Welcome to another Gotham recap! Gotham also known as the show where where almost everything is grey including the the morals, the suits and the dreary, dreary skyline.
These week on the show the mob turf war gets #real, a small child is a better detective than anyone at the Gotham PD and Barbara gives Jim and ultimatum. It’s all very exciting!
As always, things are divided into The Plot, The Gay and The Ugly, so read on to find out what went down in Gotham’s streets this week.
The Plot
When there’s something strange, in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call? Jim Gordon! Or not, as it seems as Gotham’s most upstanding detective really proves his skills (or lack thereof) this week when a professional hitman begins taking out city officials in an attempt to rock the vote.
Using a retractable steel rod and the old fashioned method of burning someone alive, the hitman in question is killing off the officials so that the control of the Arkham district (including the abandoned Arkham Asylum) will be given to one particularly mob faction. The idea is that whichever mob boss (Carmine Falcone or Sal Maroni) gets control of the district will be able to do whatever the hell they want with it and make a crap ton of money in the process. So, high stakes.
Gordon doesn’t realise this however, until he has a little visit with Bruce Wayne, who will eventually be known as Batman. According to the littlest Wayne, Falcone wants to uphold his parents’ plan to turn Arkham Asylum into a state of the art mental health institute, whilst the surrounding areas would be turned into low-cost housing. Maroni meanwhile, wants to turn the entire thing into a waste treatment centre. Gross.
It wouldn’t be dramatic if things lucked out for the ‘good guys’ (and I use that term lightly, as this is Gotham) though! And so shortly after Gordon gets into a stand-off with the hitman, whilst trying to protect Gotham’s mayor, said mayor announces that Maroni will control the asylum and Falcone will control the surrounding areas.
Helping this turf war to cause all sorts of problems for just about everybody, is Oswald Cobblepot (also known as Penguin) former assistant to mob boss Fish Mooney and current sneaky schemer.
Penguin is awkwardly limping around in a kitchen these days, after having jumped a dishwasher for his loafers last week, but he’s using his lowly position to get in Maroni’s good books. How exactly is he doing this? With more murder of course! Hiring a group a of goons to kill Maroni’s henchmen, he makes out like he’s done Maroni a favour, hiding in a freezer with a big bag of money and telling him he ‘rescued’ it from those very bad men whom Penguin is definitely not in cahoots with. Penguin is then promoted to restaurant manager giving him a prime position to listen on on any mob deals. Also, he feeds those goons some poisoned pastry so we don’t need to worry about them coming back to mess with him.
The Gay
Also causing trouble in this turf war is Fish Mooney who, in the absence of Renee Montoya (fellow Gotham PD detective and your favourite character, probably), brought the gay this week.
For reasons yet to be seen, Mooney was looking a new bit of entertainment. Both in the entertainment sense and the “”entertainment”” sense. Namely, this involved auditioning talented, attractive women and seeing what they’re made of. In quite possible the funniest line of TV I heard this week Mooney asks the two women to ‘seduce her’ which results in Mooney’s first same sex kiss on the show so far. More queer women of colour, yeah!
In a dark twist, the women have to battle it out to prove who can be a ‘weapon’ for Mooney too. The woman who kisses her beats the other to a pulp which is somehow a win because it means she’ll stick around to kiss Mooney more in the future? I think? It all happened so fast but there’s potential there. Maybe they’ll develop into adorable girlfriends, who knows.
And then, the less queer but still significant event when Barbara began to press boyfriend Jim Gordon for answers. In the episode last week, Montoya showed up to warn Barbara that Gordon killed Penguin. They kissed! And reminisced! Then, Penguin showed up.
This week in Gotham we saw the wonderful fallout of that (a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion) when Penguin didn’t introduce himself as such, meaning that Barbara still has no idea who he is or that Jim didn’t kill him, as Renee suggested. That doesn’t mean she’s going to let it go though calling out the morally grey, definitely not all good detective out on his secrets. She asks him about Penguin, he refuses to budge and after a bunch of really awkward circling Barbara is forced to admit that her and Renee used to be a thing.
Is this the part of the recap where I should say ‘Barbara has secrets too!’, ‘they’re both as bad as each other!’ well yes, probably, but Barbara doesn’t tell him about the kiss her and Renee shared either. I’m no relationship expert but keeping something like that from your partner? That’s some shady behaviour.
Moving quickly though, the couple does look to be donezo (or close enough) towards the end of the episode when Barbara shows up at the precinct and tells Jim plainly ‘either you tell me your secrets or I’ll leave your lying ass, son’. He doesn’t answer and she leaves, so grab your popcorn out for next week kids because this one’s going to get good.
The Ugly
There wasn’t a whole lot of ugly in this episode, just one thing that bothered me once I’d come down from my ‘oh my god Mooney just kissed a girl’ high.
And that was that Mooney’s storyline this week might not necessarily lead to very good representation and could just be a case of ‘let’s make her kiss her a girl, it’ll be good for the ratings’.
Can I confirm that this was the case? Obviously not! But we’ll soon know depending on how the next few episode do (or don’t) deal with it.
Expect another Gotham recap next week.
