Gotham S04E16 Review: The Team-Up Between the Clown, the Hypnotist and the Fearmonger

Gotham, Season 4, Episode 16: One of My Three Soups

After Sofia's death-coma in the previous episode, this episode of Gotham wastes no time in quickly jumping into its new premise -- a huge, all-out breakout by the classic Batman villains out of Arkham. The opening scene for this episode is insanely creepy, focusing on the one un-hypnotized guard in Arkham as she goes in to try and intimidate Jervis Tetch to submission, only to realize that her partner has already fallen under Tetch's thrall -- she gets her throat slit and it's pretty goddamn creepy.

Anyway, we get the revelation that this is the big breakout that the Joker Jerome Valeska is planning and hinting at, and his compatriots in this are the very, very entertaining Mad Hatter (who proved to be able to handle being the main arc villain pretty well) and Scarecrow (who is honestly just there as another member of the crew -- poor Crane hasn't had a lot of nice spotlights). They're insanely entertaining, with Jerome's "Composite Joker" mixture of the jolly and the fucked-up being delivered well, and both Tetch and Crane being happy to rhyme and deliver wacky lines at each other. Jerome laughably lampshades that there will be time to betray each other in the future, but for now they haev to work together.

Scarecrow actually spends most of this episode off-screen acquiring resources (mostly his fear gas) for Jerome and Hatter. Hatter ends up being the ''main" antagonist of this episode, calling Gordon and Bullock to confront him once more... but making it clear that he isn't going to go through the whole 'sadistic choice' charade again and just go straight to sadistic. It's nothing we haven't seen with Jervis Tetch in this show before, admittedly, but there are a lot of pretty great scenes. The sudden goriness of a goddamn wrecking ball smooshing a couple, Bullock rushing into a police car and locking it in to try and find the radio station Tetch is broadcasting out of, and Gordon coming up with the "save the person next to you!" to stop the mass suicide... it's all pretty competently done, but ultimately it's just a vessel and a crisis to help bring both Gordon and Bullock back together as buddies. At the end of the episode, they acknowledge that Gordon's fucked up a lot, but his status as a 'hero' of Gotham City is what the city needs. A symbol of hope -- the two of them know how Gordon's only human, but at the same time he's the best they got. Which... which, yeah, I can buy, I guess.

Meanwhile, the clear star of this show is Bruce's hero complex, as he recruits Selina (who's just eye-rolling her way through this all with a "your ego, Bruce, it's huge") to help stop Jerome. Bruce views himself responsible for Jerome being alive to cause havoc, but won't kill him -- Selina's all up for it, mind you -- which is completely the self-loathing train that Batman has. I approve. Jerome ends up confronting his uncle in order to find a piece of information, but his uncle ends up getting help from a big-ass circus  muscleman to beat Jerome and the uncle tries to shove boiling soup onto Jerome's face. The show gives Jerome a pretty sympathetic past -- his uncle's insanely abusive -- but at the same time Jerome himself even acknowledges that he's being way, way worse.

The moment when Jerome laughs as he sees how Bruce essentially got himself into way bigger trouble than he bargained for when he tried to rescue the insane murderer is so well delivered, and while no one but the evil uncle dies, it's a pretty fun scene to watch. Jerome, Bruce and Selina are extremely well-scripted and well-acted here.

Less well-scripted is the Barbara sub-plot. It's clear that Ra's Al Ghul has appointed Barbara as his successor-slash-heir-slash-maybe-a-new-body or whatever, but Barbara finally accesses the weird mystic power Ra's left within her, and that manifests in... a big glowing hand that summons the League of Assassins? Who proceed to kill all the men, leaving an all-woman group under Barbara? Just because she has a glowing hand? Yyyyeaaah. Erin Richards is a very entertaining actress and tries her best to ham it up, but nothing here really works for me. I dunno. It just feels like a silly footnote in an already jam-packed episode.

Overall, though, the entire episode turns out to just be a distraction. Jerome's plan to find out something about St. Ignatius school was the main part of the plan, while Mad Hatter's huge, flamboyant mass suicide plan is just there to distract the police (and hey, if it works, bonus!). The episode was framed as if we're going to have a villain taken down every episode, but Scarecrow and Joker break Mad Hatter out of the prison van, and they drive back out to spread even more madness. Good stuff. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The League of Shadows (otherwise known as the League of Assassins) finally make their appearance. They are, of course, the international army of secretive assassins that are spread all over the world, and have been popularized with their major role as the main arc villains of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, as well as in the Arrow TV show. 
• While I don't think any media specifically states that the League will not obey a female leader, the original comics did make it a point that Ra's scouted Batman out for a male heir to wed his daughter. 
• Mad Hatter and Scarecrow continually being a double-act while rhyming is a reference to how the two characters are portrayed in the highly-acclaimed and highly-recommended Long Halloween series. 
• Among the names of the escaped inmates that Gordon rattles off are Ephram Snow, Daedalus Boch and Erasmus Rayne, who are all pretty minor villains. Ephram Snow is a serial killer involved in the Batman: Endgame arc, who was convinced that the Joker is the incarnation of the Devil directing him to do murders. Daedalus Boch is the serial killer Doodlebug, an insane man who commits serial murders based on schizophrenic 'visions', while Erasmus Rayne, a.k.a. Death Rattle is a cult leader who worships demons. Both Doodlebug and Death Rattle appeared in the pages of Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, and were both killed in the same story they first appeared in.