Gotham, Season 2, Episode 9: A Bitter Pill to Swallow
With Theo Gallavan obtaining a righteous punch to the face, this episode focuses more on Tabitha Gallavan entering a nice, atmospheric assassin guild bar thing and hiring people to send and murder Jim Gordon. It's honestly just an excuse to have Gordon fight a bunch of awesome colourful characters like the old dude with kooky glasses in the beginning, and the Flamingo, an actual minor comic-book villain. Eduardo Flamingo is an insane cannibal with a funny skunk stripe and mustache, and the fight Gordon gets with Flamingo, all the while struggling with some cliched 'how far into the darkness to I get' character plotline, is well done. Cliched, but sorta solid, I guess, and we do need James Gordon to have actual character development, don't we?
And then Flamingo bites the Strike Force girl to death and holy shit that scene looked so sad and painful as the poor girl is just crying in pain as her blood pools around her, an unexpected gory scene considering how lacking of those scenes we've had in Gotham lately. And her death is handled far better than the other Strike Force members, with her actually having dialogue and scenes before, and the sad, sad irony that she died not during the big firefight against professional assassins, but in the precinct where a dozen other police officers are helpless to get Flamingo off of her.
Barnes didn't die despite being shot, which is awesome. We get a conversation between him and Gordon about crossing lines and shit and that's pretty great. The Lady is also pretty fun in her short scenes interacting with Flamingo and Tigress.
And at the end of the episode, the Order of Saint Dumas shows up, all ready to deliver some Assassin's Creed madness to Gotham City. I can't say I care much.
Riddler and Penguin steal the episode, though, with Nygma being utterly interesting now that he's come to deal with the fact that he's now a murderer... and absolutely enjoying it. However, Penguin, in between trying to reassert his dominance and just falling into a flunk, ends up talking to Nygma about how his mother had died, the only person in the world who cared about him had died... while Nygma points out that Penguin is now unburdened, with no weakness. They play off each other very well, with Penguin's primal rage and anguish being brought to the forefront while Nygma is a supportive but cold friend, asking Penguin all the right questions and causing Penguin to regain his anger and penchant for killing and Gotham-City-brand-madness. It's a nice, subtler change than just asking kiddie riddles, for Nygma to be introspective and actually stringing Penguin along and getting him to embrace his inner psychopath, despite being all introspective and talking about how killing doesn't pay before. Nygma singing and playing the piano is definitely hilarious, too. It's a nice, deep series of scenes.
Overall a pretty standard episode, with a fair amount of nice introspective moments for Gordon, Penguin and Nygma, though really one that still lacks impact and punch thanks to the odd pacing and focus. It still shows that Gotham is a better show than the joke that I sometimes consider it to be, though. The plot's shaping up to have Gallavan and Penguin both make their comeback, and it's shaping up to be pretty interesting.
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