By: Brandon Wolfe
With roughly half of its first season now laid out, ‘Gotham’ is still struggling to get its act together. The flaws that one hoped were temporary and being worked through are now starting to look like they might be the house style. The show is all thumbs, uncertain of what it wants to be and seemingly incapable of any artfulness. It should be much better than this, yet it doesn’t seem to be on any path to redemption.
Arguably the biggest problem with ‘Gotham’ is its stubborn insistence on cramming young Bruce Wayne into the works as a major character. This decision has hamstrung the show by forcing a character into a context in which he simply doesn’t make sense. ‘Gotham’ was sold as a gritty cop procedural set in a pre-Batman Gotham City. This is a conceit with promise, at least in theory, but it’s also one where a schoolboy version of Bruce Wayne makes little sense playing a sizable role. The creators seem convinced that people will not accept a version of the Batman universe without some incarnation of the iconic character in there, but continuing to return to Wayne Manor each week to check in on Bruce always feels like somebody sat on the remote and changed the channel. ‘Gotham’ needs to choose whether it wants to be a cop show or ‘Smallville’ and stop pretending like it’s possible to be both at the same time.
The union of Bruce and Selina Kyle at least gives these two problematic characters a reasonable seat at the grown-ups table this week as a hit squad descends on Wayne Manor to take out the Catwoman-in-progress before she can testify as the only witness to the Wayne murders. While the villains are fended off by the show’s surprisingly spry version of Alfred (and Sean Pertwee remains the show’s secret weapon), the tots flee the grounds, with “Cat” taking Bruce into the city to hide out at Flea, a decrepit wreck of a building described as a “mall” for street kids. While there, they cross paths with Ivy, a socially awkward orphan that one presumes will eventually become Poison Ivy, making this scene play out like “Batman: The High School Years” (it is to the show’s credit, however, that it resists its usual impulse to bludgeon us with winks and make numerous plant references toward the character). Bruce and Selina manage to keep one step ahead of their pursuers and bond in the process, with Selena even giving him his first taste of rooftop-jumping, before culminating in a kiss. This is cute, I suppose, but does anyone really want ‘Gotham’ to be about how Batman and Catwoman started out as Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper?
Still, focusing on the kids this week at least shifts our focus away from the increasing tedium of the mob-war storyline. Mooney’s plan to upset the order of things is working as Falcone presumes the assault on his vault was perpetrated by Maroni, for which he holds the Penguin personally responsible due to the lack of an advance warning. Cobblepot swears innocence and vows to sniff out the mole in Falcone’s organization, which he knows is Mooney and just needs to prove. All the jockeying for position among these characters has grown stale. It feels like it’s on a constant repeat cycle, and is only ever at all entertaining when the Penguin is onscreen. The show is clearly teasing an eventual blowout with these mob figures and one can only hope it leaves most of them dead so we can focus on more interesting villains going forward.
Gordon’s story takes a turn this week. While he spends most of the hour trying to locate Baby Bat and Kiddie Cat, he also gets to bristle with Harvey Dent over the attorney inadvertently endangering the children with an intentional leak. The assassins pursuing Selina corner Gordon when he tracks down shady businessman Lovecraft (whom this episode is inexplicably named after) and attempt to frame Gordon for the man’s murder, which gives the mayor the leverage to remove Gordon from active duty, reassigning him as a glorified security guard at the newly reopened Arkham Asylum. This is a potentially intriguing wrinkle going forward, as it could offer the opportunity to meet some other eventual members of the Rogue’s Gallery and take a breather from the dull Mafiosos, but it does seem limiting toward what Gordon’s role in the series can be in future episodes. After all, making sure, say, a young Scarecrow keeps his cell clean is hardly a job for a lead character.
The characters remaining wafer-thin caricatures is still one of the core issues with ‘Gotham.’ Gordon remains potentially the dullest protagonist on television. McKenzie can grit his teeth all he wants, but that doesn’t make this hopelessly boring character compelling. Donal Logue fares even worse as Bullock, whom the show seems to think is a breakout character, yet is irritating and unappealing. Bullock’s painful one-liners, one rolling out after another, hit the ears like a razor-studded Q-tip. ‘Gotham’ is a pitiful dialogue show. It’s one of those comic-book adaptations where the writers don’t realize that what can fly within the confines of word balloons doesn’t work when spoken aloud by actual human beings. No one talks like a person on this show and it’s a real problem.
‘Gotham’ retreats into its brief winter hiatus in no better shape than it was months ago in its wobbly pilot. Maybe 2015 will be where the series will start to flourish. If not, then it might be time to ascend to the roof of Fox headquarters and fire up the Cancellation Signal into the night sky (it’s shaped like the ‘Firefly’ logo).
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