Gotham 1.06 “Spirit of the Goat”

This time around, Gotham takes a bit of a detour from the current open plotlines, to showcase Detective Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue), a character that up till now had been a favorite, though the traits of him that we had been shown were always the same – crooked, mobster-friendly, never playing by the book – which could lead viewers to see him as a two-dimensional character, with no different stories to tell, or no baggage to explore.

Well, in this adaptation, Bullock has a lot of baggage, and he is not the two-dimensional character we thought he was. He is a man troubled by the mistakes of his past, and haunted by the error he committed when fighting the so-called Spirit of the Goat, who seemed like another Gotham lunatic, ten years ago.

To the disbelief of Detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), we are privy to Bullock’s more human side, and how he still tries to make up for the one great failure which cost his former partner his legs and his career in the GCPD. The episode, though it may approach it in a different way than in previous, still has the underlying theme of the common people wanting to fight corruption by their own — usually violent — means.

Before, we had the Balloonman’s or the Viper killer’s vendettas, and now the desire to cleanse Gotham from the rich and the corrupt comes in the form of a creepy guy dressed like a goat, who, as with most DC characters, is a legacy character; as he comes back to haunt Gotham’s wealthiest first-borns after ten years of absence. Having an upper-class psychotherapist being the true creator and mastermind of both Spirit of the Goats was an unexpected twist, which in turn helped to bring all the killings and the rituals down to a very earthly desire for revenge.

The other part of the episode surrounded two of the show’s most developed characters, the always-perfect Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor) – who reunites with his oh-so-weird mommy (Carol Kane) to give us some freaky but memorable scenes – and Jim Gordon’s fall from grace.

Poor Gordon is desperately trying to take another step towards making Barbara (Erin Richards) understand that he can’t be completely honest with her for her own safety, in a scene that still feels repetitive – it keeps going back and forth with these two, though I hope that what happens on the final cliffhanger will clear the air between them — and at the same time Gordon has to worry about Detectives Renee Montoya (Victoria Cartagena) and Crispus Allen (Andrew Stewart-Jones) trying to put him in jail for the supposed murder of Oswald Cobblepot.

Actually, this thread, which had been present since the pilot, comes to a head at the very ending, and it will be very interesting to see how things go for Gordon now that everybody in Gotham knows that he was never part of “the Program.”

Finally, we get another look at how little Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) has transformed his obsession about finding his parents’ true killer into a great investigation, with files, reports and lots of pictures on his big board; much like that of any police detective. This great investigation is not only about the Waynes, but has a much wider objective – understanding how Gotham works and how each important person is tied to the rest.

If this goes on until the end of the season, it may actually be little Bruce and not Jim Gordon who finds out why his parents were killed on that alley.

I’m looking forward to the next episode, as I am anxious to see what the Penguin’s next move is.

Man, that slick devil always has something up his sleeve!