I rather liked Fish's new look. Too bad it was just for one episode. Then again, she fell in the water, which is an ambiguous "death," so she could come back someday.
Hard to believe this was the season finale. It felt more like the episode before the finale. Lots of threads had unsatisfying closure. Okay, so Penguin's won the war for control of the underworld, the other gang lords are out of the picture, Nygma's had a psychotic break, and Barbara's confessed to murder... but Loeb is still commissioner, all the corrupt officials in the government are still in place, Jim still hasn't told Leslie he loves her, Bruce hasn't achieved anything more than finding a staircase, Cat's new role in Fish's gang had no payoff, Bullock was just kind of there, and just in general there was very little sense of resolution to anything.
I read that when they got an order for six extra episodes, they had to pad it out with the Dollmaker and the Flying Graysons and the Red Hood and the like -- why didn't they spend it fleshing out the closing arc more fully? Do the Ogre thing two weeks earlier, make this a three-week finale arc, explore things in more depth. At least do something to give the season a sense of resolution rather than just suddenly stopping.
Man, the more I think about it, the more I realize how totally wasted Bruce and Alfred were this week. They spent the whole episode in one room and all they achieved was finding a secret door. That was more padding than anything else, and a terrible waste of two of the show's strongest characters.
When Gordon was cornered in the hospital, I was really hoping that Bullock would show up with a squad of cops behind him, that we'd get some actual payoff to Gordon's seasonal arc of winning the respect and loyalty of the police. But the show totally abandoned that, backpedaling to a status quo where hardly anybody's on Jim's side but Bullock, Essen (who was a total no-show), and some random rookie who's gone after his one, only, and rather purposeless scene. (And as I feared, Allen and Montoya have been completely dropped as well. Why did they give Gordon two major allies and then immediately erase them from existence?)
Damn, this show is a mess. It's easily the worst comics-based show on TV. (Although I've only seen one episode of Powers, so I can't be sure about that one.) It is, at most, a guilty pleasure, watchable more for its camp value than anything else. It's weird to say that about a post-Nolan Batman-based show. I continue to find it bizarre that a show whose basic premise is more grounded and gritty than the source material, with no capes and tights and masks, has ended up being so totally wacky and cartoony.
