‘Gotham’ episode 14 review: ‘The Fearsome Dr. Crane’ sets up a Scarecrow

When you fear saw “The Fearsome Dr. Crane” as an episode title for “Gotham,” for the most part you had to know what was coming: This is an episode that was designed for one primary purpose only, and that was making sure that the story eventually set up a reveal that will be the Scarecrow origin story for next week.

Yes, Dr. Crane is the father of Jonathan Crane, and apparently the message being reinforced here is that you are destined to become whoever your father is. We’re not sure that we believe that, and it is one of the show’s lingering problems: They automatically make this enormous assumption that everything needs to be some perennially on-the-nose in order for anyone to possibly understand it.

Still, the creepiness of Dr. Crane is enough to lift this episode slightly, and we give some bonus points, as well, to Oswald and Maroni for some of their scenes (always good). Still, we don’t buy Fish Mooney as a compelling villain (and the same goes for her laugh), and we were frankly bored through almost every other story. There are times when we wish that this show would, rather than give us a whole less of stories, just focus on one or two and then save the others for later. Give us some larger chunks to digest.

It’s almost hard to grade an episode that so obviously feels like a two-parter; we presume that this did at least do a good enough job setting up “The Scarecrow,” so we will at least give it a little bit of credit for that. Grade: B-.

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