Last night’s episode of Gotham explored their version of the famous Arkham Asylum from the Batman mythology.
The episode picks up right where we left off last week with Oswald popping up at Gordon’s house and it leads us to a confrontation between the two of them in the alley. The thing that fascinates me with Taylor’s portrayal of Oswald is that even though we know his destination, I can’t help, but feel that there is a part of him that is actually trying to be good. That’s what I love about villains, when you as a viewer aren’t really sure what they are up to, even though we know that by the end of it, he will be one of the city’s most powerful villains.
The villain of this week was a character named “Gladwell” (which wasn’t his real name) who were going after councilmen as well as the Mayor. While there wasn’t anything remotely interesting about his character, I was intrigued by the weapon that he was using that reminded me a lot about a piece that Penguin uses in his weaponry in the comic books. Even though I’m somewhat fine with the procedural aspect of Gotham, a part of me wishes that we can have some regular villain that they could be going after and not necessarily just Fish Mooney.
Speaking of her, it was hard to put my finger on what she was up to in this episode. We see Fish having fun with two girls that separately auditions for an opening at the club and we learn that Fish is possibly a member of the LGBT community. I got interested when she said that she wanted to turn one of these girls into a weapon, the question is, for what? Even though I enjoy Pinkett Smith in the role, it’s sometimes nice to small dosages of her.
The relationship between Barbara and Gordon starts to take a bad turn in “Arkham” as she confesses her secret that she was in a relationship with Montoya before she met Gordon. While she comes clean with her past, Gordon won’t answer her who Oswald is and this leads to what appeared to be a break-up between them, at least for now. Regardless of how many arguments and breakups they have, these two will still end up together which will lead to the birth of Gordon’s famous daughter that one day will become Batgirl. But I’m eager to learn what happened in between those years.
The one problem I had with this episode was that for being an episode titled “Arkham”, I was hoping to get to see a lot more of it, but it was something that mostly talked about. We got to spend very little time with it, but since we learned that Falcone and Maroni will be part of it, I’m sure we will see lots of it in future episodes. I just feel that some of these titles like “Selina Kyle” and “Arkham” have been slightly misleading when it comes to the capacity, but hopefully that won’t happen again.
Overall, “Arkham” was a very solid episode that perhaps didn’t feature the asylum as much as I had hoped for, but since the show did get picked up for a full season yesterday, I’m sure we will get to see more of it in future episodes.
Gotham airs on Monday nights, 8/7c on FOX.
[Photo via FOX]
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