• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Gotham - Season 1

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.

That one was hinted at before, he was only really loyal to Fish, Maroni brainwashed him somehow before he appointed him to the Penguin.
 
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.

That one was hinted at before, he was only really loyal to Fish, Maroni brainwashed him somehow before he appointed him to the Penguin.

Wasn't it Falcone who had him brainwashed?! Well, I actually just remember him being tortured. When Falcone brought him to work for the Penguin, I guess it was a natural conclusion that he was brainwashed, considering his loyalty to Fish. But once he started actually working, I got the impression his loyalty had shifted from Fish to the night club, and thus to Penguin.

Could be totally misremembering it all, though.
 
So... I can't imagine Jim Gorden EVER getting back together with Barbara the way she ended up at the end of the season. This does not seem like the Barbara Gordon who was depicted in every other incarnation of the Batman mythos.

Kor
 
Butch followed orders without question (to avoid going back to the chair.).

He danced like a monkey, when they gave him to Penguin, because they told him to dance like a monkey.

They'd broke Butch.

Of course it just seemed up till the last episode that his mind had had it's loyalties remoored, but now thanks to the last episode, it seems that he'd become a jibbering gimp all along as well. Which is weird because Butch was the mastermind behind Penguins new empire, helping him iron out his wrinkles with manpower and his liquor supply.
 
So... I can't imagine Jim Gorden EVER getting back together with Barbara the way she ended up at the end of the season. This does not seem like the Barbara Gordon who was depicted in every other incarnation of the Batman mythos.

Kor

(You probably know this.)

Barbara Kean was Jim's first wife in the comics.

Their son, James Gordon JR is a serial killer recently attached to the Suicide Squad.

James had an affair.

His second wife is Sarah.

She's the keeper.

Barabra Gordon/Batgirl was Jim's half grown niece, who he adopted as his daughter after one of his siblings died. In other versions of the DCU, after a crisis or two, Barbara was retconned as Gordon's biological daughter.
 
So... I can't imagine Jim Gorden EVER getting back together with Barbara the way she ended up at the end of the season. This does not seem like the Barbara Gordon who was depicted in every other incarnation of the Batman mythos.

Kor

(You probably know this.)

Barbara Kean was Jim's first wife in the comics.

Their son, James Gordon JR is a serial killer recently attached to the Suicide Squad.

James had an affair.

His second wife is Sarah.

She's the keeper.

Barabra Gordon/Batgirl was Jim's half grown niece, who he adopted as his daughter after one of his siblings died. In other versions of the DCU, after a crisis or two, Barbara was retconned as Gordon's biological daughter.


More complicated than that, really. Before the '86 continuity reboot, Jim Gordon was married to Thelma Gordon and they had a daughter, Barbara, who was Batgirl. Alan Brennert and Dick Giordano's 1981 classic "To Kill A Legend," set in an alternate world where everything was time-displaced by a couple of decades so it was effectively the past, introduced Barbara Kean as Jim's fiancee and implicitly the future mother of Batgirl. When the continuity was rebooted with Batman: Year One, Frank Miller introduced a version of that Barbara into the main universe as Gordon's wife and the mother of James Jr., but she left him during that story due to his affair with Sarah Essen (who was originally his subordinate, not his boss as in Gotham). That's the version you're talking about, where he and Sarah adopted his niece, also named Barbara, who grew up to be Batgirl. In that version, Babs's mother was still named Thelma, but she was married to Jim's brother Roger instead.

The idea of Barbara Eileen Gordon (nee Kean?) as Babs/Batgirl's mother didn't come into existence until the New 52 reboot in 2011.

Anyway, there have actually been very few portrayals of the character outside of her occasional comics appearances. She had a bit role in the first two Nolan movies (played by Ilyssa Fradin in Batman Begins and Melinda McGraw in The Dark Knight) and was in the animated movie adaptation of Year One (played by Grey DeLisle Griffin). This is the first time she's ever really been a major focus character (although the BYO adaptation slightly enlarged her role from the comic).
 
Kermit flails all around!

My question is, who won't be returning next season? One of the show's many, many flaws this season is that it piled on way too many regulars up front, an insanely bloated 13-person main cast, and had trouble juggling them all. Two, Victoria Cartagena and Andrew Stewart-Jones (Montoya and Allen), were abandoned less than halfway through the season (though still billed and paid as regulars), and others, notably Camren Bicondova, Erin Richards, and sometimes Jada Pinkett-Smith, meandered through the narrative in search of some reason for being there at all. And perhaps that bloating was why the choices that were made about the character focus weren't particularly good ones.

Going in, it looks like we've lost Pinkett-Smith and John Doman as regulars, and we can assume that Cartagena and Stewart-Jones won't be back (although I'd like to be wrong about that). Richards also seems unlikely to be back as a regular. So subtract those and add Baccarin, and the main cast is down to nine people. Character-wise, that'd be Gordon, Bullock, Essen, Nygma, Leslie, Penguin, Bruce, Alfred, and Selina. A bit high, but manageable. I still think they should drop Selina to recurring and just use her when they have a good reason for it.
 
^^^^
As if to prove a point I had forgotten all about Montoya & Allen.
Selina should be reduced to a recurring character only, I agree.
 
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.

That one was hinted at before, he was only really loyal to Fish, Maroni brainwashed him somehow before he appointed him to the Penguin.

Wasn't it Falcone who had him brainwashed?! Well, I actually just remember him being tortured. When Falcone brought him to work for the Penguin, I guess it was a natural conclusion that he was brainwashed, considering his loyalty to Fish. But once he started actually working, I got the impression his loyalty had shifted from Fish to the night club, and thus to Penguin.

Could be totally misremembering it all, though.

It was Zsasz who "brainwashed" him. We actually don't know what was done, but Zsasz told Penguin that he'd worked on Butch in his basement for a couple of weeks. Likely on Falcone's orders.

I'm guessing the programming worked fine while Fish wasn't around, but once he came face to face with her, his mind couldn't cope with the conflict. After all, he wasn't just loyal to her, he was in love with her.
 
Reading that jogs me on the Zsasz having Butch in the basement but I'd totally forgotten about it. Probably a notable flaw of the show for me is that too many parts, or characters are forgotten or moments seemingly made forgettable. Done so cause for so long Butch just seemed the same strong opportunistic #1 Lieutenant no matter who he was placed alongside.
 
I never had any impression of Butch other than him being 100% loyal to Fish. Even when it came to taking orders from Falcone, he still only seemed to be doing it to keep up the pretence. Remember, he killed his childhood friend because he wouldn't go along with Fish taking over as the Don. The only thing he seemed opportunistic about was moving in on things that could benefit Fish.
 
Yeah, i thought they were nothing but clear that Butch had been "altered" to be loyal to Penguin. i mean Penguin made him dance in that scene, with a smile on his face. Why would they trust him otherwise?
 
Yeah, i thought they were nothing but clear that Butch had been "altered" to be loyal to Penguin. i mean Penguin made him dance in that scene, with a smile on his face. Why would they trust him otherwise?


I was expecting Butch to be a plant that was brainwashed to go along with Penguin up to a point, then turn on him at a critical moment.

But I was expecting that to be a Maroni/Falcone plan and nothing to do with Fish.
 
Last edited:
One thing that's bugged me that was mentioned a few times in the thread, is them turning all of the bad guys into killers. I does work OK for Penguin, but I've never really seen Catwoman or The Riddler as full on killers.
Most of my familiarity with them comes from the other adaptations, but I was always under the impression that Riddler was more of a thief or scammer more than am outright killer.
Catwoman I've always seen as more of morally ambiguous character than a real villain. Which is also part of why her sudden turn in the finale was such a disappointment to me, they pretty much took away the ambiguity that she did have in the early episodes to make her a full on villain. Hopefully with Fish dead, they'll revert her back to what she was like before the finale.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top