On this week's episode of Gotham, Penguin heads down to the port and finds his mother. However, Theo comes in and says the only way in is with the key. Penguin tells Butch to shoot Theo and his sister. Butch instead shoots Penguin's two men. Penguin begs for Theo to let his mother go. Theo's sister lets her out and Penguin is reunited. Then Tabitha stabs Gertrude in the back. Theo is about to kill Penguin, but Penguin slices his face and escapes.
Meanwhile, Edward deals with his love, Kristen Kringle being dead... after he killed her. Nygma's bad side comes out and tells Edward that he hid the body, but left a riddle to find her corpse. At the station, Captain Barnes comes in and said Penguin tried to kill the next mayor. Theo is in the Captain's office and Theo has a cut across his neck. Gordon tells Theo he's cautious about all of this. He doesn't want policing through fear.
At the Wayne household, Selina and Bruce are talking when Silver St Cloud walks in and tries to intimidate Selina into never coming back. Edward goes on the hunt at the GCPD to find Kringle's body. He figures out the riddle and finds Kris' hand inside a vending machine. At dinner at the Wayne Manor, things get catty (no pun intended) between Silver and Selina. Nygma continues to try and figure out the riddle.
Bullock and Gordon talk in the car. Gordon finds it interesting that everything with Theo is happening way too quickly. He says it all seems planned. Gordon and Bullock head into a restaurant and find Butch and his friends. Mr Zsasz shows up outside and says he's going to kill everyone that doesn't leave in the next minute. After a minute, Zsasz and company begin firing on the building. Gordon and Bullock find a couple of huge automatic weapons and fire them out the window.
Nygma continues his search and finds Kringle's body in the morgue. Thompkins comes in and sees if he needs help. He tells Dr Thompkins that he and Kringle has a fight. He wants to grab a coffee with Leslie and talk it out. At the election party for Theo, what looks like to be Penguin walks towards the manor and gets shot by Tabitha.
Shocker! It wasn't Penguin. It was a look alike. An army of Penguin look-alikes head to the manor and bust in. Officer Martinez finds Tabitha on the roof and easily takes him down, by putting her heel through his neck. Gordon takes Theo out the back and to a car. Penguin finds them and Gordon and Penguin have a stand-off. Penguin says Theo's endgame deals with someone Gordon knows and cares about. Penguin gets shot and goes down and Theo heads off in the car.
Theo Galavan gives a speech about the election party massacre and Silver and Bruce look on. Silver is playing Bruce hard. Theo talks to Gordon but Gordon isn't having it. He says he's coming after Theo.
It's the first dip in the second season of Gotham. This wasn't a bad episode, but it certainly pales in comparison to everything else that this second season has offered fans. In reality, this whole episode feels like the same old story with different players and the game is relatively the same. Everyone is playing against each other to gain a bit more leverage in the on-going power struggle in Gotham. Once again, it's another person underestimating Penguin, which seems to be a recurring theme on this show.
To be fair, some of the best moments from the episode come from the election party massacre. Frankly, the army of people dressing and acting like Penguin was wonderfully over-the-top. It's just another moment where we get to see the power of Penguin. The only weird part about this moment was the massacre seemed to have a lot more casualties on Penguin's end over Theo's. However, this whole scene led to one of the most brutal/coolest kills of the series as Tabitha put her heel through officer Martinez's neck.
There's a lot of up and down here, but what really works in the episode is Nygma's arc. We're getting to see little bits and pieces of what he'll eventually become: The Riddler. Edward searching for Kristen Kringle's body was interesting but what really made the whole story pop was the back and forth dialogue between the good and bad side of Nygma at the end of the episode. The biggest laugh of the night was Edward finding Kristen Kringle's hand in the vending machine. I don't know why, but I burst out in laughter.
When Gordon and Bullock grab those giant guns and just start firing outside, it seems a little insane. They don't know what they're aiming at and there could be people outside, walking around (or watching Zsasz shoot up a building).
There's also this back and forth between Selina and Silver which plays out in this episode. Selina is fine and the character has come a long way since the first season, although sometimes she feels like she's forced into a scene just to move the plot forward. This episode is a prime example of that. She's simply thrown in to get Silver closer to Bruce. She has no real reason to actually be here.
Overall, this wasn't a great episode. It wasn't bad. It just feels like more of the same that we saw last season. The game is the same but the players have changed. Don't get me wrong, there's some great moments in this episode, but those are just moments. The overall episode didn't hit the bar that was raised by the previous episodes. Hopefully, we get something with a bit more oomph in the next few weeks.
Moments of the Week:
- Tabitha heel stabbing Martinez to death!
- Penguin cosplay party!
- Gordon and Bullock firing a couple of HUGE automatic weapons.
- Edward finding Kringle's hand in the vending machine.