‘Gotham’ season 3, episode 12 review: Nygma’s plan, Selina’s mom, and the cult of Jerome
To say that “Gotham” Monday night had a lot to resolve would be making one of the biggest understatements out there. After all, just remember for a minute or so how it ended in the fall: With Jim Gordon shooting Mario on his wedding day, knowing that he was infected with Alice Tetch’s blood virus.
This is the continuous struggle for our oft-reluctant hero — we do think that he does the right thing, but at the same time his timing is absolutely terrible. Lee was furious with him over his actions, and it’s not necessarily because he stopped the two from being together; she thinks that it could have been done more humanely, and maybe it could have given that Nathaniel Barnes is off somewhere still alive and shouting the word “guilty” over and over again like a broken record.
Lee’s desire for revenge led to her to even say something that we never would’ve imagined her saying at this point a year ago — she seemed fine with Jim dying. As a matter of fact, she blamed him for everything terrible that transpired in her life. In her journey for healing and understanding, she paid a visit to none other than Barnes in prison, which we figure had to be a source of some evidence that Jim did the right thing. Clearly, he’s not getting any better in his time behind bars. It was enough for Lee to implore Falcone to call of his plans on Jim — something we’ll get to in a little bit.
Jim’s other case – Gordon was somewhat preoccupied in the midst of everything that was going on, which makes sense given that there was a body who came back to life after being previously dead at the morgue. As it turns out, the night manager has a connection to Indian Hill, a.k.a. the crew of one Hugo Strange. There was no Hugo in this episode, but we didn’t need to see him to know that crazy (bleep) was about to go down.
In following Dwight, what Jim and Harvey discovered was pretty horrific: A secret cult of Jerome followers. Even though the proto-Joker for this show died last season, there are many people out there who still believe this story to be gospel. This was something that we first learned about not long after he died. The two guys were able to chase down many of the Jerome followers, but unfortunately, they had another problem that they had to take on: Szasz. Falcone hired him to take him out, which we’re sure he will try to until he is either arrested or dead … or until Carmine cancels the order? We ended up going behind door #3 with this story, given that Szasz cooled off when it came to his attack after being told to by Falcone, who chose to listen to the words of Lee after her visit with Barnes.
Meet Selina’s mother – After turning up in the winter finale, she tried to have a conversation with her daughter trying to explain things. However, at the same time Selina was none too interested in either seeing or speaking with her. She would’ve been perfectly happy to see her go away for good. Bruce was able to convince her to sit down with her to dinner, which was mostly notable because of the super-obvious chemistry between Alfred and Selina’s mom.
Of course, nothing was precisely as it seemed for this woman, given that she had some secrets, and more importantly, there was someone who wanted her dead unless the right amount of money was handed down.
The rise and fall of Penguin as politician – Oswald was starting to get into a good place when it came to his political career — the city of Gotham actually loved him! Unfortunately, the problem was that his late father Elijah’s remains were dug up, and he was telling him to not trust someone — specifically, that person was his new deputy Chief of Staff. As soon as he pieced together the pieces, it led to a quick death right in the middle of his office. (Why didn’t Oswald take the murder weapon with him? This is one of those questions that it’s hard to have an answer to with this guy.)
This is where things started to get both worse and also terribly inconvenient for Oswald: These hallucinations of Elijah kept coming at the wrong time, and he completely fell apart during a live television interview. As it turns out, every part of this plan was constructed by Nygma, who hired Clayface to impersonate Elijah and use some of his own memories of Oswald against him.
The cliffhanger – Dwight is going to do everything that he can to bring Jerome back to life. Sounds exciting, no? Well, maybe to the cult … but not to anyone else.
Overall – There was a lot going on in this episode — maybe too much, since there wasn’t a lot of time to focus on any one thing. What we will say, though, is that everything we got in the episode was thoroughly entertaining. Grade: B+.
Next week – The mystery surrounding Jerome is going to be continuing moving into the next new episode.
Valen
January 19, 2017 @ 2:58 am
Pretty good episode. A lot going on. Thought the knife Mario was going to kill Lee with would come into play. The Jerome followers remind of a deadly Grateful Dead cult.
or27
January 18, 2017 @ 3:53 am
I was more than a little put off by Lee for a few reasons. Whether it was flat/bad acting by MB and the actor who played Mario, I never saw/bought that this was some great love match. After all, she met him maybe a month after Jim was locked up and fighting daily to survive and maybe weeks, if that, after losing the child she and Jim were expecting (based on the timeline of Jim in the first cellblock for a month and F-block for maybe 2 weeks as indicated). What grieving for both losses and their family and life together? I never saw or got any sense that she took any time to understand at all what Jim was going through and trying to protect her and their child from so that maybe they could be safe and not targeted while he was in prison, but she made it something else entirely and raced ahead, leaving him in the dust without any kind of resolution and never even telling him about their child. I lost most of my respect for the character (if that makes sense!) then and it’s been downhill since.
Whether it was careless and sloppy writing or editing or both, omissions didn’t help to improve her standing, only make it worse. However emotionally she should and would be impacted, there should have been an official finding, which she as a physician and department employee would grasp that was beyond Mario being infected and included that 1) he was trying to kill her when he was shot 2) he had killed at least 5 people brutally and he wasn’t a strong, powerful person, but he imagined killing Jim and crushed their skulls, or strangled the one. The last 2 he killed were known to be his victims and there had to be witnesses at the bar. Whatever the denial would be nothing compared to that. Why not have a scene or scenes with the actual evidence and findings of Mario’s crimes and then his death, connecting the dots? Why not, instead of Lee barging in so openly, at least add a more professional, behind-closed-doors with her, Jim, Harvey, Lucius instead of her hysterics or at least afterwards, however successful? Finally, the thought of her going to Falcone, who did see Jim as his son in many ways, someone who had saved Falcone’s life already and who Falcone had helped (when Lee ran and didn’t look back) Jim in prison, to encourage, urge and agree to having Jim murdered is unforgivable. It’s not that she was passive and undecided, she was the instigator and as criminally culpable in a conspiracy to commit murder. Jim has always done what he had to do to protect and keep her safe. He knew that he’d be signing a death warrant by sacrificing Mario for her as Mario lunged at her, not that he had the luxury of time. He knew when he went to find her that he might find her dead or in immediate danger. For her part, she wanted Jim dead and wanted him dead for days, not a passing, fleeting thought as a failure to accept legal and medical findings.
I liked the idea of Jim having a stable relationship with someone who could be family and liked the idea of a RL family portraying one on the show, but I don’t even want her to be redeemed at this point because I wouldn’t buy it. Sometimes, there’s no going back. There’s no scenario where Jim would want to be with someone who essentially ordered his death, something Falcone was all too happy to fulfill and agree with as a partner and the one pulling the strings. She knew exactly what she was doing and there’s nothing noble at all about reconsidering. She chose freely to have her child’s father targeted and killed. I also wasn’t sold by the performance, which made it all more confusing, but kudos to Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue, and to a lesser degree John Doman who did sell their characters and for the non-verbal gravitas from Ben McKenzie to seal the deal even if he wasn’t given the opportunity with dialogue or longer and more substantive scenes that would have shed much more light emotionally.
It’s disappointing to wish for the Lee character to be gone now, but there you have it. She hasn’t been easy to like for some time or even empathize with. Now she’s pretty contemptible and it seems like anything invested in some relationship for Jim has been a lot of wasted time.