By: John Stephens (story)
The Story: And now for the less popular inflatable-themed song, “One White Weather Balloon.”
The Review: Last week, I described Gotham as a campy extravaganza closeted in straight-laced trappings. This week, it is more than halfway out, proving that its lineage runs truer to Adam West’s Batman than the Nolan films. At the best of times, the city’s a loony bin that requires a little charity to support its existence. But Gotham pushes your suspension of disbelief too hard when it creates a masked vigilante who punishes the corrupt by making them float away on weather balloons.
It’s funny just writing it out, but watching it in the cold open—the vigilante in a plastic pig mask tying the balloon onto a crooked financier’s wrist, then watching as the businessman floats slowly away, screaming at an increasingly distant volume, “Helllp meee!“—well, it’s pretty hilarious, in a I can’t believe I’m watching this sort of way.* It’s like Gotham jumped the shark in its third episode, and it sets a cartoonish tone that no amount of melodrama can move past.
The fairest way to read into this is the show exists in its own fantasy land, which must be accepted on its own terms. Even for a heightened reality, though, Gotham demands a bit much. It expects you to believe in a world where prostitutes brazenly walk the streets in broad daylight, where there’s a mugging a minute (literally, there are two open thefts within a minute of Oswald’s return to the city), where people use cell phones and computers yet the TVs and news anchors look like they’ve been transplanted from the sixties.
It’s not impossible to accept this world. Pushing Daisies forced you to do the same every week, too. The difference is Pushing Daisies recognized the silliness of its reality and had a ready wink even in its most serious moments, whereas the characters of Gotham have to act oblivious to it all. Despite the absolute absurdity of the scenario, James has to treat it with the same grim aspect as the Wayne murders, with zero help from anyone around him (besides Barbara’s sympathetic pep talks). While James tries to get some actual detective work done, Harvey meets every single one of his reasonable points with flabbergasted vitriol—as if he can’t believe anyone would want to solve a case in a logical fashion—while Captain Essen repeats helplessly, “This is Gotham!”
As Gotham leans harder and harder into its ridiculous elements—Oswald and Fish abandon all pretense of normalcy in their performances here—it’s hard for a comic book fan not to observe that it didn’t have to be this way. The show could have actually committed to the procedural it was supposed to half-be by taking a page out of Gotham Central and developing a working partnership between James, Renee, and Crispus, about the only other sane people in this crazy town. Instead, the show turns Renee into a petty shrew, overthrowing best police practices in her eagerness to stain James and hopefully get another bite at Barbara’s apple-bottom.
Conclusion: I have no interest in a show that seems so ignorant of its own bizarreness and whose endgame is already set in stone. Dropped.
Grade: C-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * And this is all before he comes back down later in the episode, landing and killing a woman walking her dog. Seriously. It’s like watching a MADTV sketch.
Grade
Conclusion