Welcome to another Gotham recap! Gotham, also known as the show where the police are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. In a sauna.
This week on the show Penguin finally gets what’s coming to him and I’m ready to send out a search and rescue team for missing queer ladies, Barbara and Renee.
As always, the recap is split into The Plot, The Gay and The Ugly so read on to find out what went down this week.
The Plot
What’s your biggest fear? For Jim Gordon it’s probably ‘viewers seeing through my good veneer and realising that I’m as useless as all the other chumps in this place’ but for countless other Gotham residents.
Their fears prevent them from going about their day to day, which is why they have a phobia support group. Some support group that turns out to be though when it turns out that someone is killing off its members, terrorising them with their worst fears.
First to go six feet under is a man named Adam who’s been hoisted up on a ledge and then dropped off of it just to submit him to his worst fear (heights) before he died. To find his killer, Bullock hatches an ingenious plan: flirt inappropriately with Adam’s sponsor Scottie and then accompany her to a meeting. Totally professional. They’ll have plenty to talk about during their not-a-date too as the second victim – a man who’s terrified of pigs – gets accosted with one of the oinkers on the street and ends up being led towards a thug, clunked on the head and kidnapped for more fear inducing treatment.
He survives though, when Jim and Harvey investigate a lead and head to an old chair manufacturers which is the same place the man is being held captive, surrounded by, you guessed it; more pigs. They shoot his captor dead but now must find the captor’s partner – flash forward a few hours to the support group meeting where Harvey is *meant* to be scoping out suspects.
This being Harvey and this being Gotham, a place that seems to breed bad detectives like rabbits, Harvey sits twiddling his thumbs when Scottie gets up to follow a man who runs out of the room after revealing that he has a fear of failure. Harvey literally asks the rest of the group if it seems like they’ve been gone a long time and although he was there to look for murderers specifically, he didn’t think to go and check on her or go to the meeting with backup so that he could prevent this from happening. Incredible. Alas, Scottie looks to be victim number three as we see her being bundled into the back of a van.
Scottie must be something special though, because her kidnapping presents us with the first bit of good detective work in weeks. Harvey rings her mum to find out that the killer has probably taken her to a local pool, a place Scottie nearly drowned when she was a little’un and the place her fear first reared its ugly head. He and Jim show up just in the nick of time (gotta love those TV coincidences!) and rescue her, but Jim’s efforts to chase down the suspect prove futile and he gets away. With some help of Jim’s new girlfriend Dr. Thompkins, we discover that the killer also stole the adrenal gland from his first victim. For what? God knows! But we’ll probably get an answer next week as the show attempts to lure us in with another two-part crime special.
Speaking of crimes, the season-arching case of just who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents hits a snag (or does the best thing possible) when Bruce relieves Jim of his investigatory duties as his search has only turned up one eyewitness and she turned out to be a liar.
Meanwhile, Penguin’s old boss and current fugitive gangster Fish Mooney rings up his new boss Maroni to let him in on a little secret, i.e that Penguin is a lying two-faced rat who has been gathering info for Maroni’s rival, Falcone. While Mooney is travelling, revelling in her latest smart deed, Maroni is hauling Penguin’s suited ass off to a remote cabin. They’ll eat oatmeal! And bond! And see a man about a thing!
Only there is no man and after growing suspicious about Maroni’s intentions, Penguin nabs the gun from his bag and pulls it on his boss after a game of truth or dare reveals that Maroni does indeed know about his double crossing. The gun is full of blanks though and after firing them all off, Maroni punches him out and takes him to an old junkyard, where he’ll be squished into Penguin-y paste. Well, that’s the plan anyway but Penguin rings up the junkyard’s owner and tells him that Falcone will come after him and so the owner sets him free and voila, the Penguin is once again out in the wild.
The Gay
Once again, there were no queer characters on the show. For those who are keeping track, that’s two episodes on the trot. Renee hasn’t been seen in three weeks and Barbara only showed up a fortnight ago for a pointless, 30 second scene.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one (or both) of them gets added to the ‘dead queer character’ list by the end of the season.
The Ugly
What were the ugly parts of Gotham this week? Well there was the shoddy policing and the unnecessary inclusion of Jim’s love interest. There was also the continued insistence by the show that Edward Nygma is a creepy genius and isn’t actually, just creepy as he put a bunch of severed arms in the medical examiner’s locker in order to get him fired.
I’m starting to think that Gotham is just destined to be rough around the edges. Expect another Gotham recap next week.
