‘Gotham’ season 3, episode 11 (fall finale) review: Jim saves Lee, but at what cost?

Through much of Monday night’s fall finale for “Gotham,” we heard one reverberating promise time and time again from the character Mario: He was going to make sure that Lee Thompkins hated him forever.

One way in which he wanted to ensure that this happened was by sabotaging Jim at almost every turn leading up to his wedding to Lee Thompkins. He wanted to ensure that Jim was at the church, just as he wanted to make certain that Ben McKenzie’s character confessed every crazy little thing in his heart. He knew Lee well enough to know that she was not going to be okay with handling this degree of an emotional downpour upon her soul right before one of the biggest moments of her entire life.

From here, though, we saw the part of the plan that Mario wasn’t quite expecting, and that was Lucius Fox and the folks at the GCPD learning precisely how it was that he was able to fake the lab results that had the team confused as to whether or not he really had the virus. He had been able to cover it up for long enough, he would have been able to get away presumably with her for good. As it was, Jim — thanks to some careful persuasion of Carmine Falcone a.k.a. shooting anyone else with the capacity to do the job — was able to find the newlyweds and shoot Mario before he managed to kill Lee. What drove him mad was the prospect of Lee loving anyone anywhere close to how much she loved him, and hearing that a part of her will always remember him fondly may have been enough to drive him over the edge.

Sure, Jim arrived there at just the PERFECT moment, but this is television. This stuff happens. We’re sure that he will convince her that Mario was about to kill her, and there is that knife as evidence on the rocks below.

Now, what we’re curious about is if the virus can be passed by kissing. We don’t think so, unless of course Mario had gotten a bloody lip somewhere along the way in this episode … which certainly seems possible.

While most of the love-triangle drama was melodramatic, we’ll still say that it, coupled with Nygma’s revenge plans, were the highlights of this episode. The Riddler realized that Barbara’s assessment of Oswald was right, and he recruited her in order to ensure that he could destroy the Penguin’s whole operation from within. It was a slightly different plan than we’ve come to often expect from this show, given that he wasn’t so interested in killing him outright as opposed to seizing everything that he had. Barbara, in turn, is willing to help provided that she and him can rise to the top of Gotham’s underworld. We’re not sure Barbara with that much power is good for anyone, but we’re interested in watching it unfold.

The weak point – What’s going on with Bruce and the whole Court of Owls? This is a story that started with a lot of potential, but now it’s so muddy that it feels almost impossible to get excited about it. When the reveal of Selina Kyle’s mother, which was previously unrelated to almost everything, is the most exciting part of the story, you know that something is off.

Other odds and ends – Why isn’t Harvey Bullock ever right about anything, even though he is supposedly in charge of the precinct now as a Captain? Also, how awesome was it to get Zsasz back on the show again?

Overall – As far as fall finales go, this one did an effective job of making us enjoy a story in Lee / Jim / Mario that we’d gotten annoyed by through most of the season. The culmination of Oswald / Nygma was also fairly fantastic. Unfortunately, the Court of Owls stuff drags things down a little bit to where this was a good episode, but not one we’d rank among the finest that “Gotham” has to offer. Grade: B.