What They Say:
Harvey Dent – Harvey Dent encourages Gordon to team up with Mayor James in an attempt to close the Wayne murder case. Meanwhile, Penguin makes contact with Mooney’s secret weapon.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The season has had its ups and downs as is the norm for most new series finding its way, though this one is coming across as a show that’s overstuffing itself with the mythology characters a bit more than it should. Sometimes it works well as we get interesting characters making their way in, but you also get underutilized characters like Selina. The Black Mask episode the last time around was a Fight Club-light episode that was kind of okay, but I was more interested in some of the other plots of the episode, from the way Gordon is trying to do right to Bullock trying to help him in his own way. But I was particularly interested in the Bruce Wayne subplot as that had some really good stuff in the small time it had, particularly since it gave a nod to Tommy Elliott, who is better known as Hush in the comics.
The cold open for this week again puts us into the Barbara situation a bit as Gordon, having had Selina fall back into his life, has brought her home with him to try and figure out what to do with her since he’s intent on helping her. Unfortunately, Barbara has flown the coop for a bit after what happened with Falcone and Zsaz, which isn’t exactly what he needed at the time. Barbara’s reasons certainly make a good bit of sense considering what she’s been through and how she feels she let Jim down in a way, but she also knows she’s weak and cowardly here since she opts to just get out of town outright in order to get herself together. Gordon having Selina there is temporary to be sure, since he has a sketch artist coming to get an idea of who it was that shot the Waynes, but he’s intent on having her stay at Wayne Manor once that’s done so she’ll be pretty much safe and out of the way.
With that set up, not exactly something that Alfred is keen on, Gordon’s able to start building the case slowly but surely with the help of Allen and Montoya. What they need is an ADA that can work with them on this that won’t be sold out completely. That brings them into the presence of Harvey Dent, an up and coming young ADA that’s looking to make a name for himself. Obviously we know his future as Two-Face, and we get some fun with him here with his good looks and the whole coin flipping thing that’s already pretty prominent. And, as Gordon listens to him, he talks about bets a whole lot. There’s a wariness on Gordon’s part to be sure, but there’s enough reassurances to allow it to go forward since Dent is building a complicated case that, even if it falls through by being the wrong end person, will rattle the right cages.
There’s a lot of fun in watching how Selina and Bruce interact, since he’s interested in her in a basic kind of youthful way, but his “Getting to know you” questions invariably set her off. She’s not interested in him or this place since it’s far outside of her realm, so she has all her walls and defenses up. She also really pushes all the wrong buttons when it comes to Alfred and he’s intent on making sure Gordon picks her up sooner rather than later. The time that Bruce and Selina spend together is definitely nicely done as we see how she willfully deludes herself about her parentage in order to survive, and we also see how she likes to toy with Bruce in a way that should make comics fans grin. Spread across the episode, it’s a good bit of fun overall and I’m definitely enjoying both of these characters and the first blush interactions with each other.
The episode also runs a story that works in interesting directions with the villain of the week in the form of Ian Hargrove. Amid a prisoner transport from Blackgate, he’s busted out from the van by some armed thugs who want him for their own purposes. Hargrove isn’t based off of any known villains, at this point, but there’s a sense of bigger things about him with his bomb building abilities and what kind of trouble they’ve caused. It’s an interesting layout as we get more of it from Ian’s brother as we learn how he turned himself in after the last building was bombed, which injured innocent people, because everything else went after munitions and weapons factories. Ian has his own sense of justice and when things went wrong, his guilt was so consuming that he turned himself in. But now others have gotten a hold of him and are intent on using his abilities to achieve their own nefarious ends.
As we see a group of Russians behind things, it turns out that they’re just pawns of Mooney as they were Nikolai’s boy until Nikolai was killed. She’s able to direct them towards the right goal, which is to use the high end explosives they’ve acquired to cause a lot of damage that will benefit not only them but also Mooney, since everything she does is in service of that end goal. What we see unfold is pretty interesting though as they break into the Gotham Armory, which was pretty well protected in a way other places aren’t, which is why they needed Hargrove, his skills and the explosives they acquired. It’s not a lengthy piece, but it plays out well enough and is quickly resolved in the end as Mooney’s end goals aren’t achieved.
Cobblepot doesn’t have a huge role here, but he’s continuing his investigation into Liza, having broke into her place and starting to put the pieces together. He’s zeroed in pretty well on who she is as he’s convinced that she’s a plant from Fish Mooney and he uses a creative aspect to try and connect the two of them together in a surprisingly creepy way. There’s some social interaction aspects of his that are obviously off, but those quirky aspects are certainly a lot of fun to watch as he confronts Mooney in his own way without her being able to understand what it is that he’s doing or after. It also just reinforces her desire to eliminate him in a big way. Cobblepot is definitely one of my favorites in the show and seeing how he’s putting so many things into motion and manipulating people to his own ends is definitely a treat.
In Summary:
Gotham again works a main storyline that’s not all that interesting with Hargrove, though it’s one that leads us towards the start of Arkham Asylum going into business full scale. We knew that was coming and it’s done in a politically expedient way here. The bombings, the Russians and what Mooney is up to this time around didn’t connect well and it kind of just played out in that villain of the week aspect. What I did like this time around was watching the motions between Bruce and Selina as well as Alfred’s role in all of it. There’s plenty of people that just aren’t happy with what the show is doing in general, but I like seeing Bruce at this stage grappling with the scale of the world and seeing the small, subtle influences that are working on him. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to take of the Harvey Dent character yet since there’s an edge about him that’s certainly rough and raw, but I’m still feeling conditioned by the way The Dark Knight feature positioned the character as a potential white knight of Gotham.
Grade: B
