Gotham S04E22 Review: Cataclysm

Gotham, Season 4, Episode 22: No Man's Land

Huh. This season finale for Gotham is honestly more of a setup for the next season, which apparently is building up towards Gotham's grand finale. I have been extremely appreciative of Gotham's latest bunch of episodes thanks to just how fun and how fresh a take it is on the Batman mythos as opposed to how Gotham actually started. This season finale helps to clear the board from a bunch of the plotlines that went on throughout this chapter, while simultaneously setting up the adaptation of the No Man's Land arc from the comics.

The episode begins with Selina being rushed to the hospital, with her spine later revealed to be shattered. She ends up being a complete non-factor for the rest of the finale, and not even the whole "don't leave me, Bruce" is spun into any sort of drama when Bruce inevitably gets pulled away from the hospital. She survives, but they really need to work her into the fifth season somehow, otherwise this would probably count as the worst case of fridging a love interest ever. Jeremiah, with Ra's Al Ghul's help, ends up causing a bit of chaos in the GCPD when he demands to see Bruce or he will detonate all the other bombs he had left. He did leave at least one behind, though, which blows up the mayor.

With Gotham City under military lockdown, some random military dude takes over operations in Gotham City and kicks Gordon out, upon which he gets captured by the Riddler and tortured with a weight press in order to resolve the weird Riddler/Leslie/Gordon love-triangle-but-not-really subplot. It's probably one of the weaker parts of the episode, with Leslie quickly smooth-talking Riddler, then letting Gordon off with a not insignificant amount of romantic tension between them. This all ends with Riddler and Leslie stabbing each other with a knife, with Riddler being kind of a psychotic jealous not-boyfriend and Leslie defending herself. The end of this episode hints that the two of them are probably coming back next season because Hugo Strange has access to their bodies, so we'll see.

Meanwhile, Jeremiah predictably kidnaps Bruce and Ra's people kill all of the military dudes guarding him. Jeremmiah and Ra's have teamed up to make sure Gotham City gets reduced to ashes and that Bruce will embrace his destiny as the Dark Knight and Ra's Al Ghul's heir. It's interesting just how well the Jeremiah and Ra's storylines work together as they are both joined by their purpose to 'combat/train' Bruce Wayne, and to fuck up Gotham City.

Meanwhile, a coalition of Gotham City members including Alfred, Barbara, Penguin and Tabitha team up to take down Ra's Al Ghul and Jerome. Out of revenge for Selina, and to save Gotham City and Bruce, we get a pretty great action sequence as the good guys fight against Ra's, Joker and their minions. Barbara manages to get Bruce to hold the reforged magic curly dagger, and ram it straight into Ra's chest, finally killing him in no uncertain terms, turning Ra's into exploding ashes and dust. It's a great season finale action piece, and I'm always up for those.

Ra's death and whatever happened to Jeremiah (I think he escaped in the confusion?), however, isn't enough to stop whatever's going on with Gotham City. All the bridges blow up, cutting Gotham City off from the rest of the world. The martial law that the military dude inflicted is still in effect, and while evacuations are taking place all over the city, Gordon, Bullock, Lucius and the GCPD resolve to stick around to retake their city from all the criminals that are going wild. The ending goes on and on a bit with Bruce's resolution to stay and embrace his destiny, Hugo Strange looming over Lee and Riddler, and a series of montage of Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Firefly and new players Man-Bat (with a hilariously bad costume), Mother and Orphan showing up all over the city... I think that's probably one of the bigger weaknesses of this episode. After the huge climax, the episode sort of keeps going on and on with so much setup and buildup about No Man's Land, and it feels a little tiresome. It's still pretty exciting nonetheless, though.

Oh, and there's the conclusion for the Butch/Tabitha story. Hugo Strange manages to cure Butch with some insanely simple plot device (fresh blood!) and just as Tabitha and Butch have a great reunion, Penguin comes up, congratulates them and Butch and Penguin bro out... and then Penguin shoots Butch in the head, killing him, and then shoots Tabitha in the leg, noting that this is his revenge for Tabitha killing Penguin's mom all the way back in season two. It's an impressively neat bit of continuity and honestly? It is definitely a neat little nod to Penguin's pettiness and how he takes everything personally. We'll see how this ends up getting resolved in the fifth season.

Overall, it's honestly shaping up to be an interesting story in the fifth season. We've got a little proto Bat-signal, we've got the villains carving up Gotham City, we've got Bruce starting to do his own acts of vigilantism and honestly, Gotham's in a pretty good place at the moment. Definitely looking forward to the next season!

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• No Man's Land, of course, is an adaptation of the No Man's Land mega-arc in Batman comics, where Gotham City is split off from the rest of the world thanks to a massive earthquake. Due to the government abandoning Gotham and decrying it No Man's Land, the entire city gets turned into a warzone and the criminals and good guys alike fight over territory in the broken-down ruins of the city. A somewhat similar concept was also featured in the video game Arkham City. 
• The spotlight in the sky that causes Bruce to meet with Gordon on top of the GCPD building is, of course, a reference to the Bat-Signal. 
• Selina being paralyzed due to wounds to her spine, of course, recalls Barbara Gordon's fate after The Killing Joke, where she was paralyzed from the waist down thanks to an attack by the Joker trying to goad someone else into experiencing 'one bad day'.
• I'm not sure if Barbara's group has been referred to by that before, but she stakes out her territory as "Sirens' territory", a clear reference to Gotham City Sirens, a comic book that features on the three biggest female criminals in Gotham City, namely Catwoman, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. 
• The two villains you probably don't recognize from the final montage are:
• Man-Bat, one of Batman's older enemies, Dr. Kirk Langstrom gets turned into a humanoid bat monster thanks to a genetics experiment gone awry. We'll probably talk about him a bit more next season.
• Mother and Orphan is the New 52 reboot version of Cassandra Cain, otherwise known as the second Batgirl in the original DC continuity. New 52 reinvents Cassandra Cain's backstory as a serial killer, expanding upon her family's connections to the League of Assassins.