez) as the contractee for the Wayne hit. Unfortunately, Victor Fries shows up in a new suit of body armour and kills Karen, but they are still able to link the alias to Hugo Strange.

"Know that men call you liar..."

Playing his cards close to his chest since he has no official standing, Gordon rocks up to Arkham and is all 'I totes know you dunnit, lol.' Strange covers his tracks, then brainwashes a reanimated - and superstrong, because that's how reanimation works, yeah - Theo Galavan to believe that he is Azrael, servant of St Duma, and sends him to punish Gordon's sins. With a sword. Despite the obvious stupidity of sending a man with a sword and a suit of body armour (seriously, how much time and money is Strange spending on fabricating bulletproof costume armour for his reanimated crazy people? And where is he getting this done?) into a precinct full of armed cops, this is the GCPD and he goes through the bullpen like a blender. I seriously don't know where they keep getting recruits, because the attrition rate is fucking insane.

Ahh-hahahaha!

Azrael's fake sword is broken while he's stabbing Captain Barnes, so he goes after the real deal, the sword of sin, buried in his grandfather's grave. Tabitha leads Gordon to the sword and gets shanked trying to snap Theo out of his Azrael persona, but does remind him he was supposed to be killing Bruce Wayne. He heads to Wayne Manor and has a sword fight with Alfred, which made me happy. Then Bruce hits him with a car, establishing early that the 'no killing' rule does not apply when Batman is in a car. Not that it actually kills him, because reanimated, yeah, but then Penguin turns up with Butch and a rocket launcher, and that really made me happy, because I don't think Galavan is coming back from this. He was a crap Azrael anyway; his sword wasn't even slightly on fire.

It's not a real comic book series if folks are going to stay dead.

Speaking of fire, Bruce persuades Selina to break into Indian Hill looking for Brigit, who has been persuaded that she is Firefly, Goddess of Fire, and that Selina is there for her to experiment on, although Selina manages to knock her out between episodes going into 'A Legion of Horribles'.

Strange continues raising corpses, although Fish Mooney is unique in remembering who she actually is rather than being imprinted with a new supervillain persona. Unfortunately for Strange, his employers in 'the Court' (who wear owl masks, so presumably the Court of Owls) are concerned that sending costumed lunatics out into the city might endanger their main purpose - find a way to live forever - and order him to burn down the facility, along with Bruce, Lucius Fox and Gordon, who have been caught trying to sneak in and save Selina, who is busy saving herself by convincing Firefly she is her servant.

"A little song, a little dance; stepmom's head on a lance."

Strange buys time by getting one of his monsters - the future Clayface, one suspects - to impersonate Gordon. Bullock and Alfred both smell a rat, but only Barbara is both sharp enough and crazy enough to notice the difference and entertain the possibility that someone has whipped up a phony Gordon in the space of a lunch break. Then again, she hangs out with Penguin and Butch, giving advice on the tasteful placement of mummified stepmother heads. Penguin and the GCPD all descend on Arkham with the intention of saving Gordon and Bruce and/or executing Strange on account of some dissatisfaction with his therapeutic method.

Seriously, the series needs more of this sort of thing. More gatling guns, and
more Alfred having sword fights; less villains being incompetently diabolical.

Things go to hell as Fish uses her newfound psychotropic mind control bad touch - because
reanimated, and with the DNA of the notoriously mind-controlling cuttlefish no less - to break out. Selina refuses to let Strange execute his prisoners, but Strange sets off a bomb. Fish and a bus full of experiments are ambushed by Penguin, Butch and Ol' Painless, but Fish's appearance scatters the goons and she bad touches Penguin.

Gordon and Fox stop the bomb, Strange is arrested and Gordon heads south to look for Lee. And an old homeless woman opens the back of the bus and lets out the monsters, including a long-haired double of Bruce Wayne. OMG!

Once more, Gotham pulls out the stops for the closing stretch, and I am more than ever convinced that this, like Agents of SHIELD, would benefit greatly from a shorter season. It's actually pretty good at crazy, comic book action. It's when it tries to be all clever and conspiratorial that it falls down. Also, on the strength of the last few episodes, damn Ben McKenzie and David Mazouz got good. McKenzie plays Clayface Gordon and Gordon on truth serum to the hilt, while some flashbacks to Season 1 remind me how much Mazouz has grown, in terms of acting range as well as physically piling on the inches.

Gotham - 'Into the Woods'

"I wish..."

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lay a crapsack city on the edge of the woods. And in that city lived a mostly honest cop, an orphaned Penguin, and a lonely boy and his friend the cat.*

Gordon begins the long and difficult road to proving his innocence and, as it happens, finishes it as well. His ace in the hole is that Harvey Dent once told him IA records all of their incoming calls. With Bullock's help he secures the recording of the tip that led to his arrest, and takes it to his old pal Eddie to clean up. Of course, he realises that Nygma is in fact the man who framed him after killing Miss Kringle, and only narrowly escapes being kiled because Nygma prefers an audience. He goes to Selina for help, and she and Bruce take him to Alfred to get patched up. Selina then takes a message to Barnes in order to bait a trap, letting Nygma hear her tell Barnes that Gordon is lookingfor Penguin who 'knows where the bodies are buried.' Gordon tails Nygma to Kringle's grave and lets the entire department listen in on his unforced confession.

Bruce is continuing to learn the streets from Selina, until Gordon stumbles into their lives. While visiting Wayne Manor, Bruce learns that the computer in the Wayne Cave is up and running again, but Alfred warns him to keep Selina at arm's length, lest she be hurt. Following this advice leads to a split in the teenagers' friendship.

He's back.

Following the death of his father, Oswald is threatened with eviction from the family home by his stepmother, but kept on as an abused and essentially free servant, forced to bear the cruelties and insults of his 'family'. Then he finds the decanter of poison and goes full-on Andronicus, cooking his step-siblings and serving them to their mother before stabbing her to death. Once more, pointless fuckwittage = death. You'd think fewer people would take the time and effort.

Oh, and Barbara is declared sane out on the streets again, because apparently being unconscious in Arkham Asylum for three months satisfies the statute of limitations for murder in Gotham State. She pays a call on Jim. Hurrah.

Like 'Prisoners' before it, 'Into the Woods' serves mostly to get us back to the status quo. Gordon is reinstated, but refuses to talk to Lee until he finds out who hired Malone to kill the Waynes because... I don't know. Maybe he really can't handle multitasking. It still feels like the writers are getting the players in place for something, which is odd since nine times out of ten, this involves undoing something that was done to them just a few episodes ago.

* The reference is de rigeur given the episode title.

Gotham - 'Prisoners'

Gotham does Prison Break, but Ben Mackenzie is no Wentworth Miller.

After a spell in protective detention, Jim Gordon is moved to F-Wing of Blackgate Prison, general population, with love from ex-commissioner Loeb.

The Warden commissions an inmate to have Gordon killed, but the intervention of a young offender named Puck and the one honest guard in Blackgate sees the first attack deflected to just a beating. Bullock visits and promises to get him out, but also has to break the news that Lee has moved south after losing the baby, so fuck you Gotham for that little offscreen development. Still; at least they weren't eaten by hounds.

Elsewhere, Oswald's new family unravels, as his father's wife and - as it turns out - step-children plot to see the interloper off. They reveal his past as the Penguin, but he has already confessed much of that, and attempt to have the daughter seduce him, and finally attempt to poison him, succeeding only in poisoning the father when he decides to have a glass of sherry against doctor's orders. This does prevent him passing on his inheritance to Oswald, and I suspect that the legacy's destruction may trigger the Penguin's return.

ITMA

Back at Blackgate, another attempt to murder Gordon is interrupted when he is murdered by someone else. The honest guard spirits the 'body' out before Jim recovers consciousness after this little masquerade (good thing too, as throughout the proceedings he's just adorably clueless,) and then coshes the bent Warden when Jim insists on going back for Puck, who has also received an aptly prison-style beating. Bullock gets him away from Gotham to meet with the architect of his rescue, Don Falcone, who offers to help him get away, or to get him safely hidden in Gotham.

On discovering that Puck has died of his injuries - I actually thought he was going to turn out to be some sort of horrible criminal, so now I'm the asshole - Jim decides that he has to make things right. He won't run; he's going back to Gotham.

'Prisoners' is a weird episode, as it seems to exist largely to get the series out of a corner that it painted itself into by having Jim sent to jail. There was clearly no interest in giving him any kind of prison storyline, and indeed he basically sleepwalks through this whole episode. I guess it's supposed to be a kind of shock, but it doesn't make for a very interesting protagonist. Mind you, that's Gotham's troubles in a nutshell.

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.

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.

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.

Gotham - 'Worse than a Crime'

"I am vengeance. I am in my nightshirt. Hmm; needs work."

The schemes of the Order of St Dumas come to a head with the ritual sacrifice of Bruce Wayne, but the enemies of Theo Galavan are gathering against them.

Gordon wakes up to the sound of the Murder Bros duet, which must have made him wonder if he was actually in hell or something. Nygma then passes on a message to Lee, who tries to convince Jim to flee town with her as she is pregnant with their child. Alfred wakes up at the dump and flees from Tabitha's search squad, before later attempting to get back to the city and being tased in the face by an over-eager beat cop.

Galavan orders Silver to redeem her failure by re-seducing Bruce and then dancing a jig at his sacrifice, but he refuses to be fooled again, even when she fakes a break out attempt. When she admits that Galavan has directed her to do this and will likely kill her if she fails, however, Bruce puts on a show for Theo, proving he's a stand up guy. Then he gets taken away and tied to a stake, where he calls his executioner a deluded old man. I'll be honest, Bruce comes out of the last couple of episodes looking unexpectedly awesome.

Okay, I'll give you this one, Gotham; this is pretty badass.

Lucius Fox reports Bruce and Alfred missing, which leads to the discovery of Alfred in the cells (because 'acting a bit crazy' is a serious enough offence that they drop you unconscious in lock-up instead of stitching up the six inch gash in your side or the deep puncture wound in your back) and the realisation that Galavan has Bruce. Barnes is still unwilling to act without evidence, knowing that they have one chance to nail Galavan before no judge in the city will touch them, so Bullock and Alfred opt for plan B: A mad charge for death or glory. Nygma isn't able to hide his superior knowledge or resist giving a riddle which Fox solves, so they join the posse comitatus, which is completed when Cat drops in to say that she knows how to get into the building.

How turns out to be Cat sneaking in through an electrical tunnel and taking out the Order's guard (I remind you, 'warriors the like of which Gotham has never seen') so she can open the door. The group then charge hilariously up twenty flights of stairs. Silver punks out and calls for the abbot to wait, which buys just enough time for Gordon and Alfred to bust in and take out the Order like it was nothing. The abbot makes an attempt to salvage the dignity of the Order, but a winded Bullock arrives in time to take him out. Bruce thanks Alfred and Cat for coming for him, but assures them he had 'a perfectly feasible plan for escape.' Good to see the birth of the patented Bat-inability to say thank you.

Galavan tries to flee by parachute, but Tabitha finally tires of him treating her friends like tools, knocks him out and gives his chute to Silver. They drift off - hopefully never to be seen again - and Gordon arrests Galavan. Then Gordon muses on whether to shoot Galavan in the head, but Barnes arrives - summoned by Fox - then Penguin knocks out Barnes and Gordon stands between them, and then we cut to Gordon and Penguin taking Galavan down to the docks, where Penguin beats him with a bat and Gordon shoots him dead.

Much as I wanted to see Galavan taken out, I'm disappointed. After all, without his agonised righteousness, Gotham's Jim Gordon doesn't really have much of a personality.

And then this happens.

So, that was 'Rise of the Villains', in which a largely inconsequential and annoying villain and his useless band of penitent losers rose and then fell again. On that basis, I'm expecting the second half of the Season - 'Wrath of the Villains' - to involve some minor leaguers being basically calm about stuff. Okay, actually we've got Mr Freeze, and Hugo Strange conducting weird experiments at Indian Hill; or possibly Mr Freeze and Hugo Strange conducting weird experiments at Indian Hill.

Gotham - 'The Son of Gotham'

"Well, this isn't good."

With Galavan about to be arraigned, Gordon is ordered to focus on another case, only for the throat-slitting death of a mugger to point back to Galavan and the Order of St Dumas via a massacre at the Chinese massage parlour which now occupies the Order's old chapterhouse.

Gordon and Bullock discover that the Order are using the sewers to get around, and that they are all but impervious to pain after a lifetime of crazy penitence. Meanwhile, former Mayor James changes his testimony to finger the Penguin as his kidnapper. Galavan is released, goading Gordon into taking a swing at him, and provoking Penguin to bird the fuck up and stop moping around chez Nygma. Gordon is captured by police in Galavan's employ and taunted by his enemy, who proceeds to mop the floor with him in a fight and leave him to be killed by the help. It's no huge surprise when Penguin turns up and hauls his fat out of the fire.

Meanwhile, Bruce and Selina set out to get the name of the Waynes' killer from Silver, but then Bruce and Silver are both kidnapped by a terrifying, scarfaced Glaswegian who wants to know how much they know. Silver protests ignorance as Bruce is dragged off, then threatens terrible vengeance, but when faced with the loss of her thumbs coughs up a name, only to discover that her captor's employer is... Bruce Wayne. Bruce and Selina then share a touching moment, as he confesses the bond between them, and she awkwardly responds: "I'm going to steal one of your cars to drive back to the city; is that cool?"

Sadly, Alfred has already gone looking for Bruce and run into Tabitha Galavan. He does better than anyone else has done against her, and way better than Gordon does against Theo, but still ends up in a garbage truck with a knife in his back. This means that Bruce is at home when Theo comes to bag the last sacrifice for the Order's ritual: The Son of Gotham; Bruce Wayne.

'The Son of Gotham' really showcases the problem with the Order of St Dumas, which is that they aren't scary. Tabitha is almost fought to a standstill by a butler, and while they're made out to be some ultimate badasses, the only monks to fight main characters get owned by Gordon and Bullock, who is a brawler more than a badass. At the moment, they're lower on the threat list than the Victor Zsasz posse. I guess if the Galavans were more engaging lead villains I might care more, but I don't. I just mourn the opportunity to bring in more interesting comic book middleweights like Carleton LeHah and Azrael.

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."

Gotham - 'Strike Force'

"I think of it as The Shield, season 8."

There's a new boss at the GCPD: Captain Barnes (I'm not sure who the new Commissioner is, or if there is one yet, but they're obviously not using Sarah Essen's old office,) a tough ex-Marine intent on making a clean sweep. At the same time, the Galavans approach Penguin to be their underworld strongarm, take out the other mayoral candidates and make an unsuccessful hit on Theo for effect. When he refuses, they reveal that they have his mother.

Faced with the death of one candidate and the drive by attempt on Galavan, Barnes and Gordon recruit a team of four talented rookies straight out of the Academy to form the GCPD Strike Force, a no-bullshit, shoot-to-kill team to tackle the worst that the Gotham underworld has to throw at them. Aptly enough, their first encounter is with the GCPD's natural predator, Victor Zsasz. It's depressing that their exchange of flesh wounds counts as a major achievement, given he's one guy with handguns against four armed bastards in body armour, plus Bullock and Gordon.

Gordon knows that Penguin is the candidate killer, but can't act directly because of what Penguin has over him. Barnes has no such compunctions, and wants the Strike Force gunning for Cobblepot. Meanwhile, Penguin and Butch are looking, carefully, for Mama Kapelput.

'Silver St Cloud' is one of those names that screams 'character out of the
comics.'

Elsewhere, Alfred punches Selina Kyle - who has reverted entirely to independent street criminal - in the face 'for Reggie' and tells her to keep away from Bruce, triggering some sort of emotional meltdown in her. This would probably have hit her less hard if she weren't recovering from an extended and inexplicable bout of Minion's syndrome. Anyway, Bruce will no doubt be fine, as on top of a rigorous new training regime of running home through dangerous downtown Gotham, he's been introduced to Galavan's ward, the micro-honey trap Silver St Cloud.

ETA: You know what I completely forgot to mention? Eddie Nygma scores a date with Kristen Kringle by acting all domineering. He drops the ball when the subject of her ex 'leaving town' comes up by saying "I'm glad he's dead," and then starts talking to himself, but apparently she's all kind of into that. Poor Eddie; if only he'd realised sooner that the way to a woman's heart is through her crippling emotional problems.

Gotham continues to max out at okay. Barnes and the Strike Force are a new element, but the Galavans are still frankly annoying. They're like Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins, but without the gravitas and credibility. Without a visible support or intelligence network, their ability to work around everyone, identify their weaknesses and lean on them perfectly comes off as the kind of informed brilliance that really, really annoys me. Barbaritha continues to be an annoying piece of fan service, and both Galavans are just so smug you want to see Alfred punch them, or Zsasz shoot them. I know people who want to see some of the larger and more cannibalistic DC villains - Killer Croc or King Shark - introduced to the series for no other reason than to eat them.

King Shark. Man, I miss The Flash. I wonder when it's back on.

Gotham - 'The Last Laugh'

Gnah! Called it, damnit.

With the GCPD working overtime to track down Jerome and the other Maniax, Lee twists Gordon's arm to join her for a gala at the Children's Hospital (of which, naturally, the Waynes were big supporters, thus bringing Bruce to the show.) Before things get started, Jerome and Tabitha (who is indeed making out with Barbara now, because whats more fun than trashy lesbian bad girls, amirite?) pay a call on the former's father to frame the old man for masterminding Jerome's breakout from Arkham, because clearly Gordon is going to believe that's something a frail, blind fortune teller could do. Actually, in Gotham I'm quite surprised that he doesn't. Bullock suggests going to Penguin for information, but Gordon is skittish.

"How about a magic trick? I'm gonna make this pencil disappear."

At the party, poor Alfred gets a crush on Lee and Bruce spots Selina working the crowd, which seems kind of odd since we last saw her apparently on salary with Penguin. Things take a downward turn when Jerome and Barbara mug the magician for the gala and take the party hostage, with Lee in pride of place. There's a lot of stand off, Alfred is a bit badass and Bruce gets to man up. Barbara menaces Lee and tells her that totes for certain she'll end up with Jim, because he's got darkness in him too and they're, like, so perfect for each other and one day they'll laugh about how Lee tried to come between them.

I am so ready to go back to tedious villain of the week procedural now.

In the end, it turns out the whole thing is just theatrics. While he has explained to Barbara that she will be at the forefront of phase 2 of his plan, Jerome was just the warm up. Theo offs Jerome to 'save the day', thus earning the gratitude of the city he claims his family built, but were denied their credit*. Since he's stabbed someone now, Barbara is way into him when they get home, and Tabitha gets jealous. For a meticulous planner and psychological chessmaster, Theo seems utterly blind to potential emotional disruptions to his inner circle, or maybe Barbara is supposed to be some sort of irresistible sex goddess now she's a wicked, depraved bisexual? I'm starting to suspect that this show has some serious bad girl issues.

Never mind the sex, peoples; here's the Bullock!

Gotham: Rise of the Villains continues to be hampered by, well, its villains. Jerome has a certain panache, and the scenes at the end where his laugh becomes almost an infectious, psychopathic meme sweeping through Gotham plays nicely with the whole 'everyone is the bloody Joker' bit they've got going on, but dear merciful God in Heaven Barbara and the Galavans are tedious. Penguin, meanwhile, is doing very little; resting on his laurels and waiting for Bullock to warn him off messing with Gordon (aww!) while his henchlings apparently seek more rewarding employment in the field of high-society pickpocketing.

* He had this whole rant, but since he opened with 'We built this city...' I just blanked most of it and assumed the foundations to be made of a combination of rock and roll.

Gotham - 'Knock, Knock'

"Maniax. With an X! It's more X-treme!"

Motives emerge as Theo Galavan's new gang goes to work, opening by kidnapping the Mayor and forcing him to announce that he has run off with a younger woman, then dropping people off a roof to spell out the name of the gang - Maniax! - in a far better display of precision people dropping than of spelling. Jerome is clearly interested in chaos, while Theo talks about cleansing fires a lot, like R'as al-Ghul with the serial numbers filed of.

Bruce tries to access his father's computer, but Alfred takes a hammer to it. Bruce sacks him, but rehires him on the promise that Alfred will teach him to fight; properly this time. Alfred then approaches Thomas Wayne's former confidante Lucius Fox to provide technical assistance, on the promise that if he proves untrustworthy he will be tucked up like a kipper.

James Frain looks almost as sad as I feel at the way this is going.

Gordon is put in charge of the Maniax investigation, and prevents the massacre of a bus full of cheerleaders, but the one member of the gang that they capture is killed by Tabitha using a sniper rifle. Just in case we thought Tabitha was a cool, collected professional, we see her and Barbara chasing the captive Mayor with whips for shiggles and oh god they're going to become a cheesy, exploitative hot evil lesbian item, aren't they? Fuck you, Gotham; and where is Montoya? We need her to represent! And perhaps even be the Question, because that would be kinda awesome, which Tababra isn't.

Barbara turns up at the precinct and Gordon pursues her, trying to persuade her to turn herself in. She tells him that she's not a good person and has the big member of the Maniax beat the crap out of him. Meanwhile, Jerome and the others shoot up the precinct, because as we discovered last season, fifty armed cops are entirely defenceless against four criminals; or one if he's Zsasz. Lee - who is still working; yay! - hides under a table and Nygma gets to rescue Kristen Kringle, but Commissioner Essen is killed and footage of the massacre sent to news outlets to destroy what little confidence remained in the GCPD. On the up side, it draws Bullock out of barkeeping.

On the one hand, I applaud Gotham for gamely departing from past canons and for trying to do something with Barbara, the ensemble whipping girl of last season. Unfortunately, what they're doing is... not good. It would be not good even if it didn't involve the only gay character in the show becoming an increasingly sexualised psychopath. Seriously; Batman comics have a pretty poor rep for equality, but damnit they had Montoya (you know; once they imported her from the Animated Series, along with Harvey Bullock.)

Do it!

On the plus side, we are not losing Bullock and Sean Pertwee's Alfred continues to be a delight, the scene in which he tells Fox a long, rambling story of this lairy mate of his who let him down and had to be tucked up like a kipper being a high point of this episode. The other is the massacre, which manages to avoid the many pitfalls of having a sadistic psychopath murder one of your principle female characters. On the other hand, one of the principle female characters in a show not replete with female characters has now been murdered, and it's the one who was in a position of authority.

Gotham's remaining female characters are Goddamn Barbara, the lead's girlfriend*, a slutty enforcer, a serially codependent file clerk with poor taste in men, and whatever the good god damn is going on with Selina Kyle becoming the Penguin's... secretary? bodyguard? strategic adviser? This is a city in dire need of a faceless gay avenger in a trenchcoat, suit and tie.

* Yes, she's a pathologist, but so far this Season not so much with the pathologising.

Gotham - 'Damned if you do...'

There is no way this relationship is ever going to blow up in Gordon's face.

Season 2 of Batman Hasn't Begun Yet - subtitled 'Rise of the Villains', so that's promising for our heroes - opens with Penguin the 'King of Gotham', Gordon directing traffic, Harvey Bullock tending a bar and Barbara checking into Arkham Asylum with her matched luggage.

Commissioner Loeb soon finds an excuse to give Gordon the boot when he shoves his useless partner after tackling a man calling himself Zaardon the Soul Reaper (who claims to have been given dragon's blood to drink by 'the Master'.) Also Lee urges Gordon to move on, he goes to Penguin for help getting back in, which Penguin offers if Gordon will do a debt collection job for him. Gordon at first passes, but Bruce of all people persuades him that sometimes the right way is the ugly way. The job goes south and Gordon kills a mobster, but Penguin is as good as his word, forcing Loeb to reinstate Gordon and stand down, leaving Sarah Essen to become the new Commissioner.

What I love about this series is its nuanced portrayals of female characters.

Meanwhile, Barbara Gordon makes friends with Richard Sionis and Jerome whatsisname (you know, the creepiest of the 'could be the Jokers' from Season 1) in order to gain access to a phone. She calls Gordon to claim that Lee framed her and was the one to attack her, and Lee to say she's going to kill her, which kind of robs the first call of credibility. Then Zaardon arrives, dies, burps sleep gas and Barbara and her chums are rescued from Arkham by a slinky chick in leather.

A bloodthirsty, almost sexually ecstatic killer? That's new. Interesting. No,
wait... the other thing.

Said slinky leather chick is Tabitha Galavan, sister and enforcer of Theo Galavan, newly arrived civic luminary and presumed future anti-Bruce Wayne, who offers the six rescued inmates a place in his organisation. Sionis, who is a colossal moron, tells the man who has him strapped to a gurney to sling his hook because he's all possessive of Barbara's pants. He offers Galavan a million dollars as soon as he hits the street, so it's kind of a surprise that Tabitha half-throttles him with a whip then stabs him to death, rather than throwing him out of the window.

After failing to crack the code to his father's secret vault (it turns out it was 'BRUCE',) Bruce blows open the door with Alfred's help and finds a hidden study and a letter, warning him to leave well alone unless he feels a calling.

'Damned if you do...' is not a complete writeoff, and Bruce and Alfred in particular get some good stuff. The continued prominence of Barbara is not encouraging, however, and while Theo is James Frain and I can never feel entirely bad about increased levels of James Frain, Tabitha is everything wrong with female villains over the past thirty or forty years. I'm also not sure if Lee is still working, like, at all; I hope she is, because I'll be very sad if the last half-decent female character in the show - Selina Kyle is working for Penguin, which makes even less sense than her wielding a shotgun for Fish Mooney - has been reduced to the role of imperiled girlfriend.

Gotham - 'All Happy Families are Alike'

"Well, here we are, chained up in a warehouse. Again."

One of the oddities about Gotham - the city, rather than the show specifically - is that it has never escaped from the social aesthetics of the 1920s, and for all their modern cars and cellphones, Gotham's rock stars are its mobsters. This is reiterated when the TV news talks about the growing war between the Falcone and Maroni gangs, making it clear that the leaders of Gotham's underworld are not shadowy figures, living largely off the grid on cash-only purchases, or at least shunning the limelight, keeping their own hands clean, operating through layers of concealment and legitimate cover (for which see Daredevil's Wilson Fisk,) but big names who probably get interviewed for magazines and stuff.

Image of the week, if not the series.

The news in this case is that Falcone is on the out. Jim Gordon is disgusted, knowing that Maroni is incapable of bringing the kind of stability that Falcone has. Falcone is the villain Gotham needs, not the one it deserves. Thus he interrupts Penguin's attempt to murder his erstwhile benefactor in a deserted hospital, engaging in a massive shootout with Maroni's assassins - who arrive escorted by the Commissioner himself - and spiriting Falcone to his safe house, aided by the increasingly reluctant Bullock, and accompanied by Penguin and Butch, as having arrested them he can't leave them to die.

"So, I turned into a gun-toting, mummy's girl urban guerilla...
at some point."

Unfortunately, Fish Mooney has returned to Gotham and is the last person alive who knows where Falcone's safe house is. She plans to sell him to Maroni for her piece of the pie, but Maroni picks up the idiot ball and just can't not condescend one time too many, leading to a bullet in the brain and a firefight between Mooney's street rats and Maroni's surviving boys. Oh, yes; Mooney has recruited her new muscle on the streets, including Selina Kyle, who has taken some sort of personality bypass to replace her wildness with a desire for security and mothering. Gordon, Bullock and Falcone escape, while the decimation of both gangs leaves Penguin and Fish in a final rooftop struggle which sees Cobblepot emerge triumphant as 'the king of Gotham'.

Fair play, Erin Richards gives solid gold crazy.

Elsewhere, Barbara rejects trauma counselling from anyone but a doubtful Dr Thompkins. She talks a little about the Ogre before asking if Gordon ever hits Thompkins and then progressing rapidly into a degenerating spiral of mental breakdown and trying to murder the good doctor with a kitchen knife. In the ensuing fight, Thompkins incapacitates her attacker without rescue, for which props are given.

Regrouping at Barbara's place, Gordon comforts Thompkins, and gets some avuncular advice from Falcone, who once more tells him that he knew and respected Gordon senior. He announces his intention to retire, leaving Gotham's future in Gordon's hands, and presents him with his knife, which was originally Gordon senior's. His lesson: Even an honest man needs a knife sometimes.

In Barbara's favour, she does a little better than Eddie Nygma. Kristen Kringle cracks the riddling clue in his false Dear Jane letter, which turns him into Gollum.

Seriously; check that shit out, Precious.

And then Bruce discovers his father's secret entrance to the Batcave. Straight up, secret entrance, cave, with bats; and it opens to the strains of Prokofiev's 'Dance of the Knights', if the hints of some sort of prior Dark Knight weren't strong enough. I have to admit, I did not see this one coming, and I hope it doesn't turn out to just be where he kept the good brandy and the bad porn.

Either way, that's for Season 2 of course, which offers us the prospect of the Penguin's underworld, Victor Zsasz hitting the unemployment line, Batboy, the rise of the Riddler and fuck knows what they'll do with Barbara now. I hope to see Montoya return and for her and Thompkins to provide a much needed non-psychotic, non-token female presence, and for the show to find a beat other than procedural villain of the week, in which mode the show is almost the antithesis of the familiar offbeat detective format, featuring a dull detective and offbeat villains.

I also hope to see Gordon becoming less of a stiff, and bringing some order back to the GCPD. I want to see a solid arc with less rambling digression, and fewer characters - especially fewer female characters - utterly changing their personality on the turn of a die.

Gotham has a lot to fix in Season 2, but I will at least be planning to watch what happens.