Gotham, Season 3, Episode 9: The Executioner
So, yeah, Gordon's back with the police force, and we jump straight into the confrontation between him and Barnes with no preamble. It's still a bit of an odd choice to make Barnes the villain of this post-Mad-Hatter arc, and then to wrap it up within two episodes, but I'm all for not dragging things out more than they should. And Gordon doesn't just confront his boss gone crazy, but also his past sin of killing Theodore Gallavan because it's the easier way out to deal with a villain with too many connections to take down lawfully.
Barnes calls Gordon out for his holier-than-thou attitude. Barnes has gone crazy, refusing to believe there's any gray left in the world. Either you're with him in this manic crusade against all evil, or you're part of the problem. As Barnes himself articulates, there's only black and white. And yes, Barnes is well-intentioned, because all in all he's killing bad guys... but there's a limit to how free of a Punisher/Judge Dredd type character you can be, and especially since Barnes is on the influence of what's basically a rage drug, he's not thinking clearly at all.
It's a pretty chilling scene, with perhaps the most effective scene being Barnes alone in a warehouse with three criminals who escaped the system, captured by him, as he monologues about how a murderer, a drug seller and a sexual abuser have avoided the law because of lack of evidence and all that jazz, and he calmly just monologues before kicking the chair from below them, hanging them execution-style. It's chilling and cold-blooded.
And it all boils down to a tense moment where Barnes brings Gordon along on a 'case', where it's unclear whether he has found out whether Gordon is investigating him or not. Bullock and Leslie manage to convince the rest of the police force that Barnes is infected with the Alice Tetch virus, which leads the police to congregate around the warehouse before Barnes's plan of 'join me or be framed for murder' comes through, and they eventually take the crazy Barnes down... and it's a bit sad that someone so obsessed with justice ends up such a sorry state, wrapped up in a straitjacket shouting GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY into the air.
The Barnes storyline was very enjoyable, but the rest of the episode... yeah, not so much.
Again, the Edward/Oswald love triangle soap opera is the weakest part of the episode, though that should hardly be a surprise. The fact that Isabella was such a weirdly perfect little plot device adds a huge layer of 'HUH?' to the proceedings, because her existing at all is such a huge question mark that I was thinking that she's a Court of Owls spy, or she's someone with a face-swap thanks to doctor Symon or the Dollmaker, or she's a metahuman shapeshifter sent by Fish... something that would actually be relevant. She's just dead now.
And while it's fun to see Edward actually investigate stuff in his own weird way, the fact that he discovered so many things -- that Isabella was murdered, that her brake lines were cut and all that jazz... and not realize that it was Oswald who's behind it all (Oswald's panicking whenever Edward gets close to the truth was never very subtle) is a bit irritating.
Poison Ivy, meanwhile, has became super-hot, yet still thinks like a little girl, which adds an extra layer of creepiness to her whole seduction factor. She makes it clear that the men around her gives her nothing in return because of her mind-altering plant perfumes (that... doesn't affect her? I mean, all that weird metahuman did was age her up, right? Where did the plant powers come from?) but she ends up biting off more than she can chew when her stealing a particularly pretty necklace ends up causing her and later Selina and Bruce to be the target of a bunch of persistent ninja assassins. It's a bit of a hilarious reveal from Ivy to Selina, but ultimately I just find myself kind of... not caring for this part of the storyline.
So yeah, the Barnes stuff was pretty cool. Everything else is somewhat entertaining, but not by much.
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