Gotham S03E13 Review: Return of the Joker

Gotham, Season 3, Episode 13: Smile Like You Mean It

I have to admit that the initial teaser pictures for this episode soured me so much from watching it, mostly it features the "cut off my own face and then wear it like a mask" version of the Joker from New 52, which, while I try to not let myself be a raging purist when it comes to reinvention of characters... it's something that absolutely sickens me. Yes, the Joker is a psychopath, but he always has this absolutely great balance between being a sick psychopath and being entertainingly funny. Poison an entire city? That's just an evil thing to do. Poison an entire city to blackmail the mayor to give him trademark for laughing fish? That's funny. In the words of Jerome himself, New 52 Ultra-Psycho Joker just 'has no class'. He's turned into your run-of-the-mill psychotic killer that doesn't have the same hilarious charisma as what the Joker should be.

But Gotham, against all odds, actually made the cut-off-face thing come off as an unsettling thing, combine it with this spiritual adaptation of Batman Beyond's Jokerz gang, and still bring Jerome back. While watching this episode I totally bought the idea that Jerome wasn't coming back, and that we're going to have Dwight wear Jerome's face as one in a presumably rotating lineup of Jokers. It was actually a nice bit of subversion when the mad scientist set-up, despite the foreshadowing from last episode, didn't manage to bring Jerome back. But bring him back he did. 

Don't get me wrong, Dwight was absolutely entertaining, played by a pretty awesome actor who tries his best to rouse the army of Joker fanatics, but as both Jim Gordon and Jerome himself points out, all Dwight is doing is aping what Jerome did in the past, only managing to get along because the Jerome fanatics all bought in "we are all Jerome" spiel. Jerome himself comes back in the second act, and absolutely returns to form even without a face, channeling that glorious Mark Hamill/Heath Ledger Joker hybrid interpretation, with that conversation with Leslie being the highlight of the episode. Jerome absolutely steals the show from Dwight (quite literally), kidnapping him, blowing him and the power plant up on television, with a far more effective message than Dwight's longer one earlier in the episode -- in the darkness, unleash who you really are. And Jerome makes good on his promise by actually blowing up the power plant and plunging the city of Gotham into darkness. That was a wonderful bit of villainy. 

The slicing-off-the-face thing actually felt well-integrated in this, too, being a crazy act that a desperate wannabe like Dwight would do when he realized that after gathering so many Jerome fanatics, he couldn't deliver in time... and it serves to give Jerome that New 52 look without making the Joker-in-all-but-name feel crass. The Joker Cult is also handled really well, and showing that the cult has so many psychopaths hiding in society -- the guard in the beginning, officer Dove in GCPD -- pretending to be normal until they are confronted and they reveal their true starking mad nature.

The rest of the storylines here are pretty weak, so much that I get pissed off any time we cut away from the Jerome/Dwight plot. Jim and Leslie have this argument about how Leslie doesn't want to be bound and protected by Gordon any longer, which is just annoyingly repetitive. The Bruce and Selina plotline is also weak because Maria Kyle turned out to be nothing but a scam artist working with DoucheDude to scam some money from Bruce, and he knows it but goes along with the hopes that Selina will reconnect with her mother anyway. It's actually not super-bad, it just doesn't quite hit with the same emotional impact considering Selina's mother literally came out of nowhere. Oswald's disgraced in public, and while we get a nice return to the mafia genre with Barbara, Tabitha and Nygma pulling all sorts of strings to get various colourfully-named members of Penguin's organization dead should be fun, but really felt mechanical and nowhere as interesting as literally everything else that's happening in this episode. Hopefully Jerome's blackout will throw a huge monkey wrench in, well, all these bland plotlines to inject some fun into them. 

Overall, a very, very good police-vs-Jerome episode, but it falls short in all other aspects.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• I think I covered a lot of the Joker stuff in the review proper, didn't I?
• Speaking of the Joker, while no one refers to either Jerome or Dwight as the Joker, the beginning scene has people playing cards with one of them noting "Joker's wild", and the scene after the Jerome-cult guard stabs the other guard shows the blood splattering on the iconic Joker card featured in various live-action adaptations that feature the Joker.
• Dwight's actor is David Dastmalchian, and he played another psychotic Joker henchman in 2008's The Dark Knight.
• Riddler claims to be held in Kane Chemicals. Kane can refer to two things -- Bob Kane, real-life creator of Batman; or the Kane family, a member of which is Katherine Kane, a.k.a. Batwoman.
• Bullock's comment about how the graffiti has been here the whole time and they haven't noticing is actually accurate -- since season two, HA HA HA and smiley-face graffiti has been in the background of many scenes set in the streets.