Gotham - Season 1
- Thread starter Agent Richard07
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Way to set the bar high.
I guess I'm the only one, but imo, Gotham is pretty much the best superhero show on tv right now. Yes, certain characters are over the top. Those are characters that are supposed to be ott, though. Welcome to Gotham city - the insanest place on earth...
I do agree the finale felt weak, rushed and a little random, though.
I do agree the finale felt weak, rushed and a little random, though.
I also find it to be a generally fun show. I thought I wouldn't be interested in it, put it on randomly several episodes into the season, and got caught up in the thing. But...
...this.
...this.
Except that it doesn't have any superheroes in it...
Not really. That's just one interpretation. Batman has been many things over the decades, ranging from the gritty and grounded crime drama exemplified by the Nolan films to the unapologetic goofiness exemplified by the Adam West series. And Gotham is a bizarre hybrid, because its avoidance of costumed heroes and emphasis on cops and mobsters implied at the start that it would be taking a more grounded, naturalistic approach, but instead it's ended up being even more caricatured and goofy than shows that actually embrace costumed heroes and villains like The Flash.
Besides, there's a difference between over-the-top camp and just plain bad writing. The characters on this show don't have coherent story arcs. They just wander around through random plots, making random choices. As I said, the climax of the mob war arc wasn't the least bit satisfying or surprising, because Penguin didn't earn it but just had it handed to him by arbitrary writer decisions. That's just bad and disappointing writing, regardless of whether you're talking about a naturalistic drama or a crazy comedy. Being silly is not an excuse for being incompetent, and the writing on this show is completely incompetent.
On the subject of the Penguin's victory seeming unearned...I suspect that next season, he's going to find that it's not easy to be king. This is a guy who can't even run a club, and now he's going to be the #1 target of a new group of contenders.
^Well, that's not quite the same subject, since you're talking about the situation for the person in-universe as if he were real (for the sake of discussion), whereas I'm talking about the inept story choices made by the writers. The situation next season won't be any more coherent unless they make some changes in the writing staff, e.g. promoting Ben Edlund to showrunner.
I think it's kind of the same subject, because it really was an unearned victory in-show as well as story-wise. But yeah, that whole element could have been written in a more satisfying way. Like if Penguin had done more to manipulate his enemies into killing each other. He did start the gang war for exactly that purpose, but the actually offing of his rivals was pretty random.
That's true. I meant to say Genre show.
It's the interpretation I like best, so, yay for me. And the Flash is way campier than Gotham. Captain Cold could've almost fit right into the Adam West universe, and he was far from the worst offender.
They seem mostly coherent to me. Again, aside from the finale which I agree was weird. Bruce is steadily chipping away at finding out what his dad was up to. Gordon is trying harder and harder to make a difference while steadily getting dragged down into the muck of having to make shady deals to get something done, because the city is that far gone. Bullock has gotten to the point where his partner is more important than his long habit of doing whats expected. Nygma has been trying hard to earn people's respect, and the constant failure has finally caused him to snap. Penguin made lots of very smart decisions that have steadily brought him higher up the chain (again, apart from the finale).
I do agree Selina and Barbara have been mostly wandering around, with the writers not really knowing what to do with them. Selina works ok as Bruce's streetwise guide, so I was fine with that, and I was assuming based on earlier episodes that they had some idea where they were going with Barbara, but after the serial killer thing, I guess they don't, which is a shame. Still a great show, though.
You could argue that Penguin has been planning all this, and has successfully manipulated and maneuvered himself into this position since the start of the season. It's not like he sat on his hands all season and then took advantage of a random situation. He planned every move. Seems to me like he earned it. Whether he'll have the ability to keep it is another matter.
Personally, I don't think the Gang War is so much over, as it is about to take a new turn.
Personally, I don't think the Gang War is so much over, as it is about to take a new turn.
Except it's dragging out, wandering off on tangents, and not really going anywhere.
Except the arc lost focus early in the season, and the signs that Gordon was starting to win allies and respect in the department were abandoned in favor of dragging out the original status quo. Montoya and Allen became Gordon's allies, which should've been an important story point from that moment onward, but they disappeared from the show immediately afterward.
I see the same thing happening here that happened in LOST. At first, the writers had story arcs that they moved forward at a reasonable pace, but then they got an order for more episodes and it looked likely that they'd get another season, so they put the brakes on the story arcs and regressed everything to an earlier status quo. Instead of adding substantively to the story arcs, they just diluted them to fill more space. And so stories that were evolving in interesting directions just stopped evolving and either meandered in holding patterns or went backward. That's when I lost interest in LOST, and it hasn't done much for my opinion of Gotham.
Yeah, but he got there more than half a season ago and hasn't had any real development since.
Which came about rather abruptly, I felt, and in a very cliched way. Did he have to murder someone to become the bad guy? If it actually had happened as you describe, if his breakdown had been the result of the cumulative slights he endured at work rather than his murder of the suddenly-inserted abusive boyfriend -- or if it had been because Ms. Kringle herself had rejected and humiliated him definitively rather than just being a passive object in the story -- that would've been more interesting than what we got.
Besides, I don't agree that the Riddler should "snap." I think that's misunderstanding his character, drawing from the Jim Carrey version rather than the more standard portrayal of the character. Normally, the Riddler isn't a homicidal maniac. He's a rational, calculating master criminal who thrives on the intellectual challenge of clashing with Batman and whose only significant behavioral disorder is a compulsion to leave clues and puzzles for the authorities and Batman to solve.
Batman's rogues' gallery is so effective because its characters are so diverse. But we're not getting that here. The Penguin started out as a brutal killer, then Nygma became a killer, Selina became a killer, even Barbara killed her parents. Nobody on this show gets to be a bad guy any other way than murdering someone, and that's lazy. And it isn't fitting for either Nygma or Selina. Catwoman's supposed to be a character who skirts the line between hero and villain, a thief rather than a murderer.
I don't know about that. As I've said before, Barbara's role in the comics was not to be Jim's destined love, but to be his ex, the person he broke up with. So I always expected something would happen to separate them definitively. So maybe this was always their plan for her. Heck, they've turned everyone else into a killer, as I said.
That applies to his actions before, but not to what happened in the finale itself. He didn't do anything in this episode to earn his victory. He let himself get captured by Gordon and then by Fish. He did nothing to bring about Fish's decision to kill Maroni or Falcone's decision to retire. And it was purely by luck that he was less injured by Butch's gunfire than Fish was. That's not an earned victory, and the sheer arbitrariness of it undermines the effectiveness of his previous arc. It doesn't matter how good your routine is if you fall flat on your face in the dismount. That just ruins it.
How's it supposed to happen? He just finds a hidden file with everything he needs to know. They're making him work for it. There's nothing wrong with that.
I'll have to rewatch the mid-season eps sometime, but I don't remember getting the impression that he was ever that popular. And the GCPD isn't exactly a dependable group. Allen and Montoya disappearing is a fair point, though.
He's had a less story arc in the second half. It's an ensemble show with a big cast. I have no problem with some characters sidelining for a little bit every now and then.
I've thoroughly enjoyed every part of Nygma's storyline. Ymmv, obviously. Also, I have no problem believing that Selina is willing to kill someone if she thinks it's necessary. That doesn't make her equivalent to the Penguin.
Maybe so. Season 2 will bring some answers, I assume. Still seems like a very strange place to take her character. Her not being able to deal with the danger Jim was getting into made sense and was interesting. Her randomly turning into a psychopath is, well, unexpected, but not necessarily in a good way. But, like I say, season 2 may make it all make sense.
Not quite accurate. It was Penguin who started Fish and Moroni arguing in the first place, clearly with the intention of creating some opportunity to escape. If he hadn't done that, well, she still might have killed Moroni, but Penguin would've already been dead by that point. He also displayed his cunning in convincing Gordon not to leave him in Falcone's hospital room, which also saved his life. But in the final scene, yes, it came down to luck.
No, they're making him meander in no particular direction. The way to handle an ongoing arc like this is to have a series of nested revelations, payoffs that serve to introduce new layers of the problem. That way, there's actually a sense of progress and accomplishment even while the ultimate answers remain elusive. Here, they've just stuck Bruce into a series of vignettes that are vaguely connected to his larger search but don't seem to have any sense of progress or interconnection. They're just side quests to mark time.
That's not what I said. What I said was that there were signs that we were seeing the early stages of an arc about Gordon gradually gaining the trust and respect of the GCPD. He won over Bullock, Essen, and finally Montoya and Allen, so there was some momentum building, a sense that he was going to get more people in his corner, win more victories in his quest to remind the cops that they were supposed to be on the side of law and order. There was a direction to that story arc. And then it lost direction. It was just forgotten and ignored for the rest of the increasingly directionless season.
Not to start, of course. But the story of James Gordon, ever since Batman: Year One, has been the story of how he comes into the corrupt GCPD and changes it for the better. If its corruption and incompetence just remains an immutable fact, then the story isn't going anywhere.
This is too often the problem with serial storytelling. At its best, serial storytelling can make a narrative richer and more engaging because its events have lasting consequences and the characters and their world continue to evolve. But all too often, lazy writers use serialization as an excuse to avoid the effort of coming up with a satisfactory resolution for anything. They just use perpetual cliffhangers to keep people coming back and assume they don't have to bother to give any story an ending or any question an answer. LOST was perhaps the most infamous offender; staffers on that show have admitted that they never had any solutions in mind for the mysteries they shoved in, that it was all just smoke and mirrors (sometimes literally). And that's a lazy cheat. Gotham seems to have been doing things the same way for most of the season. There's no sense of progress, just marking time.
My main issue with the reveal of Thomas Wayne's bat-infested man-cave is that we saw the bit with Bruce finding the sliding fireplace in previews for two episodes before the finale. So I assumed that would be fairly early in the episode and we'd get to see more. But nope, they just spinned their wheels on that thread for the entire episode, and the sliding fireplace was the climax. What payoff did we get for two weeks of teasers? Stairs!
Well that's huge! It means, there are no bat-poles!
(Also,Bruce can have a Batcave with relatively few people knowing of its existence. Most of the people who built it are dead, or just plain forgot)
Last night I got around to watching the Gotham S1 finale and I read a few pages to discover that my "WTF did I just watch" feelings aren't alone.
Fish - Last we saw Fish escaping the island in the helicopter she is shot, on her left side. The episode opens with her coming in like she's the Queen of the Ferryman off the River Styx's. She and Penguin fight on the roof and she takes body shots from Penguin to her left side. That should really, really hurt--yet, no real noticeable pain increase from her.
Selina - So Cat spends two weeks with Fish and suddenly she's a badass cop killer? She's going to ignore and mock Gordon? She is the one carrying the gun leading a group of adult men thugs to track down Gordon/Bullock/Falcone??
Butch - Why are we acting like, or Fish was, that something had been 'done' to him? Butch is a very loyal but opportunistic character on the show. He was with Fish, then Falcone who appoints him to Penguin and through all this he is shown as a very competent, in control person. Suddenly in this episode he's portrayed as a bit unstable and somewhat manic--that came from nowhere at all.
Maroni - I'd love to have it revealed that his head shot somehow ended up just being a glancing blow, regardless how dead on it looked. I really enjoy that actor in the role and frankly Maroni is needed for Harvey's conversion into Two Face later. Despite the leeway they've taken on this show in a number of areas it'd be unnecessary to change this as well.
Barbara Keane - so now she's the murder of her own parents, not the Ogre? Not even sure what to believe on that honestly. She's been shown as a fairly weak character so it wouldn't be hard to write her character as still fractured from that experience and not really in her "right mind". I'll be glad though if the net result is that she goes away for next season and the in story reason is she's seeking treatment somewhere else--Metropolis maybe?
Nygma, Gordon, Bullock, Leslie, Bruce and Falcone all felt like their storylines were within reason to this point for the finale. I didn't get any WTF vibes from their portrayal in this finale.
I can say that it ended in such a crazy and bizarre unflattering way that it doesn't leave me waiting on baited breath at the edge of my seat for S2. More like I'll tune in to see if the train is still heading for the brick wall or if the writers rooms realizes their mistakes and hits the track switch.
Fish - Last we saw Fish escaping the island in the helicopter she is shot, on her left side. The episode opens with her coming in like she's the Queen of the Ferryman off the River Styx's. She and Penguin fight on the roof and she takes body shots from Penguin to her left side. That should really, really hurt--yet, no real noticeable pain increase from her.
Selina - So Cat spends two weeks with Fish and suddenly she's a badass cop killer? She's going to ignore and mock Gordon? She is the one carrying the gun leading a group of adult men thugs to track down Gordon/Bullock/Falcone??
Butch - Why are we acting like, or Fish was, that something had been 'done' to him? Butch is a very loyal but opportunistic character on the show. He was with Fish, then Falcone who appoints him to Penguin and through all this he is shown as a very competent, in control person. Suddenly in this episode he's portrayed as a bit unstable and somewhat manic--that came from nowhere at all.
Maroni - I'd love to have it revealed that his head shot somehow ended up just being a glancing blow, regardless how dead on it looked. I really enjoy that actor in the role and frankly Maroni is needed for Harvey's conversion into Two Face later. Despite the leeway they've taken on this show in a number of areas it'd be unnecessary to change this as well.
Barbara Keane - so now she's the murder of her own parents, not the Ogre? Not even sure what to believe on that honestly. She's been shown as a fairly weak character so it wouldn't be hard to write her character as still fractured from that experience and not really in her "right mind". I'll be glad though if the net result is that she goes away for next season and the in story reason is she's seeking treatment somewhere else--Metropolis maybe?
Nygma, Gordon, Bullock, Leslie, Bruce and Falcone all felt like their storylines were within reason to this point for the finale. I didn't get any WTF vibes from their portrayal in this finale.
I can say that it ended in such a crazy and bizarre unflattering way that it doesn't leave me waiting on baited breath at the edge of my seat for S2. More like I'll tune in to see if the train is still heading for the brick wall or if the writers rooms realizes their mistakes and hits the track switch.
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