Review: Gotham Season 2, first half
Uneven.
Without a doubt the best word to use to describe this season of Gotham. Sometimes the show is really trying to show the origin story of a city that would need and accept a man dressed up in a bat suit as its protector. It is also the origin of Jim Gordon, a police chief/commissioner who would work with that man/bat. Other times, the show attempts to be interesting and compelling unto itself. This makes sense, because there are more people out there who don’t know the minutiae of Bat-history or the Gotham of the comics.
And that, to me, is really where the show stumbles. In being an origin story, you have an endpoint you are building up to. Where, an engaging and compelling drama there must have stakes. Death or horrible outcomes have to be on the table, especially in the post-Game of Thrones genre drama world.
Though, the show is doing better than it was last season. The biggest thing that the show has been doing is messing with expectations. Introducing characters that share a name from the comics, but the not being exactly the same as it is in the comics. Silver St. Cloud, Firebug, the Sacred Order of Saint Dumas, just to name a few, all show up in this season of Gotham, but are skewed or reimagined from the comics. This works. It keeps the diehard, super-fans engaged, while giving the show some space to make a world of its own.
The worst unevenness of the show is actually in how it portrays its main characters. Cobblepot and Gordon both feel off from the characters they were in the first season. Cobblepot, a.k.a. Penguin, is the new big boss of Gotham and evidently has lost all of the cunning and guile that allowed him to rise into that position. And Gordon, rather than being a crusader standing up to make the world, by way of Gotham, a better place, is instead obsessed with getting himself killed saving someone else. The interaction between these two characters is one of the more compelling parts of the series, even if it is all offscreen as the two them are trying to succeeded.
And subplots, the show is not lacking in subplots. We have Cat, Bruce, Barbara Kean, and Ed Nigma. Of these Ed is the most interesting, seeing him descend into his puzzle obsessed madness has been one of the better plotlines. Barbara is loony, and continues to slink around the screen, and not much more. Bruce and Cat both have pretty strong stories throughout the season. But, Cat especially, I find is really uneven, they make her great character, but then have to undercut the character to fit into the story they want to tell.
That might be the biggest problem I have with this season, is that the characters are altered to tell the stories. Not altered in the story, but the characters are altered in ways that either don’t make sense or are not explained.
But, for a nice binge the show was entertaining and has had somewhere it was going. It could finish pretty strong if they do the same thing in the second part of the season.
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