‘Gotham’ season 2 finale review: Stopping Strange; who is the Secret Council?

“Gotham” has told a really remarkable second half of season 2 stuffed full of a wide array of interesting characters. We met Victor Fries and Hugo Strange, and saw the return of people like Barbara Kean and Fish Mooney in slightly different ways.

Let’s start this review for the finale by going ahead and getting the major negative out of the way first and foremost: This show really went a little bit overboard with the characters, basically throwing everyone and the kitchen sink into the show, hoping to make an “event” when they didn’t really need to. What they ultimately needed was to wait on a couple of characters like Clayface, or have another episode or two this season. We found a great deal of this story particularly rushed.

Eventually, Jim Gordon and the rest of our good guys managed to ensure that all of Gotham was not blown up in Hugo Strange’s last-minute nuclear blast, but there was another problem: A bus stuffed full of some of the city’s horrors, with Fish Mooney at the helm. She seemed to not only escape, but also at the same time use her new “skills” (whatever they are precisely) to knock out the Penguin and terrify Butch and his men.

So what’s your season 3 tease? Other than Fish, it was the arrival of a Secret Council in Gotham that controls “everything.” We’ve seen Strange in conversations for quite a while with someone, and this is your carrot. As for Jim, he took off in order to find Lee Thompkins and return his life to normal. He also jacked Harvey’s car!

This episode brought almost everything you could want in terms of intensity, but there were too problems. For one, the over-stuffed nature of the finale; also, how did the police not surround that bus? The fact that some random woman unlocked the horrors of Indian Hill unto the city is slightly unbelievable, to put it lightly. The Bruce Wayne “twin” twist? We’ll at least concede that was fairly cool. Grade: B-.

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