‘Gotham’ episode 21 review: Are the seeds planted for the finale?

It may have taken us a little bit of time to get to where we are now in “Gotham,” but we feel like the stage is finally set for a pretty solid season 1 finale … at least so long as you love the Penguin story. This is really the best thing the show has going for it at the moment.

Oswald Cobblepot, Carmine Falcone, and Sal Maroni have all been going toe-to-toe for weeks, and with Fish Mooney trying to re-enter power, we imagine that we are now building to a place where all of these different factions are going to go at each other in pretty dramatic fashion.We’re going to be pretty disappointed if or even when the Maroni – Penguin battle ends, since it seems like it is going to have to eventually for the show to move forward.

As for the Ogre, this bizarre story with Barbara Kean seems to be at its own end for now … with her once again being the woman in need of a rescue. Ugh. We really don’t know what the point of all of this was; we thought briefly at the end of this past episode that maybe the show was dropping hints that maybe this character was starting to take a dark turn in her own way, but we really did not get any of that at all this time. The best thing we can say, if this is really the end of the story, is at least they got it out of the way before the finale.

Finally, cheers for the Riddler starting to become like the Riddler! After dispatching of a certain “boyfriend” of Kris Kringle’s, he then left her a coded note telling her that he’d skipped town … when he was of course dead. While this hasn’t been a perfect story by any means, we have to cheer now that we seem to be pushing towards a good place going into season 2. Episode Grade: B.