Gotham, Season 3, Episode 5: Anything For You
Is it February already? Because last week's episode of Gotham was almost entirely devoted to characters vying for affection. If not the romantic kind like Gordon/Valerie, Leslie/Gordon, Butch/Tabitha, Bruce/Selina, then it's Butch and Riddler vying for Penguin's "love" as his favourite henchman. There's definitely a bit of obvious shipping thrown our way, especially on the Penguin-Riddler front. And for the most part? It's actually enjoyable, hilarious, fluff.
The main plot centers around an attempted assassination plot on Penguin by the Red Hood Gang -- a nice callback to the little piece of Batman's lore from Gotham's earlier seasons -- and Penguin going on a huge warpath on the bastards that shot up the statue of his saintly mother. Butch is revealed to hire the Red Hood Gang to shoot things up so Butch can play the hero and slay the Red Hoods, while Riddler finds something suspicious and uses his own riddling and detective skills to figure out that Butch did it. Then it's a fun game of blackmailing each other and threatening each other for them to look heroic in front of Penguin, and it's honestly just an insane series of scenes that I can't help but really, really enjoy myself in a way that Gotham has never done for me before. The fact that you're never sure if Riddler was being super-faithful to Penguin or just being your typical villain and planning to take over Penguin's place is also a very fun point that makes this plotline really fun.
I really expected Butch to die in this one (the show hasn't made him interesting at all since the Gallavan arc, asides from the one bazooka scene) thanks to Riddler's machinations, but Tabitha became relevant as well and apparently heads off to rescue his man. I've never liked Tabitha at all since season two, and I don't care about her at all, but Butch was fun in this episode. Really fun.
Yeah, some of the other extant plotlines happen. Barnes is struggling with the Alice blood and apparently goes all Mr. Hyde near the end of the episode. Mad Hatter is being fucking creepy, dressing a random girl as Alice and killing her. Ivy shows up to remind us that she exists. Leslie's engaged to Mario Falcone, and blabs about this to Riddler. But the main part of the episode?
Romance.
From Butch forcing himself to pretend to try and kill Penguin so Tabitha won't be hurt, to Tabitha going off to rescue Butch, to Bruce finally confessing his feelings in typical awkward manner to Selina ("I'm confused." "Good."), to Gordon barging in on Valerie seemingly using her womanly wiles to get information for the Jervis Tetch story, to Leslie seemingly baiting Gordon for a reaction regarding the whole engagement thing (huh?)... yeah, how can you not see Penguin and Riddler's not-kiss embrace as anything but meant to be romantic? The only real reason is that Penguin has been mostly asexual throughout the series, being far more obsessed with either getting power or being a good mommy's boy, but his talks about finding someone to share his victories in and the shocked and overwhelmed face he has when he hugs Riddler... I'm not sure what I think of this sudden change, but damn if it isn't entertaining.
I dunno. It's a pretty solid episode, and while probably not one of the best to have come out of this show, it's one of the most fun.
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