Gotham Season 2.01 recap and preview for next week
Season two picks up one month after season one ended. Harvey is no longer a detective, but a barkeep – and he is very happy. Penguin is now the head of Falcone’s crime family, and he is good at it. Butch is at his side, and Selina is like a thug-in-training. Barbara has been remanded to Arkham, where she holds her own just fine. Ed is losing his sanity rapidly, and argues with his fractured persona in the mirror. Jim has been relegated to traffic cop. He won’t quit, no matter what kind of crappy assignment they give him.
A crazy guy in a cape and loaded with weapons marches into Jim’s intersection, claiming to be Zaardon the Soul Ripper. He is loaded with weapons and even takes a hostage, but Jim diffuses the situation and arrests Zaardon. Zaardon is a special kind of crazy, but I think only half of it can be blamed on the glowing liquid he drinks, given to him by Theo Galavan (who we will formally meet later on).
Captain Essen wants to give Jim a commendation for handling the situation, but when the uniform who came to take his shift shows up late, Jim hassles him and gives him a gentle push. Loeb takes great joy in announcing that laying hands on another officer is grounds for automatic firing. Jim goes quietly, but he is not happy about it.
So Jim does the only thing he can do: he goes to Penguin. Penguin promises to get Loeb out of the commissioner’s chair and get Jim back on the force as a detective. But in order to prove his “friendship” and loyalty, he wants Jim to collect a debt from a club runner who refuses to pay up. Jim refuses this deal. He drinks with Harvey, then visits Bruce to apologize and explain why he won’t be able to keep his promise. Bruce thanks him, but asks if Jim is foregoing the greater good to appease his own sense of pride. This causes Jim to take Penguin up on his offer.
The debt collection goes south, and while Jim makes it out of the club with the money, he also gets into a shootout with the debtor. Ogden Barker ends up dead. Penguin promises Jim that his “colleagues” won’t bother him about this death, and promises to take care of the Loeb situation.
Penguin and Zsasz visit Loeb in the middle of the night. They play with him like a cat with its prey, and Zsasz is a little too eager to kill him. Beheading Loeb’s guard got his bloodlust running. When faced with the choice of death or retirement, he chooses retirement. It is at his retirement ceremony that we officially meet Theo, though we don’t know him as anything more than a philanthropist. Essen is named commissioner, and Jim is reinstated as a detective.
Meanwhile, Zaardon is brought into Arkham, and he is annoyed and frustrated that no one is paying attention to him. They pay attention when he starts to convulse, collapse, and dies. Out of his mouth comes a thick cloud of blue smoke, a side effect of the liquid he drank at top of the show. A trio of leather-clad, gas-masked ninjas move through the asylum, kill some guards, and take six now-unconscious inmates.
The inmates are delivered to Theo. The lead ninja, Tabitha, is his sister. Theo wants these sprung inmates to form together and become a team of “brilliant outlaws,” to do his bidding I assume. One of the guys wants out, so they let him leave – but before he can get to the door Tabitha slaughters him brutally. No one wants to leave after this.
After a month, Bruce still hasn’t figured out the password to his father’s hidden room. So he decides he is going to built a bomb and blow the door open. Alfred does not like this idea – he seems to think Papa Wayne had a sex dungeon (or something similar) down there, and didn’t want to have to explain it to the young Master Bruce. But Bruce can’t be dissuaded, so he agrees to help build the bomb. The bomb is a success, and they find that the secret room is an office, coated with more dust and cobwebs than seems normal. Propped up against a computer is a letter to Bruce from his father. In it, dad says he must be dead, and Bruce figured out that “Bruce” was the passcode. He explains, vaguely, that Bruce’s birth made him want to be a better man, take a look into the way his company was being run. Since he doesn’t know what happened to him and Bruce’s mom, he won’t try to give any advice, except for this: “You can’t have both happiness and truth. You have to choose. I beg of you, please choose happiness unless you feel a calling. A true calling.”
That cheesy ending aside, this was a pretty good way of bringing us back to Gotham. I have to say, Barbara doesn’t bother me as much now that she is fully insane. She has a purpose now. I still can’t quite figure out how they are going to bring her back around so she marries Jim, but I guess that is way in the future. Right now, I will just enjoy her craziness.
Check out what is coming up this season in the trailer below!
