Gotham S03E03 Review: Mad Hatter

Gotham, Season 3, Episode 3: Look into my Eyes

Well, that was an entertaining bit of television, but honestly nothing overly special. As a Batman fan, the little new reimagination of Mad Hatter was a fun bit, but other than that this is a wholly average episode of Gotham. It's not outright bad, but it's honestly not that great either. It seemed to be treading a lot of the same ground that Gotham skirted around through its two previous seasons, but there's a bit more focus to the two or three central plots due to trimming off the excess fat of various unimportant characters, most notably Fish, who I'm absolutely glad to see missing. A lot of the minor characters like Bullock, Barnes, Barbara, Butch and Tabitha get only minimal screentime, a line or two when the location is convenient.

There's a bit of a groan-worthy moment with the Bruce Wayne plotline, where they discover that Clone Bruce Wayne (a.k.a. "Five") is actually not an evil little gremlin trying to kill Bruce Wayne and take over his place, but just a confused little boy created in a lab who doesn't really know what the fuck is going on. Also has more strength than he should. Alfred reacts the same way I would in that situation -- alternating between outrage and barely-disguised confusion and disgust -- but Bruce is all nice and emphatic, though apparently Five, after witnessing a confrontation between Bruce and Selina (who's hunting the missing Ivy) ends up cutting off all her hair and stealing Bruce's Rolls Royce to try and pick up and impress Selina. It's definitely the low point in this episode, and honestly after the novelty that the clone is actually nice, I honestly don't quite care that much about this part of the plot.

Penguin announces his candidacy for Mayor by calling out the fact that Aubrey James is a useless shit, and basically pulls a Batman Returns by pointing out that he's the only one who's really stepping up to take charge when Fish and her army, or when Gallavan and his army, assaulted Gordon. There's a bit of a hilarious moment when Penguin shows off how much more prepared he is compared to James by having the entire restaurant filled with his people when James only hid three gunmen. Oh, and Penguin intimidate-frees Riddler out of jail so they can be mayor buddies. It's fun, hammy business for these two and honestly it's again testament to Oswald's actor that he's consistently far more fun that literally the rest of the cast put together, even in plotlines that don't particularly make sense like the previous season's insane family plot.

Gordon also meets up with Leslie, who's engaged, and they kind of go with the whole 'I'm happy for you' thing. Leslie is engaged to a nice doctor, one Mario, who meets Gordon and have a friendly exchange in the ER. And it turns out that Mario's father is Carmine Falcone! Who is an absolutely welcome return to the show. I'm not sure if Falcone is actually building a nice, honest life for his son, which I totally buy because Falcone is a criminal with class, but we'll see how this factors in with the whole Court of Owls/Fish's metahuman army/Mayor Penguin/Evil Bruce Wayne Clone mega plot.

The bulk of the plot ties in Gordon's bounty hunting job with the Indian Hill escapees thing. Despite the Mad Hatter cameo reference last season, it appears that Jervis "Mad Hatter" Tetch isn't affiliated with Indian Hill. He's introduced to us as this hypercompetent hypnotist (a nice take on his comics version's mind-control hats) who tells Barbara that he can only make people do what they want to do, though he then proceeds to drop subliminal hints and then rob a random rich couple by telling the husband to kill the wife and then kill himself... pretty sure that they don't exactly want to do that. There's also a hilarious moment in Jervis's show where he hypnotizes Barbara into 'loving' him, and gets met almost immediately with Barbara's intense reaction to being rejected.

Jervis hires Gordon to find his sister Alice, who's apparently an inmate in Indian Hill. Gordon manages to find Alice, but we see that she has superpowers. Her blood turns people into rage-zombie things and she's at least aware of this to know how to deal with the jackass rapey landlord. Alice is also apparently deathly afraid of Jervis. Considering how in the comics Mad Hatter's obsession with "Alice" is him trying to marry a blonde girl named Alice, it's pretty unsettling to hear Mad Hatter going "I love you, Alice!", regardless if they're going for an incest subtext or not (they don't seem to be). Even without that brother complex thing, Mad Hatter's hypnotism offers a crapton of cool scary moments, especially how the can turn from cheerful soft-spoken magician to... soft-spoken sadist who gets Gordon to try and throw himself off of a building a moment later.

It's a nice reinventation that still keeps the character's core gimmick, just cutting out the more whimsical hypnotic hat and Alice in Wonderland obsession, though those obviously can still come into play later. So yeah, it's a pretty decent little 'filler' episode with a villain of the week and progressing the side-plots forward, so there's that, at least.


DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Mad Hatter, a.k.a. Jervis Tetch, is among Batman's classic roster of supervillains, albeit never really reaching the same level of prominence as the likes of Joker or Penguin. He's obsessed with both hats and the works of Lewis Carroll, and the degree of his obsession towards the former or the latter varied depending on the time that the story was written. His modern power set generally revolves around hats embedded with mind control circuits as well as a gang of Wonderland-themed enforcers. Later stories that revealed his origin generally involved a childhood sweetheart named Alice who rebuffed (or didn't notice) his advances, and as the years went on his schemes generally involved kidnapping women to have them act the role of 'Alice' to his Mad Hatter.
• Mario Falcone is one of Carmine Falcone's three children in the comics, though in the comics Mario is a full-fledged lieutenant of Falcone's crime family, and it was the youngest son Alfredo that was kept out of family business and sent to study abroad. Alfredo is a lot less nice than show!Mario, though, so this incarnation of Mario Falcone seemed to be mostly his own character.
• Penguin running for mayor, of course, is the plot from Batman Returns.