Gotham had an unusually strong cold open tonight. Oswald Cobblepot’s visit to Jim Gordon paid off greater dividends than I thought it would, as the former seems to have surprisingly murky motivations. He offers to help Gordon as his “secret agent,” and for the first time all season Robin Lord Taylor’s manic proclamations that Gotham is his home actually rang true. Elsewhere, a councilman and his aide were killed in a surprisingly nasty fashion, via a blade/spyglass contraption that stabs one through the eye. Here’s a tip: if a stranger approaches you in a dark parking lot and tells you to put your eye against something, don’t do it. BEST case scenario it’s a penis.
Cobblepot’s story was more interesting tonight than it’s ever been. It’s the closest thing we’ve gotten to an “origin story” for the Penguin since Gotham premiered; up until now it’s just been Cobblepot killing frat boys and mob enforcers. But he actually shows some ingenuity and calculated ruthlessness tonight – he stages a robbery that leaves several of Maroni’s men dead. Cobblepot conveniently lives, and even more conveniently he manages to rescue a bag of money. This gets him promoted to restaurant manager, and later he kills his hired robbers with poisoned cannoli, and no the last part of that sentence was not a joke.
But Cobblepot was decidedly the B-story, as most of “Arkham” focused on the titular asylum (and the district in which it stands). Gotham shows us the heart-pounding intricacies and nuances of backdoor land deals, which is exactly what you want in a show about Batman’s hometown. The meat of it involves Gordon and Bullock on the hunt for a hitman called Gladwell (Black Sails’ Hakeem Kae-Kazim), who killed the councilman and then ups his body count to three, as he sets another councilman on fire.
Gotham is firmly in case of the week territory with, well, every episode since the pilot, and true to form Gladwell ends up dead before the hour ends. But at the very least the stuff with Arkham plays into the grander mythology that the show is attempting to weave. The mob war brewing between Falcone and Maroni will surely come into play as well, and so will whatever the hell Fish Mooney is up to, which involves ordering prospective nightclub singers to seduce her, then fight each other. Again, I’m not joking.
Fish Mooney is in an entirely different show, and wouldn’t seem to exist in Gotham at all if Harvey Bullock didn’t go running to her every single time – EVERY SINGLE TIME – he has trouble finding a suspect. Bullock’s steps one through infinity of detective work are pretty much “Go to Fish for help.” Which leads me to wonder, what the hell is Fish getting out of this deal? Gordon “killed” Cobblepot for her in the pilot, but other than that there’s been precious little of the quid pro quo that an arrangement with a dirty cop would seem to entail.
It’s frustrating that Gotham keeps throwing second-rate villains like Gladwell at us, when what the show clearly wants is to get to this mob war it never shuts up about. But hey, at least there were no goddamn balloons this week. That’s what you call a small victory.
A Few Thoughts
- Barbara leaving Gordon happened entirely too soon for me. It rang false
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Does Bruce go to school? It seems like he just spends all day playing junior detective
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A little bit of Edward Nygma goes a loooong way
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This show really wants you to know that cops in Gotham are corrupt and not opposed to using excessive force
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