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Spoilers Gotham - Season 2

Forbin said:
I'm not real happy with our hero executing Galavan. Oddly enough, I'd be okay with him turning his back, walking away and letting Penguin have his way. It may be a fine line, but I've been okay with heroes letting bad guys die before.

The only other bad-guy execution by a hero I can recall was on Miami Vice. Crockett confronted the man who murdered his wife, who then taunted him that cops don't murder people, and since they were in the Bahamas at the time he couldn't even arrest him.We saw Sonny fire, then walk away. We cut to the bad guy dead. But then they tried to backpedal by showing a gun in the bad guy's hand. We were left with the question, did the bad guy draw on a drawn gun? Or did Sonny plant it? There was also the mitigation that Crockett was not in his right mind, and he then descended into a schizophrenic period where he believed he was hi undercover criminal persona.

Here, we just have our good guy betraying all his principles and assassinating someone because he couldn't do his job well enough to get him convicted.
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[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7vW1oEKP1k[/yt]
 
Anyone find it funny that they promote Chris Chalk to series regular and then Lucius Fox is barely on? I guess they need to continue the tradition from last season. Now he needs to sleep with Barbara and suddenly never be heard from again. :lol:
 
He's been down in the batcave fixing the PC. He's taking almost as long as some of our IT guys at work.
 
Maybe he's building an atomic reactor down there as a side project.

And/or decorating the place with robot dinosaurs and giant pennies.

Keep me informed...if the giant penny shows up, I may start watching the show again.
 
Are we to assume that Galavan could be brought back? That would absolve Gordon of being a murderer. Sort of.

And Fish Mooney was also there at Indian Hill in a tank.
 
Santa the Hutt said:
Are we to assume that Galavan could be brought back? That would absolve Gordon of being a murderer. Sort of.
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It's still attempted murder. His mens rea was that of a murderer. And of course he's still guity of felony murder for the killing he committed in the season premiere. He did it during his commission of a crime, and the felony murder rule trumps self-defense.
 
Oh, just because your victim is reanimated thru arcane sci fi means, doesn't absolve you of first degree murder.
 
Forbin said:
Oh, just because your victim is reanimated thru arcane sci fi means, doesn't absolve you of first degree murder.
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I seemed to recall the Law and the Multiverse blog covering this, and yes, according to it, you're right:

http://lawandthemultiverse.com/2010/12/07/resurrection-redux-crimes-punishment-and-debt/
There’s another potential wrinkle in here: what if someone is convicted for murder and then the victim comes back to life?
Actually, this one is could be pretty straightforward: if the victim was actually dead at some point, i.e. he really was dead, he wasn’t simply missing or presumed dead, then the elements of the crime are still complete. The defendant did, in fact, kill the victim. Whether or not the victim stays dead is not actually an element of any homicide offense. So it would seem that this is ultimately irrelevant, which is perhaps a little counter-intuitive but does have the benefit of simplifying things a lot. As courts tend to like rulings which alleviate the burden on their dockets, this is not an unlikely outcome.
If, on the other hand, the victim turns out to have merely been critically injured and then lost or hidden, as has happened too many times in comic book history to count, things do change somewhat. If the defendant has been sentenced to death, that sentence would probably be commuted, as the Supreme Court is pretty consistent about requiring a dead body before the death penalty can be invoked. See, e.g., Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 534 (1977). But it is unlikely that the conviction would be overturned entirely. A murder conviction includes all the elements of attempted murder, and a manslaughter conviction would probably include all the elements of aggravated assault. Whether or not a court would order a new trial probably depends on the facts of the crime and the reappearance.
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So... if Galavan is actually dead by legal definition, and yet is subsequently brought back by extraordinary means, then Jim would still be guilty of murder. If Galavan was just nearly killed and manages to recover, then Jim is guilty of attempted murder. Either way, he's a bad guy now.
 
Christopher said:
And of course he's still guity of felony murder for the killing he committed in the season premiere. He did it during his commission of a crime, and the felony murder rule trumps self-defense.
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Not this again.

Self-defence doesn't simply end at a certain, arbitrary moment. If you are assaulted and take a weapon away from someone, run away, and then that person takes up another weapon and chases after you, there is still a condition of self-defence.

Neither had he committed a felony. If someone owes you money and you grab it off the table in front of them it is not a criminal offence, it is a civil case. They can sue you (and likely lose if the money was actually owed) but you can't be arrested (in Canada at least.)

I think the fact that Gordon's actions in the season opener were grey makes the actions in the mid-season finale more poignant, and I think it is no coincidence that these episodes are bookends to a season where he is driven further to the edge by event after event.

Gordon as a consistent boy scout would get predictable pretty fast. The drama between him and Lee, the dance he has with Penguin, the push/pull with Barnes all make for a more interesting story than the goody-goody Jim from the first episodes of season 1.
 
The most enjoyable part of this great little series for me is Bruce, Alfred and our wonderful Selina.

It most certainly will be interesting and we progress forward. I personally am hoping for a Fish sighting.
 
Ok, for some reason the quote function isn't wanting to work. A couple people mentioned that the actor playing Lucius was a regular and barely appeared in the season, but he wasn't the only one, the guy who plays Harvey Dent is also a regular and was barely in the half-season. I do have to wonder why they are making these people regulars if they don't actually have plans for them.

I'm now responding to Christopher's comments about Gordon. I can see being frustrated if you are expecting Gordon to always be the incoruptable heroic cop, but I just look at his story in Gotham as the story of how he became that person. I don't really have a problem with Gordon going to the kinds of dark places we're seeing here. I'm pretty sure by the end of the series he'll be the Gordon we see working with Batman.
 
JD said:
I'm now responding to Christopher's comments about Gordon. I can see being frustrated if you are expecting Gordon to always be the incoruptable heroic cop, but I just look at his story in Gotham as the story of how he became that person.
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But that is exactly the problem -- that was what I expected the story to be, but it is no longer possible for him to become that person. Gordon is now a murderer at least twice over. He committed felony murder unintentionally in the pilot and straight-up deliberate murder in the winter finale. He has now crossed a line that he can never come back from. He can never be an incorruptible cop, because he's already been irredeemably corrupted. His only options are to confess his crimes and go to jail, or to become commissioner while continuing to lie about his crimes and cover them up, in which case he's just one more corrupt, self-serving official. Which means the battle is already lost. I've pointed this out multiple times already in this thread. That's why I stopped watching after the season finale -- because I wanted to see the story of how Gordon became the man we knew, but that was the moment at which it became clear that this Gordon could never become that man.
 
But IS Gordon supposed to be in the "incorruptible" cop... and what does that mean? He's certainly not doing it for the money?

He needs to be frustrated enough in his work to "need" Batman, and yet hav hope enough to keep going.

The way Gotham treats murders,no one not just never gets caught, but no one cares. There's no "proof" like we have in Chicago right now with a couple of them.

And I understand what you're saying Christopher...but as we all see it, there is NO ONE better who can help.

Gordon's "penance" will be to do things by the book.. and basically not get caught in the future. But his limitations as a city official will have him turn to Batman's means.. which were better than Gordon's previous efforts.

But i agree -- it's a shame that they Gotham couldn't show a good man's journey with him killing someone. (And the same for a bad guy -- the Riddler)
 
Far be it from me to defend the questionable choices of a show that I've chosen to stop watching, but I could see this Gordon growing into the character we know. It's going to be a long story going from where he is now to the Batman years (whether or not the show lives to tell it), and it's a valid choice to have Gordon's journey involve him becoming corrupted by Gotham before he tries to drag it out of the corruption behind him. You learn from your mistakes, and he's arguably getting some valuable experience in how things work in Gotham. Future Gordon will be driven to atone for his mistakes...but he won't be able to help Gotham from a jail cell.

Not that I'd lay down money on the showrunners having put that much thought into what they're doing....
 
Morpheus 02 said:
But IS Gordon supposed to be in the "incorruptible" cop... and what does that mean? He's certainly not doing it for the money?
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I already spelled this out in my previous post, and weeks ago after the premiere. He is guilty of murder. The only way, therefore, that he can have a career that leads to being the commissioner of police is by continuously lying and covering up his guilt for the rest of his life. So everything he could do as a cop from this point onward is corrupted by the simple fact that he's hiding from justice for his crimes. He cannot be any kind of commissioner except a corrupt and self-serving one, one who has to hide the truth and suppress justice in order to maintain his position of power. At this point, the only ethical and law-abiding thing he could do was to confess and pay for his crimes, and then his police career would be over, since no police force is going to hire a convicted murderer. So the only options for him are to be a corrupt cop or no cop at all. That is why he cannot ever become the Jim Gordon we know.

It's one thing to tell a story about the young Gordon bending the law, making the occasional moral compromise on the path toward cleaning up the system. That's where the show seemed to be going in the first season. But now he's crossed from bending the law and justice to BECOMING A FREAKING MURDERER. That is an entirely different kettle of Joker fish.


And I understand what you're saying Christopher...but as we all see it, there is NO ONE better who can help.
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How? How can this pathetic excuse for Jim Gordon possibly help? He's accomplished nothing. He's just spiraled further and further down into corruption. He let the Penguin get his hooks into him and became more and more compromised. Now, if I recall what I read about the latest episode correctly, he's actually cohabiting with the Penguin and the Riddler. He's no longer even trying to solve the Wayne murders. He has demonstrated no qualifications for cleaning up Gotham. Gotham has beaten him at every turn. I wouldn't trust this version of Gordon to clean up a bus station.
 
"incorruptible". What in the hell are y'all talking about?! I'm not saying that the Jim Gordon we have known from the comics is a BAD guy, or even that he isn't justified in a lot of what he does, BUT, he's the police commissioner, sworn to uphold the law, and he actively cooperates with a man dressed as a bat who breaks and enters, commits assaults and any number of other crimes, while operating illegal military grade equipment inside Gotham.

I think the corruption ship sailed a loooong time ago. :lol:
 
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