Gotham: Series Overview

Well, it was only a matter of time before I talked about this series.  I was going to get to it, but I don’t like doing episode by episode reviews, I tried that a while back with Once Upon a Time season 2, and it didn’t work within my schedule.  So, rather than try to tackle this show one piece at a time, let’s look at it one character at a time and see how they’ve grown over the course of the series.

The overall plot of Gotham is to follow the adventures of the last good cop in the city, Detective Jim Gordon, played by Ben McKenzie.  Former military, Gordon approaches his police work with a single minded focus on the traditional model of law enforcement; police should be pillars of the community, an example for the public to aspire to, and to have the protection of the public be their number one goal.  This mindset clashes heavily with his fellow officers who are caricatures of corruption.  Notably his partner, Harvey Bullock and Captain Sarah Essen seem beaten down by the corruption in the city, until Gordon’s example lifts them out of their funk.  Still fearful of the hostile environment, rather than slam head log into their opposition, they use the twisted system to engineer justice in a place where justice was a fantasy.

This doesn’t mean that everyone loves Gordon.  They like his results, most of the time.  As he attacks each case, he rubs people the wrong way, and they are numb, if not outright hostile towards him.  When he collars the perpetrator, however, or saves the city from this-that-or-the other, they salute him and treat him as a hero.

What is ironic is that while Gordon is arguably the most interesting character in the show, he’s also the least interesting of the show.  I say that because you know how he’s going to act.  We’ve seen his phases when dealing with relationships, cases, co-workers, and outright villains.  He’s got to be the most interesting portrayal of the character because he’s very competent in his job, unlike say some movie versions, and has taken down at least two major villains on his own, most notably the Electrocutioner.

He’s shown he can do his job without the aid of a lunatic dressed as a bat.

Speaking of which, we also have David Mazouz as young Bruce Wayne, and not far behind him Sean Pertwee as Alfred.  I link these two characters because this is the time in Bruce’s life when Alfred is his guardian and Alfred takes that responsibility to heart, even going super soldier mode when assassins target Bruce and Selena Kyle (more on her in a minute).  Sean Pertwee’s take on Alfred is absolutely fantastic.  He rides the fine line between parent and servant to Bruce Wayne.  I’ve read it in comics where Bruce and Alfred’s relationship was described as Bruce values Alfred, seeing him as the only family he has, but also its very clear Alfred works for Bruce and, more often than not is subject to Bruce’s orders and whims, whether he agrees with them or not.  That’s very well portrayed in this show, as Alfred offers council, advice, and training as requested, and will even voice his concerns, but will do whatever it takes to see his employer’s requests are met.  Alfred loves Bruce and will kill to protect him.

Bruce’s side of the relationship is complex as well.  The series picks up almost at the moment of the Wayne’s murder, so we are thrust right into Bruce’s life scarring event.  I don’t think I’m out of line saying that Bruce is suffering from PTSD, and the combination of the writing and Mazouz’s performance really bring out the more subtle accents of the disorder.  Bruce is seen suffering from nightmare, obsessing over various topics, self-destructive activities, and a lot of unfocused aggression.

It’s made clear that Bruce is seeking something to fill the void left by his parents’ murder.  He becomes an amateur detective in an attempt to find meaning behind their deaths, thus holding on to the last shreds of his parents.  He also looks to Alfred as a father figure, but at the same time maintains their traditional employer/employee relationship, so no matter how close they grow, there will forever be a distance.  Basically Bruce could really use some counseling…

Unfortunately as we find out in the season finale, Dr. Leslie Tompkins has limited crisis counseling experience.  Otherwise she could have, and probably should have, filled her comic book counterpart’s role as counselor to the young Bruce Wayne.  Instead she starts out as a staff physician at the newly re-opened Arkham Asylum, and later takes over as the medical examiner and Jim Gordon’s love interest.  When she first appeared in Arkham, I was hopeful because Morena Baccarin has a very soothing on screen appearance and could easily portray a counselor.  I honestly thought that was the role she was going to fill.  Baccarin does a wonderful job in the role anyway, but I think the character could have been taken a different direction.  Yet it’s entirely possible that Tompkins will take on the crisis counselor role later after experiencing the trauma of facing off with a crazed Barbra Kean.

Comics are, in general a twisted knot of ret-cons, with multiple writers trying to put their own mark on the history of iconic characters.  No set of characters suffer more from this than Jim Gordon’s immediate family.  It is a mess and I’m not even going to try to compare the comic version to what we see in Jim Gordon in Gotham.  That said Barbara Kean was Gordon’s first girlfriend in the series before she left after Gordon had run afoul of Police Commissioner Loeb.  When she returned after his reinstatement, he had already moved on to Leslie Tompkins and Barbara sent herself on a self-destructive spiral that culminated in her encountering the serial killer known as “The Ogre”, her murdering her parents on his orders and eventually trying to kill Tompkins, only to be stopped by her ex-boyfriend.  Everything I just said there, that’s simple compared to the comic book counterpart.  Erin Richards plays the role well enough, I never really liked the character, but I don’t think we were ever meant to like her.  Richards plays the transition from emotionally wounded socialite to full on psychopath with a great deal of believability, and I look forward to what direction they take the character post-psychotic break.

Edward Nygma is the next character that is worth talking about because he himself as a very interesting transition.  Nygma is set up as the GCPD’s forensic expert who likes riddles.  He really likes riddles.  He likes them so much he tries to bring his information to the officers investigating the case in the form of a riddle, much to their annoyance.  His relationship to Gordon is interesting because he seems to almost admire Gordon.  Gordon was, apparently, the first detective he’s worked with to rattle off the answer to a riddle right away.  Played by Cory Michael Smith, he’s shown to have more than a few sociopathic personality traits, tries unsuccessfully to woo the affections of records specialist Kristin Kringle, and later murders and brutally disposes of the body of her lover.  His first foray into his comic book counterpart’s psychosis is when he forges a letter from the deceased boyfriend, but arranges the sentences so that the first letter of each line spells out “NYGMA”.  He has a psychotic break later, berating himself for leaving an obvious clue.  It’s hard to gauge where this character will go next.  My guess is that he’ll continue to work with the police, only to watch as they try to decipher the clues from the crimes he commits.  This actually plays well into the character from the comics as he always held himself intellectually superior to those around him and it seems logical he would place himself in a location where he can watch people run themselves ragged trying to decipher his clues.

However there are wasted and unnecessary characters as well.  Part of the problem with most American television programs are filler episodes.  These are episodes that provide no information towards the overall arc of the season, only put there to fill an episode quota and provide a “villain of the week”.  Smallville was notorious for this, but I’ll get to them later.

Gotham doesn’t necessarily have any “filler episodes” per say.  Everything is designed to reveal or, sometimes, force feed us characterization, letting us get into the mind of the characters.  If the A-plot doesn’t cover something significant for the overall story, then the B-plot usually adds something, usually by establishing relationship ties.

Ivy Pepper, our proto Poison Ivy for the show, is a unnecessary character.  They literally could have written her out of the entire show at this point and not missed anything.  Midway through the series they introduce a character named Jerome, who again, has no business in the show other than to tease us with a possible Joker origin.  I’ve read that there will be more Joker build ups later, but that’s to come.

Finally under the tent of unnecessary is Attorney Harvey Dent.  He’s set up as a young, up and coming lawyer, with possible dissociative identity disorder, show when he rages at a suspect, and then is promptly dropped.  He’s depicted as a contemporary of Jim Gordon, which is sometimes comic book accurate.  What isn’t comic book accurate is how Dent later becomes Two-Face in the comics, in which his face is scarred by acid thrown by gangster Sal Maroni…

Which brings me to wasted characters, the top of which is Sal Maroni, who is played by David Zayas.  Zayas’ had a spot on portrayal of this rough and uncouth mobster, reminding me of DeNiero as Al Capone from The Untouchables.  If you took Carmine Falcone (John Doman) to be Don Vito Corleone, ala The Godfather, then the pairing of these two legendary mobsters was a fantastic example of two-sides of the same coin.  Which was ruined by Fish Mooney.  Not to knock Jada Pinket-Smith’s portrayal, she actually reminded me of Eartha Kit from time to time, but the inclusion of Fish Mooney was just not necessary, at least not in the capacity in which she was shown.  They could have set her up as a rival crime lord, not an Falcone lieutenant with high aspirations, and they could have focused on her conflict with them more than the Dollmaker plot thread.  That felt forced and actually plugged in some sub-par computer generated effects, which we could have been sparred if they had gone a different direction.

Finally, there is the Penguin, played by Robin Lord Taylor.  I really don’t know what to say about him.  I can’t give him too much praise as I feel he did what was expected of him, and I can’t knock him because he did his job well.  He made you watch him every time he was on screen, but I didn’t love the character.  He was dangerous, but that danger wasn’t out of left field, you always knew it was there.  I think, he’s kind of an anti-Gordon.  His arc is predictable, but well portrayed. 

I suppose I should talk about Selina Kyle, played by Camren Bicondova.  Again, she did a good job, but she didn’t have the same caliber of material Mazouz did.  She wasn’t anything we haven’t already seen before, but that’s not the actress’s fault.  People have been doing their spin on the orphan thief with questionable ethics for generations, so the odds were against her.  She had a good, if subdued screen presence, with a dangerous-bad girl vibe.  She ended the season showing Selina had a violent streak in her, so it might be interesting to see where they take it from there.

Overall, it’s a pretty good prequel series, easily in my top 10, but maybe not directly in my top 5.  Give it a watch and see for yourself.