Gotham, Season 4, Episode 8: Stop Hitting Yourself
(I found Mr. Murderface, who gets murdered by Grundy in the ring, far more hilarious than he had any right to be. Sorry.)
Yeah, I kind of got a bit behind on Gotham. So much shit going on in November, I'm sorry. I'll try to catch up. This is going to be a somewhat shorter review than normal.
So yeah. Basically the plotline of this episode revolves around Cherry's fight club, where basically everything kind of comes to a head. Nygma gets a bit too overconfident over his possession of basically Solomon Grundy as a sponsor, and gets to impersonating Penguin as part of the show (which is hilarious!), which in turn gets Penguin's feathers ruffled as he sends Barbara, Tabitha and Selina down to deal with it, in exchange for fucking up the Street Demonz biker gang. It's... a lot less interesting than it should be, considering how so many of the characters involved know each other -- Barbara and Lee have a standoff. Tabitha and Grundy-Butch have a standoff. Everyone gets their turn to whack Nygma. Firefly shows up, and completely forgets she's buddies with Selina. Sure, the fight scene between Tabitha and Grundy is somewhat exciting, but everything is treated with such a clinical tone to it that I'm honestly unimpressed.
There's also a B-plot of Bullock basically being super-duper down the rabbit hole, Gordon gets offered a promotion by Sofia (who bribes the mayor), and Gordon wrestles on whether to take it or not but decides to finally take the job when Bullock refuses to show up on a bullet-giving ceremony out of shame or whatever. It's... the breakup of friendship between Gordon and Bullock should feel like a huge moment, but it really feels something more in notion of 'it's a long time coming'. Though I guess kudos to Gotham for making the dissolution of the two's trust in each other very believable over the course of the season.
Sofia's storyline as this wild card that supports both Penguin and Gordon also ends up feeling a fair bit convoluted, though for the men's credit, at least both Oswald and Gordon are very much realizing that Sofia's likely to be playing them both, with Gordon realizing that Sofia's doing way more than he bargained for, and Penguin noting some suspicious activity from Sofia.
There's a fair amount of poorly-delivered lines in it all, and this ends up feeling so much like a 'we need to get from point A to point B' without being super-duper interesting, and it's a shame considering how great Gotham tends to be if it took itself less seriously. Robin Lord Taylor delivers a great hammy performance in his short scene, and both Cory Michael Smith and Morena Baccarin both make the best that they could out of their weak roles this episode, but honestly the only scene that stood out for me was the Gordon/Bullock one.
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