‘Gotham’ episode 20 review: The Ogre versus Barbara Kean

Remember Barbara Kean? It’s hard not to, but it’s hard to remember anything significant that she has actually done over the course of “Gotham” so far. She’s been at times a former drug user, a devoted girlfriend, in a runaway relationship with Montoya, and extremely depressed. We have no clue who this character actually is.

Yet, there were some moments during Monday’s episode “Under the Knife” that started to make us wonder if Barbara is something else entirely: Complete psychopath. Could the Ogre’s sudden urge to try to kill her instead flip some sort of switch in her head? We’d be more than down for evil Barbara, if for no other reason than that it’d justify spending so much time with this character for most of the entire season.

It only made sense for Milo Ventimiglia’s character at first to target Barbara, if for no other reason than some of the mandates that Jim Gordon made to track the guy down; while the two are not romantically involved anymore, it’s hard for a serial killer to do a whole lot of research on the fly. We wonder if Gordon did put the spotlight on himself even more by going to the press and blabbing about how he was going to capture the guy if it was the last thing he did.

We did not spend any time in this episode with Fish Mooney, but we’ve got to say that for the most part, we’re fine with that given how crazy her story has been.

Let’s make a quick run for some of the better stories this week involving villains instead of focusing on her. Oswald is continuing his plot to kill Maroni, and after he let it out to the Penguin’s mother about his true nature, he is more motivated than ever before. As for Edward Nygma, we may have seen our first bit of true evidence in here all about what sort of killer he really could be.

In the end, we have to toast “Gotham” for giving us a very entertaining episode of the show, even if the story is still all over the place and in need of cohesion. We’re clearly building towards a great finale, and that at least has us stoked. Grade: B+.