‘Gotham’ season 2, episode 1 review: Has Jim Gordon sold his soul?
We know that Jim Gordon is a good cop. He’s one of the best police officers Gotham has ever seen; he cares about justice, and he isn’t afraid to jeopardize his life or his career in order to get it.
During the season 2 premiere of “Gotham” Monday night, what we also learned that he was specifically willing to also jeopardize his integrity. In the early days of season 1 we felt like Jim was suffering a bit too much with always-be-the-good-guy syndrome. He was boring, and there’s nothing worse than watching a goody-goody and his girlfriend with some impossible apartment given whatever sort of money she has. Things with Gordon and Lee are far more interesting than Gordon and Barbara. More on that later.
Gordon’s big move to compromise himself came in the form of a deal with the devil; in this case, a deal with Oswald Cobblepot. He agreed to help get the Penguin more money sent in his direction, and as a result of this, the Penguin would pull the strings to get Commissioner Loeb to resign. Loeb had assigned Gordon to uniform duty in the streets, giving him the lowest-common-denominator job in hopes that he could convince him to resign. That didn’t happen, and instead he had to find a reason to fire him.
Now that Oswald fulfilled his end of the bargain, Jim is back in power, but with a catch. Don’t you think that the moment the going gets tough, the Penguin is going to remind him of how he got this job back in the first place? We have a hard time imagining that this is going to be ending in any other way for the two of them.
Meanwhile, Jim is also being haunted still by the voice of Barbara Kean, who is making fast friends in Arkham Asylum. So fast, in fact, that with the help of newcomer Theo Galavan, she and some other members of the new Maniax gang are now free and working for him seemingly causing carnage all over the city. We’d say that for now, Jerome is the only notable member … though we should mention that the possibility of a Barbara / Theo romance is there, even though we wouldn’t run the risk of that if we were him. While we know that seeing Barbara almost as a Harley Quinn type at this point is completely illogical when looking at the character we met in the pilot, we’re just going with it. It’s far better than Barbara 1.0, so we’ll take it.
The weakest part of the episode strangely revolved around Bruce Wayne, mostly because the challenge with showing him enter what we assume will be the Batcave, only to discover a letter there from his father, is that this mythology is already pretty well established. It is hard to get that enthused about a story where it revolved around material that has already been told in so many other stories.
Oh, and someone place erase the whole “cat around the house” scene with Selina Kyle from the record. Those lazy lines are what we didn’t like about season 1 at times. The show’s getting too good for them now. Grade: B.
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