A serial killer is stalking the streets
of Gotham. Can Gordon stop a criminal so terrible that he has the
rest of the police force too scared to even mention his name?
Following on from last week, Bruce and Selina go on the trail of
Reggie to discover who he is working for, why he stabbed Alfred? Away
from Gotham, Fish has problems of her own. Will Mooney’s attempts
to escape from the island be successful, or is the sinister Dr
Dollmaker a foe that even her fearsome resolve can’t overcome?
Continuity has always been ‘Gotham’s’
biggest weakness. From week to week things will change, including the
personalities of the main characters. Part of the popularity of a
police procedural is the consistency of the characters. It doesn’t
mean they can’t change, in fact they need to, it just means that we
grow to empathise with the grim life of a policeman by following them
and sharing in the experience. This is hard to do when the characters
we follow have no fixed attitudes or goals.
For example Harvey Bullock started the
season as a ‘bullish’, difficult man. He was never willing to
make an effort when he didn’t have to and viewed women as objects
to entertain him. Over time we learnt about his past and several of
his demons were laid to rest. His womanising was even tackled when he
was shown to have feelings for the girl in the phobia group. All of
that however is gone again this week; he is back to his lazy, girl
hunting ways with no apparent reason given.
This episode particularly suffers from
these continuity problems as attempts are made to push the characters
into new places, with no memory of who those characters were, where
their boundaries should currently be as a character. It’s a shame
because these issues undermine a generally very well written script.
Fish Mooney’s adventures on the
island are reasonably interesting this week for example. Fish keeps
playing with various factions on the island, taking ever larger
chances. This eventually leads to a brilliant and malice filled
confrontation with Dollmaker in his office.
The character of Fish Mooney seems to
have been watered down and made more caring. This would be an issue
for any character but it is terrible for the character of Fish
Mooney. She had been established previously as somebody who was
willing to do anything she had to do to achieve her goals. Mooney’s
willingness to sacrifice anything and anybody made her very engaging,
it made us wonder what had made her this way.
Now we have a Fish who looks after the
needy and puts herself second. It’s possible that we are meant to
believe that her experience on the island has changed her for the
better but this seems very out of character for somebody that has an
implied, horribly dark past. A past that was horrible enough to make
her devote the majority of it to her own preservation. Hopefully this
is just a temporary blip but I suspect that ‘Gotham’ has still
not realised that a character doesn’t have to be friendly to be
sympathetic.
Weirdly the opposite issue turns up in
Bruce’s segments of the episode. Last week Reggie was established
to be a man who was desperate but not without some of his old honour,
he even attempted to talk the Wayne board out of hurting Bruce. This
week he is cartoonishly evil for no apparent reason. Well, spoiler
warning, it is for a reason. The reason is to make his murder at the
hands of Selina Kyle more acceptable. This is particularly bad as we
have already seen Selina kill somebody, at the start of the season
she left a corpse with its eyes gouged out in order to escape from
Dollmaker’s suppliers. This moment where she killed Reggie was
meant to be character defining but she was already established as
somebody who would kill to defend herself so this seems pointless. It
is interesting to show that Bruce was close to killing him and Selina
saved his soul, as it were, but making the man she kills irredeemable
first is lazy.
Thankfully Gordon’s storyline is very
strong this week, making up for many of the issues in the other
segments. The serial killer, known as ‘The Ogre’ is genuinely
threatening. The reason for this is entirely in how he is introduced.
We have seen most of the villains as cutaways during Jim’s
investigations. They may be a few steps ahead but they are constantly
being pursued. Rather interestingly, everything we see of the Ogre is
seen via flashback.
We follow him as he chooses his victim and lures
her into his lair to be kept imprisoned until he becomes bored of
her. We see events that cannot be avoided, giving them a considerable
weight. The fact that Gordon is months, not moments behind the Ogre
makes him seem considerably more dangerous, particularly as he preys
on the loved ones of those who try to investigate him.
The Ogre is played brilliantly by Milo
Ventimiglia, who previously played Peter Petrelli in ‘Heroes’. He
manages to bring the wholesome and kind parts of that character and
subvert them to make a genuinely chilling character. The moment where
he establishes that he is going to kill his most recent captive,
simply by saying “This isn’t working out, it’s not you, it’s
me” is horrific.
So despite some glaringly bad character
continuity issues, this episode still has a lot to praise about it.
The voyeuristic moments where we watch the Ogre would not have been
out of place in a show like ‘True Detective’ and it is nice to
see Gotham showing a darker side in in its storytelling. The
production on this episode is also noticeably strong with interesting
direction and editing throughout.
We are into the
home stretch of this season of ‘Gotham’ now. It’s distressing
to see that issues I complained about months ago continue to be as
bad as ever, it lowers my hopes that these issues will be fixed at
any point. That being said it is nice to see that the series is still
willing to take some creative chances. ‘Gotham’ may not yet be a
killer serial, but neither have I grown bored of it yet. Yet again I
remain interested to see what the next episode will bring.
No comments:
Post a Comment