Gotham S1E19 Review: Completely Skippable

Gotham, Season 1, Episode 19: Beasts of Prey

Gotham’s been on a break for… two months or something along those lines between episodes 18 and 19. And one thing that Gotham didn’t manage to do is to make a sufficiently interesting cliffhanger so viewers are on their seats waiting for the break to be over. Agents of SHIELD did that phenomenally well with the whole Skye-turns-into-an-Inhuman thing when they went on a two month break. Gotham didn’t have anything remotely interesting going on and was just slogging through its weekly motions when it went into hiatus, and it took me quite a while to really get back to watching it... not really helped that Agents of SHIELD, Flash and Arrow are all on their respective phenomenal season finales while Gotham is just… well, just wasn’t that interesting, really. And honestly, episode 19 was pretty crap one to come back to after a hiatus. It’s one of the messiest and least interesting Gotham episodes.

All the various plot threads are being built up – Gordon being forced to take the fight to bring down corrupt Commissioner Loeb (who set Gordon up to hunt Ogre, who targets the loved ones of the policemen sent after him), the whole mob situation with Penguin-Maroni-Falcone heating up, Bruce and Selina investigating the evil Wayne Enterprises and the GCPD is corrupt. Also whatever the fuck is going on with Fish and the Dollmaker, which thankfully gets resolved. But this episode is so messy and goes from one plot to another without much cohesion and it really is a gigantic mess.

On the police side, it seem to be building up to a multi-part arc pitting James Gordon against the Ogre, who is this handsome dude that’s totally fucked up in the head and is what happens when the Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight mentality meets that of a psychopath. The Ogre’s a brand-new villain created for the show (the old Batman comics did have a villain called the Ogre, but he’s nothing like the one here, being a literal ogre) and while he does seem like a relatively generic serial killer on paper, kudos to the actor for putting in such a performance that delivers his stalker-y entitled psychopathic characterization. He’s totally sick in the head, actually wanting those women he kidnapped to love him and killing them when they’re not “the one”.

He does seem rather generic all in all, though, and I do hope he doesn’t last more than two episodes. The whole Ogre plot point seems to just give Gordon an excuse to finally take the war to Loeb because he gunned for Gordon’s loved ones, and I really wished that with the finale brewing up Gordon’s main focus wouldn’t be on some random psychopath but on the mob or Penguin or something.

A good chunk of the episode is also spent with Bullock and Gordon just running around trying to get down on this secret serial killer thing that other policemen apparently just shut up about and never mentioned and they spent way too long just building up the Ogre, clearly not meaning to take this anywhere because Ogre’s still got a couple of episodes to show up in.

And while you could argue that showing a pointlessly extensive flashback of the Ogre stalking and killing one of his victims is a waste of space when we could’ve inferred it, what really took up space was Fish’s scenes with the Dollmaker. Not only does Fish’s entire Dollmaker plotline pointless, a gigantic annoyance and a waste of space I watch at double-speed, the Dollmaker ends up getting taken out like a bitch and the scenes focus so much on Fish just talking to the multiple factions in the random prison that don’t mean jack shit because really who cares about any of them other than Fish and Dollmaker? And I don’t even like either of them. Fish manages to escape with the most generic series of scenes ever, of course, but she got shot in the belly. I’m sure she’ll return for the finale, though. Whatever. I don’t really want to talk about Fish other than the fact that her scenes here are simply horrid to watch.

Penguin is going around setting up an assassination attempt at Maroni, which seems to going to be the big thing on the mob side of the plotlines, at least for the next episode or two. And again, while seeing Penguin just hamming it up all pathetically and stuff is always one of the highlighs of Gotham, his scenes also drag on for too long with convincing the bartender lady and the needlessly cringe-inducing finger horror show with the pappone.

Bruce and Selina’s scenes also started off really dull, with a needlessly winded recap about how Reggie stabbed Alfred and was evil and was sent by the Wayne Enterprises people and all that. The journey of Bruce just going around before finally tracking down Reggie is just trite… though the final scene with Selina pushing Reggie out of the window when he threatens to rat them out to his superiors is a great one. Selina actually freaking kills Reggie, and I do like the shocked look on Bruce’s face. He clearly didn’t want Reggie to die, especially considering what Reggie means to Alfred, but there really wasn’t much they could do if Reggie wasn’t so stoned at that time, them being, y’know, kids. It’s a great finish, with Selina and Bruce having a bit of an argument over the killing of Reggie, and Bruce keeping this a secret from Alfred would be an interesting wrinkle to their relationship.

Again, still don’t really give much of a fuck about the whole Wayne plotline, but I am relatively invested in Bruce and Selina’s interactions. Do like them portraying Selina as an anti-villain instead of ‘a good girl who likes to steal stuff’.

Overall it’s kind of a crap shoot of an episode. The whole Ogre thing really goes nowhere and is just padding – rendered rather pointless since the next two episodes would deliver Ogre’s psychopathic character far more effective than the ‘oh the police are scared’ scenes here. Fish and Dollmaker’s plot just… kind of crashes and burns and ends without anything satisfying, but I can’t say I would care if it did, so whatever. Penguin, Gordon and Bruce really don’t do anything of substance, so the only real good thing in this episode is Bruce reacting to Selina pushing Reggie to his death. And a minute of good stuff doesn’t salvage the entire episode.