Gotham, Season 1, Episode 2: Selina Kyle
Man, now I know why Arrow keeps putting all those flashbacks in their episodes, and why Agents of SHIELD has so many characters. It's because, well, without either of them, you could compress an episode like this easily into half its length and it's still a palatable episode with action scenes and whatnot. Episode 2 isn't quite as bad as episode 1, but it's still boring to watch. There's a lot of padding scenes that could really be shortened. I'm not even talking about cutting scenes, there's a lot of padding that could've been edited and the episode would've had the same amount of impact.
Like, for example, the scene with the initial kidnapping of the street urchins. Did it need to be that long? The evil lady looking for Selina in the bus, did we really spend half a minute just seeing the two muck around with chairs? Bruce listening to metal music, what was the point of that? Jim's fight with the random cop, felt a bit too long, and Bullock interrogating people also felt too stretched. So did the scene of Selina talking to the police dude near the end, which was stretched out a fair bit. Or the gunfight, which also felt a bit too long than was necessary. Or the scene where Fish is just brooding and reaffirming that she won't change the status quo two episodes into the show.
Also, remember how I kept talking in Arrow reviews where the flashbacks are kind of devoid of tension because we know who's going to survive and who's not? Well, with Gotham, the entire cast is going to survive, so good job in making the show tensionless. Man, why can't we have a Batman show? Freaking Agent Carter gets her own show, and Batman doesn't rate it? Damn whoever is making these decisions.
The main plot is that two thugs working for the Dollmaker -- who's that one creepy Z-lister Batman villain that Arrow borrowed in season two -- kidnapping street urchins and whatnot. And to be fair, the two goons working for the Dollmaker were sort of funny. They use a pin and the lady keeps doing these old-fashioned 'oh gosh' and 'oh fudge' which I thought was a bit entertaining, but it's otherwise pretty m'eh and they don't really have much to them beyond having this unfazed cheerfulness in almost everything they do. There's the point when the lady seems to... mercy-kill the dude whose eyes Selina gouged out? But other than that...
There's also this pharmacist guy that takes up a fair amount of screen time doing nothing but being just the middle step to get to the Dollmaker duo who's another one that sucks up screentime like a sponge.
Why can't we have the Dollmaker himself as the villain? I mean, it's not like Batman has a shortage of super-minor disposable villains...
Anyway, for an episode that's titled 'Selina Kyle', Selina shows up for ten seconds in the opening, and then disappears until the thirty-minute mark, giving her around a grand total of eight minutes of screentime. And most of her screentime is pretty boring stuff. She is played by a not-shitty actress, though, so there's that. We get to see some offscreen awesomeness as she gouges out a dude's eyes, but otherwise beyond knowing that she will become Catwoman one day there's nothing that really makes her interesting. She's looking for her mother, doesn't want to go upstate or whatever, and keeps wanting to talk to Gordon with the big 'oh gasp' moment at the end of this episode is the fact that she saw who killed the Waynes, something that has absolutely zero impact thanks to the audience already knowing this.
Why can't ten minutes of this episode spent briefly showing the stuff in episode one (Selina doesn't need to show up in that episode) from Selina's point of view, trim out the middleman bullshit in the kidnapping plot? Would make this episode more of a Selina spotlight that would fit the title of the episode better.
Gordon's still pretty m'eh. There's really nothing that I can describe about his character beyond 'straight cop', 'unafraid to speak his mind', 'whipped by his woman' and 'lacks a mustache'. He's the main lead and while he's not a shitty main lead the fact that I can't tell you what is interesting about him as opposed to, say, Oliver Queen or Barry Allen who are actually interesting.
Though Gordon kills a dude this episode, shooting the pharmacist's lackey into a bottomless pit without losing much sleep over it. Why the hell does a pharmacist or chemical company have a bottomless pit in their basement anyway? Also, Gordon totally killed that dude. I mean, it's for a good cause and he saved those kids, but, you know, he's not 100% an angel. I think I like that, sorta?
Bullock is still pretty entertaining even if he's a bit of a jackass. The coffee bit in the opening was the only thing that made that scene bearable. We get to see some conflict between Gordon and Bullock, and I do like that one scene where he goes 'Saint Jim here will shut up until you tell us what you know'. But otherwise, Bullock's only marginally more interesting than Gordon and that's only because jerkasses are funny.
We get to see Essen for more than a second, and she seems to be a dirty, if reasonable, head cop lady. I don't think there's anything particularly interesting about her.
Mayor whatshisface gets introduced and he's your average corrupt mayor as expected, definitely being more concerned about his image than of the children's wellbeing. I do like that Gordon immediately calls it out to his face and he just shrugs it off. He's basically putting all the homeless kids in prison-in-all-but-name and that'll probably make petty crimes go down. In a fashion I kind of agree with him, but of course it's ethically evil to do so.
Riddler gets a short scene where he, uh, gets to be weird and stuff. Is he developing an obsession for Gordon?
Barbara is a bit of an idiot. If most of the cast is pretty wooden, Barbara is an idiot. She feels a lot like Laurel Lance from Arrow, except a bit more irritating. And that's impressive since she only has a short scene here compared to Laurel, who's a main character in her show. Gordon basically goes 'oh, here's the stuff I have on investigation, blah blah blah', and without even confirming just how much of the story is true, and even when Gordon tells her that it'll probably get him in big doo-doo (and this is Gotham City where the cops are shitheads as the show keeps whacking us in the head with), Barbara just... calls the goddamn newspaper and calls it in like a crazy lunatic gossiper, with the extremely childish reason of 'well it's the right thing to do!' She's a stupid, flat character and I dislike her.
Don Falcone makes a short appearance, and I do like Falcone! He just walks into Fish's club and basically dominates the scene. We get some foreshadowing about the Maronis as the second powerhouse in the city, we get to hear him talk about the Waynes' death and how it'll upset the balance of the city, and he and Fish seems to reach some sort of understanding. The bit about asking for Fish's lover is a bit puzzling, but I get it... Falcone is basically making the statement to Fish that 'this guy I'm beating in front of you could be someone you care about, or it could be you, and it's by my grace that you survive despite all the shit you've done'. Falcone's awesome. Poor Lazlo, but that's what you get.
Fish herself is also pretty unlikable, but she's meant to be a bitch. She's trying to sweet-talk Falcone and while Falcone's civil it's evident that Falcone's got Fish by the figurative balls. She's still trying to take over, which won't bode well for her, and she's sorta made up with Gordon and Bullock... even though she doesn't deny that she's the one who ordered the hit. Frankly I'm surprised Gordon doesn't try to arrest Fish then and there. She's pretty annoying, though, and I eagerly anticipate her character's death.
The Waynes get some backstory, and we are told that Arkham Asylum has been closed for 15 years, and the Waynes are trying to rebuild just that. Thomas Wayne apparently gave Alfred strict orders on how to raise Bruce if he dies, and that apparently means 'no psychiatrists' and 'let him find his own way.' Well, with parents like that, no wonder Bruce Wayne will spend most of his life running around with a bat mask and throw bat-shaped boomerangs at clowns and claypeople.
Alfred's still pretty rude, and not at all what my mental image of the kindly foster father Alfred would be, but he's got a fair bit of Alfred qualities to him. He still mostly cares for Bruce, but isn't quite as fatherly as other incarnations of Alfred, sort-of justified by the fact that he's never been a father. He's still respectful and cares for Bruce, just lobs around angry British swearing all over the place. Still not a particularly big fan of Alfred.
Bruce, meanwhile, has taken to burning his hand to test his capabilities and shit, and apparently according to Alfred cutting himself too? Don't be emo, Bruce. Train hard and study hard, don't cut yourself and burn yourself. There's also this scene where he's listening to mental music and drawing all kinds of shit, which leads to nowhere. If I didn't know that this kid is going to grow up to be Batman, I'd be seriously worried about him. We get a nice little in-joke with Alfred getting surprised and angry at Bruce for creeping up behind people's back.
There's also this bit of a cheesy scene where Bruce wants to give money to the homeless, but then decides to give clothes instead. Somehow I sort of like that, how he wants to do a nice gesture but not by simply throwing money.
I still think Bruce is in this too much, and interacts with Gordon too much (and will be in the future, from the looks of things). Why can't we have Bruce be training offscreen? The whole concept of the show is 'Batman's city before there was Batman', so why the heck do you keep showing Batman?
Other than that, we get the Penguin side of the story, which doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the plot. We get a scene of Allen and Montoya, the straight cops, interviewing Mrs Cobblepot (or Kaplepoot or whatever she corrects them?), who's not right in the head. She's a bit crazy and goes off-track several times, going on and on about her handsome child and all that, and so far matches the description of Penguin's smothering mother from the comics. Except, you know, crazy. Allen and Montoya are still pretty flat, though I thought it's a bit interesting how the only other clean cops other than Gordon is going to come to heads with Gordon by tracking the apparent 'death' of Oswald Cobblepot.
The Penguin's just hobbling along and being this tightly wound-up mass of emotion. A bunch of kids screw with him when he's trying to hitchhike and I thought that was a bit cruel, but they do end up letting Oswald get on board the car and give him a beer. I do like how Oswald suddenly talks in this absolutely extensive vocabulary for no good reason other than being a little queer, but it's all fun and games and he stabs this dude with a broken beer bottle when he jokes about him looking like a penguin.
Dude's crazy.
He goes off and apparently rents a trailer (which is another scene that took a while but Oswald's funny and therefore the scene becomes absolutely tolerable) and does this crazy newspaper clippings thing... seemingly obsessing about Wayne? And we get a rather hilarious scene where we start off with Penguin threatening the mother of the other boy he's holding hostage. And while it starts off like any chilling hostage situation, it soon devolves into comedy as the mother apparently keeps believing that her son is pulling a scam, and it gets downright hilarious when Oswald goes 'but I sent you the video, how can you not believe me?' in such an incredulous tone that he's snapped out into sanity for a moment. Man, Oswald, you're fun. And then the mother hangs up and Oswald gets to become creepy-scary again as he possibly kills his hostage.
Overall, it's not an entirely solid episode. I'm still rather interested in the stuff that's going on in this show, and I am told by various people that it gets a lot better after the first three episodes or so. There's definitely potential for a lot of interest down the line. For now, I am waiting.
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