By: Brandon Wolfe
After last week’s narrative pyrotechnics concerning Gotham City’s ensuing mob war and the Penguin’s key role in it, ‘Gotham’ shifts back into procedural mode, a mode that it still hasn’t quite cracked how to do well with. With the more interesting story threads largely moved to the backburner this week, Gordon and Bullock are back at work on a more standard case, and the episode suffers for it.
“The Mask” concerns a financial firm that exercises the unusual hiring process of having its young hotshot prospects fight each other to the death for a seat at the table, all to satisfy the whims of its deranged CEO, Richard Sionis. When the body (with the gruesome addition of a severed finger in its mouth) of a failed prospect is recovered, Gordon and Bullock begin poking around and begin to notice that virtually all of Sionis’ charges around the office bear some form of battle scarring. This all leads to a confrontation between Gordon and Sionis at one of the warehouses where these bouts are held and broadcast for the amusement of the firm’s partners, where Gordon quickly loses the upper hand and it look for a time as though none of his police colleagues are coming to his aid.
This scenario, essentially mashing up ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ with ‘Fight Club,’ seems to be the writers’ attempt at satire of the cutthroat nature of corporate culture, but it doesn’t really land. Nothing about the storyline really lands, for that matter. But given that Sionis appears to be the series’ version of the villain Black Mask, it stands to reason that we will revisit him at a later date, with the hopes that future storylines will find greater success with him than this one.
Another area we can only hope the series will do better with eventually revolves around Barbara Gordon, who is still handed the thankless task of sitting around Gordon’s apartment to grouse at him about how he is pushing her away. All the overheated dialogue that this character has to spout each week continues to sound hopelessly inauthentic, even in the greater context of a show that doesn’t exactly do dialogue well in the first place. Over the course of the episode, it appears that Barbara decides to leave Gordon, but there’s no way we’re getting off that easy. The show needs to find a role for the character to play beyond constantly haranguing Gordon about not letting her into his world. As it stands, it just seems to go around in circles.
But Barbara is hardly the only character that ‘Gotham’ doesn’t have a handle on. In addition to Selina Kyle and Mrs. Cobblepot, two characters that the series continues to shoehorn into the proceedings without seeming to know why, there’s also the eternal problem of young Bruce Wayne. His portion of the story this week is better than usual, as he’s pushed out of the house and into a prep school by Alfred, who feels the boy needs to be around peers. While attempting to find his place, Bruce is menaced by a bully named Tommy Eliot (who will become the character Hush in his later days), who likes to rub the murders of Bruce’s parents’ in our young hero’s face. With the encouragement of Alfred, Bruce decides to strike back at his tormenter by going to the boy’s house and pummeling his face, with the promise that Alfred will further hone Bruce’s fighting prowess from here on out.
This is almost certainly the best material that the Bruce Wayne character has been handed so far on ‘Gotham’ and the show is doing a solid job at making Alfred a tough old cuss instead of a tweedy butler, but it seems to have been beamed in from a completely different show altogether. The show needs to decide once and for all whose story ‘Gotham’ is, Gordon’s or Bruce’s, because there really isn’t an effective way for it to be both.
While Gordon is stuck idling in the same straight-arrow setting indefinitely, Bullock has become the more interesting member of the duo. Established as a slovenly, hopelessly corrupt boor, Bullock has grown as both a character and a cop over these eight episodes, and he gets the episode’s best moment when he loudly chastises the entire precinct over their cowardly unwillingness to assist Gordon in any way, even when the man’s life is hanging in the balance, a speech rousing enough that it even survives Bullock’s unfortunate use of the word “asshat.” ‘Gotham’ hasn’t displayed a tremendous amount of character growth thus far (aside from Bruce already being halfway to becoming Batman before his voice has even deepened), but the strides Bullock has made are noteworthy and admirable.
As always, ‘Gotham’ lives and dies by its Penguin. Robin Lord Taylor continues to be the straw that stirs the drink here, whether bluntly robbing a woman of her jewelry on the street, tensely facing down Fish Mooney as an equal at the bargaining table or menacing a Falcone lieutenant for information (the less said about the scene with the creepy, eccentrically accented Mama Penguin, however, the better). Penguin’s power play and rapid climb up the criminal ladder represent the series at its strongest, and Taylor’s work contains the personality that so much of the rest of the series is lacking. If ‘Gotham’ can spread some of that flavor around to the areas where it’s sorely needed, maybe it will blossom into something stronger than its present incarnation. The Penguin shouldn’t have all the fun.
Discuss this review with fellow SJF fans on Facebook. On Twitter, follow us at @SandwichJFilms, and follow author Brandon Wolfe on Twitter at @BrandonTheWolfe
Please Leave A Comment-
Comments