The police search is still on for Dr
Crane after his murderous rampage in the last episode. Meanwhile the
Penguin is attempting to reopen Fish’s nightclub, although Maroni
may have other plans for him. Fish herself has more concerns than the
loss of her nightclub when she wakes up in an underground prison,
surrounded by violent criminals.
So this episode, ‘The Scarecrow’
spends the majority of its runtime resolving last week’s
cliffhangers. The various plot strands of this episode resolve around
the concept of fear, rather appropriately. A lot of the episode
follows the Crane family, filling us in with a lot of much needed
backstory. We learn to sympathise somewhat with Gerald Crane, who we
learn is trying to “cure” himself from having fear. A sympathetic
villain is far more engaging and the successes he has with his
methods do add some slight grey tones to his ‘madness’. An
interesting drug addiction metaphor is used to equate Gerald’s
desperate need to rid himself of fear with that of an addict needing
their fix.
The fact that his son, Jonathan, does
not want to follow in his father’s footsteps adds an element of
pathos to the episode. I like that the interruption by the police is
the main reason that Jonathan’s fear removal goes wrong. A feeling
of inevitable destiny follows all of the classic Batman characters
who appear in ‘Gotham’, from the moment they appear their fate is
sealed. It’s interesting when the character is sympathetic as we
find ourselves rooting against the destiny of the character. The
origin of ‘The Scarecrow’ is well handled but the Crane family
owning an old scarecrow in their garden is a little on the nose.
Most of the Penguin parts of this
episode are relatively unmemorable due to the fact that they barely
feature the Penguin. We get several scenes with Maroni and Falcone
talking about how cool/terrible the Penguin is but Oswald is absent
from these scenes. The scenes we get featuring Robin Lord Taylor show
him redecorating his nightclub, hardly his finest moment. We do get
one incredibly awkward moment where Oswald and Edward Nygma meet for
the first time. I’m sure that this scene sent their respective fan
girls crazy but it really doesn’t add anything to the episode aside
from embarrassment.
Fish Mooney’s scenes also suffer from
a lack of motivation. Fish is not a character that can exist in
isolation. Without her gang and club she is a far less credible
villain. The prison like dungeon she wakes up in feels like an
attempt to reboot her character, forcing her to regain her empire
from the ground up. Without her scheming against Falcone and her
confrontations with Oswald, she really isn’t that dynamic a
character. Hopefully when she returns to Gotham City itself she will
regain some of her purpose within the show.
We also spend time in this episode
following Bruce Wayne. Bruce is trying to continue a family
tradition, without his family. In these moments with Bruce we are
shown that he is learning to cope by himself. This change from child
to young adult is an important part of Bruce’s development into
Batman. ‘Gotham’ is also developing the character of Alfred in an
interesting way. We are given the impression that older repressed
parts of the Alfred character, that of the soldier, are being brought
to the fore in his attempts to connect with Bruce. Hopefully future
episodes will continue this trend.
So ‘The
Scarecrow’ is a slightly above average episode of ‘Gotham’. The
moments with the Crane family are very well handled and raise
interesting questions about the natures of medical experimentation.
Unfortunately experimental angles have been taken with the characters
of Fish and Penguin which don’t entirely work. Penguin has been
given power and Fish has had hers taken away, neither of these are a
good fit for the characters as they have been established. I suspect
that future episodes will restore the status quo to some extent. This
would be a shame as character development is never a bad thing, even
if in these cases it may need a bit of a reworking to truly work.
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