Gotham S05E07 Review: Batman Needs The Joker

Gotham, Season 5, Episode 7: ACE Chemicals

Oh, boy, I love this episode. I have always enjoyed Gotham's version of the Joker, setting him up more as a myth passed down from one crazy man to the next. Sure, thanks to the DCEU studios being meanies they can't actually call Jeremiah or Jerome straight-up "the Joker", but honestly? This version of the Joker and his utter obsession with Bruce is perhaps one of the better Joker/Batman interactions I've ever seen. And, sure, the same argument of this happening before either of them have donned their personas permeates all of the Gotham show as a whole, but I honestly think that it doesn't matter that much. Gotham has done a lot of the legwork to make the history of the characters work, that I've even started to subconsciously refer to Jeremiah as "Joker" in my head. He's certainly far more Joker than the embarrassing 2Edgy4Me Tattooed Gold-toothed Gangster version from the Suicide Squad movie, anyway.


And honestly... I enjoyed this episode a lot. Part of it might be my own bias and general fanboying for general Joker/Batman stories, but the episode itself is built up pretty well through short scenes slowly unveiling bits and pieces of Joker's master plan before finally exploding into a full episode of its own. The cold open with random firecrackers and random people killed by the Joker laughing gas is pretty creepy while having that whimsical 'sick joke' mentality that a lot of modern adaptations of Joker have completely forgotten. See, the Joker's whole point is that he dresses up all of his maniacal crimes with some comedy, some punch-line that's ridiculous but funny in the right circumstance. Take that away to make him more 'serious', and he's no longer the Joker and just some clown-themed serial killer. But I digress.

I do like that the episode goes straight into Bruce already discovering Alfred missing and is basically recruited the GCPD to help look for him, but then Bruce himself gets led to Jeremiah's huge plan with a bunch of newspaper showing the Wayne deaths, as well as the pearls... and ends up crossing the underground tunnel to the mainland, seeing Jeremiah having hypnotized Alfred and two random people who's been facially reconstructed to look like Thomas and Martha Wayne, and it's so, so fucked up.

The hypnotism angle is a bit of an ass-pull, although I suppose the Mad Hatter has worked with a Joker before? It's pretty sick, honestly, and that lunch scene as Jeremiah rants about wanting to be Bruce's best friend, and the way to do so is to have Bruce re-experience the most important day of his life and connect to him. It's definitely an interesting angle of Joker's character, less about the whole 'one bad day' or 'everything burns' mentality, but moer of his obsession of being Batman's arch-enemy. We get a genuinely tense and well-shot scene of Bruce getting Alfred to duck into the tunnel before Jeremiah's bomb explodes.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot of this episode, we get some genuinely bizarre hijinks about Barbara wanting Leslie to be her Obs/gyn doctor, which is just so utterly impossible to take seriously, and perhaps it is this aspect that made this particularly insane plot twist work. I don't really care about any of Gordon and Leslie's romance-not-romance storyline going on in this episode, honestly. Meanwhile, Penguin and Selina are trying to figure out how to pass the river, and apparently there are mines in the river? I'm not sure how that works. Either way, the two go on their own merry way as they go through the B-plots, with Selina backstabbing Penguin and working alongside Barbara, and both Gordon and Leslie getting captured by Mad Hatter and Echo.

I'm not sure where the Selina storyline is going, honestly, and her suddenly breaking cover and holding Penguin at knifepoint seemed a bit random and just there to further the storyline along, and get Alfred to recruit Selina to help out Bruce.

Aaanyway, back to the meat of the story, we get Bruce being brought to the theater where we get to see what Jeremiah was doing with all those people that he killed in the beginning with 'Z' carved into their bodies, and apparently it's a sick re-enactment of the Mark of Zorro, the movie that young little Bruce Wayne watched and was so scared of that he begged his parents to exit the theater. It's a fun little speech from Jeremiah, telling Bruce that if he managed to conquer his fear, maybe his parents could still be alive, in a neat variant of the Batman Begins storyline. In a fun bit of improvisation by the villains, Jeremiah decides to swap out the plastic-surgery randoms with a hypnotized Gordon and Leslie to be the 'Thomas and Martha' that he kills, which is... it's actually well-done and I didn't see this coming. Oh, and there's a master plan of unleashing the laughing gas all over the city to deny aid from coming into the city. Which... which is kind of ridiculous, but that's the sort of comic-book governmental nonsense that I've came to expect from these shows.

Of course, Jeremiah immediately monologues about the cruelty of this particular hypnosis, that Gordon and Leslie will be released fro their hypnotism the moment the pearls hit the ground, which... okay, I actually would buy that Jeremiah would be that cruel and petty. Selina shows up for the rescue, and we get a three-way fight as Gordon deals with the firework bombs, while Bruce and Jeremiah fight atop the chemical vats, leading to the honestly surprisingly well-done confrontation between the two, where Jeremiah rants that Bruce "needs him", because he's just a "joke without a punchline" without him. Yeah, Batman needs the Joker, all that. Because of origin story tropes, the struggle leads to Jeremiah plunging into the bubbling chemical vat, and we later see his scarred, apparently brain-dead-but-still-alive body.

He's not going to be out for long, of course, but it's a neat exit for his character for the moment. Meanwhile, Gordon only manages to drive the fireworks van into the Gotham River, preventing the airborne dispersal of the Joker Gas, but doesn't prevent it from released into the river, and extending this No Man's Land storyline for a bit. The epilogue throws in a bunch of developments, with Oswald recruiting Riddler as an ally, them wanting to construct a submarine with Barbara, and Gordon and Leslie having a whole slap/slap/kiss nonsense going on. Not the biggest fan of Barbara's entire storyline honestly just revolving around her being pregnant, but eh, at least it leads to some gems from the story-writers.

Anyway, a pretty masterful episode from Gotham, and even if this is the last appearance of Joker in this continuity, he definitely went out with one hell of a bang.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Lots of various references to various incarnations of the Joker:
• ACE Chemicals is the location in the comics where Batman fought the 'Red Hood gang' (or a pre-Joker version of Joker, depending on the continuity) and during the struggle, Joker gets thrown into a vat of chemicals and transforms him into the madman he is now. While Jeremiah's already kinda crazy before, the fact that it takes place at Ace Chemicals and involves a struggle leading to his fall is definitely a reference to this. Ace Chemicals itself has shown up in many other adaptations of Batman.
• The Joker's utter obsession in becoming Batman's super-duper arch rival has been a running theme going on as long as the two characters have existed as fictional characters, particularly explored in Dark Knight Returns. 
• Jeremiah trying to kill Batman's parents is an allusion to the Tim Burton 1989 Batman movie, where he was the one responsible for their deaths. 
• The Mark of Zorro, the movie that young Bruce Wayne watched as a kid before the faithful night of the encounter, get referenced a couple of times in the episode. The fact that Jeremiah alludes to young Bruce apparently being too afraid of the violence and begging his parents to go home (and meeting the gunman) is an allusion to Batman Begins. 
• Wayne Manor's blown up a couple more times than you think, notably in the Batman Begins movie and the Arkham Knight game.