Gotham, Season 2, Episode 16: Prisoners
This episode is a bit of a focused episode, showing Jim Gordon's life in prison, how he was at his lowest point and ended up being reinvigorated to seek justice and whatnot. Meanwhile, Oswald continues to deal with his bizarre and surreal sub-plot with a weird gothic family with all the blatantly-obvious evil stepmother tropes.
It's a good episode, if one whose plot and developments could be seen from a mile away. It puts its focus solely on Jim Gordon for the majority of the episode, with short cutaways to Oswald's family drama and Bullock's attempts to help his buddy out. We don't see anything from Arkham (despite the Barbara cliffhanger last episode), we don't see Bruce, Selina or Alfred.
I think it addresses one of the biggest problems about Gotham in these late episodes... really, Jim Gordon himself. No beef with the actor, and I definitely loved the character in the comics, but him killing Theo Gallavan in cold blood instead of bringing Gallavan to trial or at the worst letting someone like Oswald or Bullock do it... has made his character relatively controversial. I mean, I would kill Theo Gallavan -- he was a very effectively-written villain in making us hate him -- but this is Jim Gordon, and he's supposed to be better than that. And as a result, knowing that our hero was actually hiding from the murder of Gallavan and blatantly lying to everyone's faces kind of makes it hard to sympathize with him. Yeah, he's in prison for the wrong murder, but, y'know, he did murder people in a way that's not accountable to the system.
Seeing Gordon getting bullied by prisoners, humbled by being in a prison and transferred to the 'World's End' wing, and having to deal with a warden that's exacting revenge on behalf of ex-commissioner Loeb (a nice little continuity nod there) aren't anything special. But having Bullock come in, and drop the utter bombshell to Gordon that Lee had a miscarriage? Man, you can't not feel bad for Gordon at that point.
(Thankfully, in real life, Lee's actress, who was pregnant was simply taking a maternity leave at that point of the show)
And he becomes a cynic and gets to see this random kid Puck who tries to save him from getting beaten up, and ends up dying of wounds inflicted by other prisoners for standing up for Gordon. Puck is... a pretty blatant plot device that came out of nowhere simply to get Gordon to fight against injustice once more, and I suppose he didn't annoy me quite as much as these characters tend to do... although having him tell Gordon that he's a hero like every second line out of his mouth seems to be a bit too blatant in telling us that Jim Gordon is awesome and you should love him. Which considering his morally ambiguous choices in the final episodes of the Gallavan arc, is kinda iffy for many people at the moment.
Getting Gordon out of Blackgate is just a manner of Bullock calling in all the stops -- a welcome cameo from Carmine Falcone, who set up a bunch of random nameless dudes to help fake Jim Gordon's death and subsequent escape. Puck dies, but no one cares about Puck.
Oh, let's talk about Oswald. I still find it absolutely bizarre that the show lobs him into this utterly baffling subplot of being stuck in this wacky story where he has turned into a submissive yes-man, and he meets his equally crazy biological father. Oh, and Oswald's stepmother and stepsiblings want to kill his father and get those tasty inheritance money. It came out of nowhere and is just utterly random, and really only the strength of Elijah and Oswald's actors really made me not skip these scenes entirely. They're good scenes, twistedly heartwarming like something out of a Tim Burton movie, but it's just weird seeing this in a Gotham episode. Ultimately, though, we don't linger on this for a long time as after mistaking Oswald as someone who will inherit all of Elijah Van Dahl's money Elijah himself is kind of an asshole for apparently planning to give everything to the biological son he knew for like a week instead of to his wife and stepchildren who he knew forever; murder attempts notwithstanding.
Anyway, after an attempt to (hilariously) seduce Oswald, they tried to poison him. Except Elijah drank the poison instead, after a series of heartwarming moments with Oswald. And presumably his nice father's death will spur Oswald back into villainy. It's a bizarre way to get Oswald back into the path of evil, and far more unnecessary since, y'know, bringing him to Arkham to get humbled by Hugo Strange ended up not accomplishing anything at all. But we'll see.
It's a strange episode. There really isn't anything bad in this episode that I could bash and rant on for hours, but it's just weird since everything that happens here is just them trying to backtrack from the oddly random plot developments they just threw at us an episode or two ago, and it's just... I dunno. It's just not very exciting, I suppose, with a lot of what happening in this episode being things that aren't exactly new and fresh.
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