Gotham "Under the Knife" (REVIEW)
written by Omar Castillon (@omar_castillon)
In this second part of the whole Ogre storyline, we continue with more speculations as to who might be behind the murders. Obviously the audience knows, but Gordon and Bullock have to go all the way back to the first crime that was reported by an older officer worn down by his job. He in turn tells of the first murder and how it was all a dead end. This dead end of course leads to the 11 other women The Ogre killed. Gordon and Bullock connect some dots and end up going to the mansion of a wealthy family presumed to be connected to The Ogre. It turns out that The Ogre’s father was the butler of the mansion and the resident that was being taken care of has been dead for more years than a normal human should be kept above ground. Despite Gordon believing in Leslie being in danger after he realized the whole, “he kills your loved ones” dilemma, Gordon has some luck keeping her out of the whole mess. Instead, The Ogre had been following Gordon and Barbara before they broke up (or whatever the hell happened) so in turn, The Ogre goes after Barbara instead of Leslie. Barbara then does a whole ridiculous act about her being dark and foreboding. I wasn’t convinced by her sudden turn as a “mysterious” persona type of character. In fact, this made me want to change the channel…again.
In better storylines, Bruce and Selina go on their own adventure to a gala (ironically the same one Barbara goes) where Bruce meets up with the man that could possibly be behind the murder of his parents. Earlier in the episode, it was pretty great seeing the moral struggle of taking someone’s life. If you remember the previous episode, Selina pushes Reggie Payne out of his drug den to his death. Bruce is shocked and questions Selina’s morals. Bruce still plays along and is dead set on finding out what the Wayne Enterprises senior officers are really after. Not the best plot point per se but at least the storyline with Bruce and his parents’ murder did move forward a bit.
Cobblepot had a more reduced role this week having an encounter with Maroni. It wasn’t a happy reunion obviously because Maroni shows up unannounced to Cobblepot’s club and whispers horrible things to Cobblepot’s mother. She is shocked by the things Maroni tells her and Cobblepot sees it as an attack on him directly, you know, without guns blazing and whatnot. Little by little Cobblepot becomes what he says he is not, a killer. He kills one of Maroni’s messengers outside of his mother’s apartment. It seems like we as an audience are finally seeing Cobblepot’s true colors. Speaking of true colors, Nygma finally has his time to shine when he has had enough of the police officers at GCPD. It wasn’t a random crime so to speak but a crime of passion. He sees that his crush has bruises on her arm and confronts the officer she is dating (kind of a submissive type I see) and Nygma finally snaps. In a rainy setting, Nygma stabs the officer to death and laughs in a maniacal manner. Earlier in the episode Nygma foreshadows to his sort of violent nature with a ton of watermelons being stabbed. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming.
It was another weak episode this week. The writers have seriously dropped the ball on these last couple of episodes suffering from tone inconsistencies and poor writing. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; the long hiatus was a terrible move by both Fox and the creators of Gotham. It’s as if the writers were trying to cash in on the whole 50 Shades of Grey craze from a couple of months ago with the recent Ogre storyline. It’s frustrating to see the series go so low after being an edge of your seat pace it once had before the midseason finale. On the plus side, NO FISH MOONEY! I’m sure she will be back at the very end of the season but I’m about ready for this season to wrap up. I just hope the last two episodes make the payoff worth it in the end. And maybe by then, Gotham can have better writers or at least reduce the number of episodes to 13 just so it can be a tighter on their storytelling. Criminal of the week format at least for Gotham still needs a lot of work to do.
