Welcome to another Gotham recap! Gotham, the show where we’re all essentially just waiting for Bruce Wayne to go through puberty and put his many billions of trust fund money to good, crime fighting use.
This week on the show, crimes are stopped, milk is drank in large quantities and no one seems to care that Renee Montoya has been missing for two episodes now!
As always, our recaps are split into The Plot, The Gay and The Ugly, so read on to find out what went down this week.
The Plot
In Gotham’s fifth episode, the dairy industry really got lucky when a chemical agent was doled out to the poor, homeless masses in the name of revolution and anarchy. Righteous! Except not really because the chemical in question caused those who inhaled it to become super strong, batcrap insane and also in need of some serious calcium. The chemical wore down their bones after a few hours, making their body crave that dairy goodness before they eventually wound up dead, deformed and decaying in the street.
Detective Jim Gordon is hot on the case though as when he’s not dealing with romantical drama stuff (see: last week’s ultimatum from his girlfriend Barbara Kean) he’s a relatively adequate detective. He and partner Bullock narrow things down to a science wiz with a dodgy ear, calling in the man’s former employers WellZyn (a company owned by Wayne Enterprises), to figure out just what he was working on and how the hell he got away with using their labs to make it.
As expected, Gordon and Bullock are spun a load of yarn by a PR person which leads them to hit up his old professor who quickly reveals that his former student was working on a boost for super-soldiers and military activities, all signed off on by WellZyn. Does this mean that Wayne Enterprises are as rotten as a week-old cheese sarnie left out in the sun? And that Bruce is going to have to don those bulletproof bat ears sooner rather than later?
Coincidentally, Bruce is doing his bit to find the answer to one of those questions as he and butler Alfred have hit up the annual Wayne Enterprises luncheon. Bruce being a headstrong kid with a total disregard of subtlety/detective smarts starts asking around about possible corruption within the company. Obviously, he gets shut down like a backyard kegger in a middle class neighbourhood but he is almost taken out too when the mad scientist shows up and sprays the newer, more powerful version of his chemical gas through the vents.
Gordon and Bullock show up to save the day, evacuate everyone and apprehend the bad guy, as the show’s formula goes. Sadly though, before he can offer more help than “go look at Warehouse 39!” he jumps off a roof and sets off a car alarm. Rest in pieces you slightly barmy lunatic.
At Warehouse 39 meanwhile, the place is empty. Who’s to blame for the sudden removal of evidence? The same lady that Bruce spoke to at the luncheon it seems, it seems, and it appears that Bruce Enterprises is corrupt and only a pre-teen who has yet to witness his first chest hair, along with his British man servant, will be able to uncover the plot!
Meanwhile, similarly shoe-horned in and trying to shake things up in Gotham this week are restaurant manager Penguin and mob boss Fish Mooney. The former has just told his new boss Sal Maroni that he knows various mob secrets that can be of use, leading to Maroni threatening to kill him, before Jim shows up to get him of that jam. The latter is sending out her talented, leggy protégé out into the wild to go and seduce mob boss with mommy issues, Carmine Falcone, so that Mooney can stage a takeover.
The Gay
Once again, the gay content was taking a short holiday with the closest we got to actual non-heterosexual activity being a scene where Mooney is teaching her protégé how to sound motherly and it leads to the two of them putting their heads together real close. It’s also worth noting that this was offset by Mooney’s secret hookup with a male mobster so a serious girlfriend is probably off the cards for now.
Jim also didn’t address the fact that Barbara threatened to break up with him last week so we’re no closer to Barbara and ex-girlfriend Renee Montoya (neither of whom were in the episode at all) getting back together.
The Ugly
Overall, this was a pretty pointless episode. Other than Wayne Enterprises most definitely being corrupt, it was very much all filler. And that’s saying something given that we sort of knew that the Wayne company was less than legit already.
Fingers crossed that Gotham will improve soon – the first season has a guaranteed 22 episodes in total so it’ll have a good amount of time to improve upon its poor run of form.
