Gotham might not be so maddening if it would just be consistent. Nowhere is this more evident than in Arkham Asylum. Some of Arkham is genuinely creepy, for example whatever machine Hugo Strange straps Penguin into, which apparently came from the set of House on Haunted Hill. Well done, show! Then you get the patients themselves, who are at best cartoons and at worst harmful caricatures. I mean, one of them is literally in his cell yelling “Mommy!” over and over.
And that’s Gotham in a nutshell. Half good, half campy crap. Sometimes it can get out of its own way, like it did last week, but sometimes it’s not so successful. “A Dead Man Feels No Cold” was mostly scattered, but it did show Gotham‘s deepest desire: to keep the status quo more or less in check. (Look how quickly Penguin’s medication wore off. Minutes before he couldn’t remember his name; now he can remember Jim’s name, and who Jim killed.)
Let’s talk about what worked first, and get that out of the way. Bruce and Alfred make a welcome return, with a bit of tension between them. Bruce wants to track down Patrick Malone, the man who killed his parents, and kill him in turn. This despite having told Lee that he’d let “the law take its course.” (More on Lee, and her many hats, later.) The deal he makes with Alfred would let Alfred pull the trigger, but Bruce confides to Selina that he wants to kill Malone himself, and is unafraid of how it will change him. In fact, he’s counting on it. I’m in favor of this subplot because it puts the best part of Gotham, Bruce and Alfred, back on my TV, but of course they have to bring Selina Kyle along, because this show has no idea what to do with her. Remember when she was spying on Butch and Tabitha last week? Because I guarantee that Gotham doesn’t.
Okay, on to Lee. I love Morena Baccarin – it’s kind of a rule of TV – but what the hell is this character? Nora Fries has wound up in Lee’s care, at the police station, because showrunner Bruno Heller has decided that medicine is a “one size fits all” field of study, so this episode sees Lee acting as a personal physician, psychiatrist, and medical examiner. That’s annoying enough, but to top it off she keeps falling victim to terrible girlfriend tropes. When Barnes decides that Nora should be moved to Gotham, everyone except Jim thinks it’s a bad idea. Except it’s a great idea! Gotham General is too big to be secured, especially with Gotham’s rapidly-dwindling police force (Mr. Freeze alone is responsible for killing seven cops, and I think that number jumped to nine this episode). Bullock doesn’t want Nora surrounded by “loonies,” as if the mental patients are in the ER. And Lee thinks the police station is more secure, which it provably isn’t, but she concedes to move Nora to Arkham – if she can come with. Not to be reductive here, but Lee, you are pregnant. This same shit just happened on The Walking Dead! Female characters, no one is making you have children, but if you do, maybe, you know, give a shit about them.
Mr. Freeze storming Arkham is actually a decent set piece, and I like the addition of the ice grenades (plus his helmeted costume gets him closer to his comic-book look, which is a nice move). Of course, his arrival means that a lot more cops die, and in a very telling moment, he freezes someone’s hands to a steering wheel to make the guy’s truck crash the gate. Later, the driver tells Jim that Freeze “didn’t say anything, only that he was sorry.” Notice that no one, including the cops, gives a shit about the cops that Freeze has killed. But this civilian – ah, let us tend to your wounds, good sir, and let our finest constable James hear your tale of woe! When Jim and Bullock show up to Freeze’s house, they see a cop frozen on the ground, and don’t even call the paramedics. Gotham hates cops so, so much. I’m no #BlueLivesMatter zealot, but it’s a weird, uncomfortable stance for the show to take.
At the end of “A Dead Man Feels No Cold” – ugh, that title – Gotham is pretty much back to where it started, minus a Nora Fries. (Her death scene was actually solid. Not an ice pun, I swear.) The most promising development is the unholy alliance between Hugo Strange and Mr. Freeze. Now that Freeze has the white hair and blue eyes that we’re used to, things might start getting more interesting.
A Few Thoughts
- I audibly groaned when it was revealed that Barbara is in a coma at Arkham (and its WWI-era hospital beds). My current theory is that she will emerge as the female Joker, in season three or four.
- The end of this episode confirms that pretty much every dead bad guy that has ever been on this show is currently in a vat at Indian Hill. You know what that means: season five, Rise of the Ballonman!
About Author
