Gotham S01E02 – Review

By: Bruno Heller (story)

The Story: Better to be starving on the streets than subject yourself to Gotham’s institutions.

The Review: Apologies for the lateness, but to be perfectly honest with you, I really wasn’t feeling it. That’s a terrible reason to shirk on responsibilities, even self-imposed ones, but it’s the truth. Gotham isn’t such a bad show, really, but it’s like a child torn between two wildly different, equally demanding parents. The mother who gave it life is the Batman mythos, with all its colorful, outlandish characters; the father is your typical urban drama, sternly trying to push its child into its footsteps.

Gotham tries its best to please both parties, but ultimately, underneath the straight-laced trappings is a flamboyant show trying to come out. It’s painfully clear in a lot of ways, but most revealingly in the show’s obvious love for Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney, a character Alan Sepinwall correctly describes in the spirit of Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman on the original Batman. Smith makes no attempt at subtlety; she commits to Mooney’s purring, cajoling, scowling, yowling ways with such conviction, she makes it work, just barely and only most of the time. Still, that’s a pretty successful approach, one that perhaps should be applied to the show as a whole.

This episode practically brings it there already, what with two supposed social workers running around the city, dressed like a matron and warden from a Depression-era orphanage, and acting like the sadistic cousins of Annie‘s Ms. Hannigan. These are people who lure homeless children into vans to be either experimented upon, trafficked, or shot, grinning and high-fiving all the way. They are the campiest of Golden/Silver Age villains, but with no costumed vigilante to take them down.

But they’re only a microcosm of a world that veers increasingly further away from reality. I don’t know if Batman comics are just better at capturing Gotham’s deep-rooted corruption or whether they’ve done so for so long that now you just take it for granted without any selling necessary. All I know is on TV, the city’s pervasive horribleness keeps you constantly aware of how outrageous this world really is. It’s not just Harvey screaming when James stops him from beating a homeless teenager, “I wasn’t gonna beat him, I was just gonna scare him, but if I did want to beat him, I could—it would be my prerogative.” It’s the first responder who’d rather check out the restaurant paying him under the table for an extra lookout rather than secure a murder site. It’s Captain Sarah Essen protesting that she can’t force James to break the law, “but this is Gotham.” It’s a city in which the people aren’t just brutal, selfish, and careless, but who also freely proclaim it without bothering to justify themselves.

This would all be okay if the show made an effort to explore the root causes of all this dysfunction, but that would require spending more time with the common folk of Gotham, and there are Bat-icons to think of. The ten minutes that could be devoted to fleshing out Harvey’s occasional attempts to bully the GCPD with media leaks, or the family needs that drive the first responder’s negligence, or Essen’s pressures as captain, are instead given to Oswald Cobblepot to squander in a series of pointless murders. The show cares about homeless kids only insofar as they provide a sympathetic objective for James and Harvey, but not enough to figure out how they became homeless in the first place. Once saved, they’re shunted “up-state,” which Selina Kyle refers to with fear and loathing. They no longer figure on anyone’s radar, not even James’.

Speaking of Selina, I have to echo the sentiments of most reviewers that it’s sort of ridiculous that the episode is named after her, but she doesn’t utter a line until two-thirds of the way in. Personality-wise, she’s quick-thinking and smart-mouthed, but we don’t come away with a particularly strong opinion of her, which is a waste for an episode ostensibly featuring her. And if Gotham treats its big-name characters this way, how can it be trusted to treat the others any better?

Conclusion: Entertaining and credible in parts, but rarely at the same time.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – I should mention, as a dependency specialist, this entire episode made me cringe and angry at the utter lack of anything resembling a modern-day child welfare agency. People are using cell phones in the show; they’re not living in the seventies here.

– I admire Barbara for tipping off the media about the whole homeless kid abduction thing, but she could’ve just left the cops out of it, if only to spare James from suspicion for the leak. How about, “I know the kid who’s seen it happen; the police have him,” and let the journalists do the math?