Scared Straight.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
"The Fear Reaper" pitted Jim Gordon against a rampaging Scarecrow as part of an unofficial bet between Gotham's top cop and Penguin over whether or not Jim could catch young Johnny Crane in 24 hours. All of it a part of Oswald's public plan to discredit the GCPD and save face in light of his embarrassment at the Iceberg Lounge opening.
What came of all this, aside from Jim heading into the belly of the beast solo and besting Crane and a dozen frenzied inmates, was a deeper analysis of the GCPD itself. After three seasons of abusing the city's police department (and its one solitary precinct), and giving the denizens of Gotham massive Batman-scale crises to contend with, the show is finally taking stock of just how feeble the cops are (or, how feeble they've been written to be). It's one of those meta-methods of course correction in which a show's ongoing flaw is turned into a storyline - similar to why so much of Batman v Superman had to directly deal with the amount of casualties created by Superman's battle with Zod.
Sure, it's satisfying to hear Penguin openly address how many times the GCPD has been made a fool of, or even how many times their own station house has been turned into a blood-soaked war zone (hey - one of my pet peeves!), but it's also a bummer when a show has to send so much side-eye to its own past arcs and angles. I'm all for a series attempting to smooth out its wrinkles but sometimes when the issues have persisted for too long there's no going back.
We can dig into the GCPD now and focus in on how much the cops don't feel like they make a difference (since crime escalates to ridiculous degrees in Gotham even without Batman - whose usually supposed to inspire all the heightened super-baddies) but there's still no element to the police on this show that feels real. Yes, I get that Gotham isn't aiming to be realistic, but there still needs to be some semblance of rules. You can't just pick and choose or it makes for a sloppy narrative. Harvey, who became captain because he just sat in the chair first, I assume, actually let Jim go battle a psycho on his own because he didn't want to lose the faith of his men who, basically, are rotten and disloyal. So much so that they refuse basic orders. Or, you know, beat Jim to a pulp in the locker room.
When Jim screamed out that none of them were fit to wear the badge, he was right. So you have to wonder what's left saving of the department as it is? Who among these cops is worth going to bat for?
If you flip it around though...look who's telling everyone they're not fit to be cops? The worst cop in the entire city. Yes, Jim Gordon is an action hero and the show's go-to guy for fist fights and shoot outs, but he's also a murderer. The best thing the show ever did with him was have him resign and drink himself into a stupor. I'm all for redemptive paths, but let's not turn him into such a hypocrite, okay? He can't expect everyone to be a crusading supercop like he is just because, now, that's who he's decided to be.
I'll wrap this part up by just saying that it's a shame when a show has to steer directly into a storm that it created itself. The GCPD being a total s***show is the story now because, for years, the show needed to abuse and under-serve its heroes for the sake of a glossy gallery of ghoulish villains. We'll have to see how it all shakes out, but there's a good chance that nothing can be salvaged here. It's been too long. Other attempts to fix missteps - like Ivy transforming herself from a dunce to something more diabolical via secret shaman serums (or something something elixirs) - are more forgivable. To be fair though, this is Ivy's second big reboot. Let's hope it sticks.
Barbara being back (with a new do and a yearn to make amends) isn't a huge surprise, given the show, though it is a little sad to see last season's finale lower its official kill count. Obviously, and I'm glad this was brought up right away when Penguin confronted her, someone brought her back to life and is funding her new weapons venture. We don't know why yet - why someone would resurrect a person just so that they could become a shifty arms dealer - but the show made a point of it being a mystery so let's hope there's a decent payoff. Is it someone we've never met or is this how the series brings back Butch as Solomon Grundy?
The Scarecrow stuff was okay. Watching a fledgling, screaming Scarecrow isn't the best -- nor is watching Jim trip out again (the fear toxin is still too adjacent to the Tetch blood and the "Red Queen" hallucinogen Jim got hit with last season) -- but it was serviceable as the action element this week. The Crane character was fine, nothing special, but the predicament that Jim was in, alone in the asylum, should have felt more dangerous than it did. It seemed like he maneuvered his way through the obstacles too conveniently. Undercutting the danger too was Harvey's entire attitude that it was nothing Jim couldn't handle as a one-man wrecking crew. Also, Jim beat the fear toxin because he was able to, inexplicably, snap himself out of it. I'm just going to attribute that to Jim being slightly immune due to how many times he's been infected with things.
Now, I'm not going to join in on all the "gimp" jokes being made regarding Bruce's proto-Batman suit ("gimp" referring to what people sometimes call rubber S&M bodysuits, thanks to Pulp Fiction), but it sure was a sight to behold. From a far. Where it looked like a rubber S&M bodysuit. Again, I'm not against Bruce suiting up this early, complete with Lucius Fox's help with the bulletproof-ness of it all (they even borrowed Bruce's outdoorsman excuses ala Batman Begins - though here it was rock climbing), but this is some serious on-the-job training.
As I mentioned last week: You just kind of have to put Batman out of your mind completely here since everything that's usually done within the context of Batman - from widespread city chaos to Year One-style apprenticing - is currently being done without him. By the time Batman rolls around, there'll be nothing left. So you just have to see Bruce's journey as him becoming...something else. This currently storyline comes with the tagline "A Dark Knight," signaling that, truly, these are Bruce's final steps toward becoming an effective crime deterrent. The final piece will come, assumedly, when he chooses a symbol to represent himself.
Final question here: Why would Falcone hate what Penguin is doing? Or why would Jim and Harvey assume he'd hate it? I know the show needs Jim to get some more guys backing him, but what would Falcone resent about Oswald's plan to license crime? I know it'll probably get answered next week, but I'm just genuinely curious because I couldn't think of a solid knowable reason off the top of my head.
The Verdict
While Scarecrow screamed, swung his scythe, and sprayed lunatics with fear toxin, this episode honed in some more on the GCPD's current crisis of conscience. It's an interesting journey to take but also one that smacks of the shows past sins regarding a poorly-manned (and conceived) police force - with Jim Gordon now trying to be the guiding light.
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