Now this is the way you start a season! After a powerful season opener, with an Arkham breakout and the lead character terribly compromising his principles and, hell, even killing a man, just to even the odds a little at the GCPD, Bruno Heller and the writing crew could have relaxed and gone the introspective, slow character build-up route.
But no, they didn’t! Instead, Gotham delighted us with a great episode, maybe one of the best so far, in that it depicted at perfection an essential part that makes Bruce Wayne crazy to become Batman and go out every night on patrol.
Maniacs, that’s what.
Sure, we have had our share of them on the first season, but that was just building to this. Here, there are no kids gloves, and you can throw seven shipyard workers off the roof of the Gotham Gazette to spell the word “Maniax!” or pour gasoline all over a bunch of frightened, innocent cheerleaders…just for fun, and just for the sake of creating chaos all over Gotham.
Just because you can. Just to show that you are crazy and that the crazies are running the show now.
That craziness is Batman’s world day in and day out, and it was wonderfully portrayed in this episode, continuing with the tone that had already been set with the opening salvo.
All the hype about this season being the “Rise of the Villains” could have been just that if the characters and situations had not been so cleverly played out. So, up until now, and especially after this maniacal episode, there’s one thing for sure. Gotham is aiming big, not caring about Bruce being just a teen, or playing with the characters’ lives and tweaking them here and there as they see fit, as long as it serves the overall arc of the series. And that makes for a great ride!
Jerome (Cameron Monaghan) gives another amazing performance, this time even scarier than the previous ones. His unique way of proving that he should be the leader of the villain rag tag team is crazy, and yet so perfectly portrayed. He doesn’t waste any of his scenes to show the demented attitude that will surely be his trademark, and the over the top bloody violence he and his pals display when taking out the whole GCPD is probably one of the best sequences of the whole episode.
On the other hand, poor Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) takes a brutal beating, after falling for the “easiest of them all” ploys: Barbara Kean (Erin Richards) showing up at the precinct and then disappearing into dark alleys for him to follow. If he wasn’t the main character he would be dead, much like his only ally inside the GCPD, Commissioner Essen (Zabryna Guevara), whose death, courtesy of Jerome, is one of the coolest scenes, and marks the tone of the show, as only she believed in Gordon’s ways and a “clean” Gotham and GCPD.
Sure, the way we’ve got Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue) coming back to the fold (it had to happen sooner rather than later) gives just a little bit of hope, or let’s just call it more manpower, to fight the maniacs and whatever overarching plot Theo Galavan (James Frain) has got cooking.
I like this main baddy, as I said on my previous review, because he’s essentially an evil Bruce Wayne, and that makes for a very interesting premise: what if the Waynes used their power to control Gotham through terror instead of using it to build a better city?
The level of action has sped up a notch or two, and that is certainly welcome. There are still some clunky bits, like Gordon managing to rescue the school bus when we were expecting a huge explosion, but I guess it’s a way to keep the show 14+. Cheerleaders going boom would have been too much.
Meanwhile, on the Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) front, the story develops quite nicely, as we assist to a very in-character Alfred (Sean Pertwee) moment, where he decides to crash the secret computers Bruce’s dad had hidden in his cave beneath the Manor; which gets him fired, if only for Bruce to reconsider the terms of their agreement and ask him to come — back after they decide that Alfred will train Bruce so that he’s ready for dangerous situations. And the Kevlar vest they find in the cave suggests his father had to face similar dangers.
In the final part of it all, we get a few scenes between Lucius Fox (Chris Chalk), Alfred, and Bruce. It’s short but sweet, and we finally have the mechanics genius on board!
There’s lots of evil to come in Gotham, and I’m certainly not going to miss it! Are you?