‘Gotham’ season 3, episode 1 review: Chaos and the Court of Owls

There were few season finales quite like the one that “Gotham” aired earlier this spring, at least in terms of giving you so much while also leaving a few interesting things open for the upcoming season. The premiere felt in some ways like a direct continuation of what we last saw, and that to us greatly improved the hour’s overall quality. This was good enough that we almost wish we had a full 90 minutes to spend with these characters!

Let’s kick things off here with Bruce Wayne, since we almost want to call him Kid Icarus. He’s incredibly ambitious in his hopes to try and understand who is truly running Gotham, but simultaneously, he may be perchance flying a tad too close to the sun. The more questions he asks, and the more problems he causes. The ending of the episode is proof.

Jim Gordon and Valerie Vale – If Jim, now working as a rogue investigator, and a local reporter are the new buddy-cops of this show, we gotta say that we won’t be all that angry. They have a good chemistry, and there is something fun about seeing their trust games go back and forth in the way we saw tonight.

Oswald and Fish plot their next moves – Now with Butch back at his side, he’s figuring out a strategy to use the citizens of Gotham as leverage within his battle against Fish Mooney. She’s used many of Hugo Strange’s experiments to form her own crew, but there’s a major problem: She’s feeling the aftereffects of the transformation, and it is causing problems for her. Despite capturing Peabody, she still has not figure out precisely where Hugo Strange is located.

Maybe you can argue that the show may have a tad too much going on, given that Barbara and Tabitha’s nightclub operation, coupled with Harvey Bullock and Captain Barnes, could use a little more time. Still, it’s hard to argue against so many intriguing plotlines, a great cliffhanger with a new Poison Ivy set to emerge as a result of one of Fish’s minions (this is without even mentioning Bruce’s capture by the Court of Owls), and with Gotham on a knife’s edge. Grade: B+.