Clowns to the left of me, Jeromes to the right...
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
We jump back into Gotham's third season with a particularly silly episode in "Ghosts," which saw both Jim Gordon and Penguin targeted for take downs. For Jim, that meant dodging the (many wild, flailing) bullets of Zsasz and for Penguin it meant enduring "Stage 1" of his demise at the hands of Ed and company.
Sure, it was interesting to see Ed employ his proto Riddler-style mind games and chip away at Oswald's psyche by using Clayface to impersonate his dead dad (sort of a thankless cameo for Paul Reubens here) -- much in the same way he defeated Gordon last year -- but it all still rang rather empty because of how fake Isabella felt as a character. I swear, there's still part of me that thinks she was an Indian Hill creation.
Ed's rage toward Oswald feels unnerving because the show, basically, had to rush us through the "love of his life" in two episodes and in order to do that it had to make Isabella falsely fit into Ed's life like a lab creation designed to fill his every desire. But Gotham isn't a fan of nuance. It uses the broadest of soap opera shenanigans to move story, instead of serving character. Meaning, it will make people do huge "180"s based on one scene, or even one line of dialogue. It never takes much to make a character completely change their mind in a big arc-serving manner.
We saw that this week with Lee, who went from grieving hate-filled Mafia widow (which itself was a huge change of pace for her) back to Lee in the blink of an Arkham visit. Just because she saw how crazy Barnes was shouldn't mean that she stopped hating Jim. She should still have walked out of that cell thinking Jim murdered Mario when he didn't have to, as nothing was mentioned in "Ghosts" about the knife Mario was holding that fell in the water. Jim didn't even bring it up to try and defend himself. Likewise, Falcone shouldn't have called off the hit simply because Lee didn't want to go through with it anymore. If anything, him realizing that she still loved him (okay) should have made Falcone want Jim extra dead.
Granted, her wanting Jim flat-out murdered was an extreme out-of-characer stance in the first place, but "Ghosts" was a fairly haphazard chapter. I'm not even sure of the timeline here as we entered the episode with Mario's heavily attended funeral but the first scene we saw with Selena and her mom (Ivana Milicevic) was the first conversation the two of them apparently had since the last episode. So their story picked up right away while Jim's story happened days later.
Meanwhile, Zsasz -- who can be fun in a jovial psycho sort of way -- brought up how he never misses and then spent a bulk of the episode firing his machine gun at nothing and missing Gordon at every single opportunity. Even when he had the drop on him, he missed. I think a performance review is in order here.
It's rare that the "crime of the week" element overshadows the character stuff on Gotham, but this week gave us the Joker cult. Not only did it signal the return of Jerome, who looks to be back next week, but it also retroactively helped explain the odd Lori Petty detour back in Season 2's "The Ball of Mud and Meanness" when went inside the dance club that worshipped Jerome. Plus, the casting of David Dastmalchian as the cultist who's set on bringing Jerome back from his cryo-state was a fun nod to The Dark Knight where the actor had a brief-but-notable scene as one of Joker's mentally ill recruits.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at http://ift.tt/2aJ67FB.
The Verdict
"Ghosts" was a sort of a bust save for the rising threat of Jerome's return. Lee, even with all she'd recently been through, behaved in an extremely uncharacteristic manner throughout the bulk of this one, almost flipping switches as fast as Barbara did back in the second half of Season 1.
Editors' Choice
→
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire