It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
I doubt it, despite two Heroes alums in its cast. Heroes, odd though it may be to say this, made more sense.
Hardly a triumph though: Heroes ended up in a whimper, a shadow of itself and the revival is more a second chance.
I kind of agree. Heroes started brilliantly and ended up disappointing. It did not live up to the expectations. Gotham did not live up to the expectation from day one. But my bet is that it will be axed.
Its like the writers/creative team just have no idea what to do and we see lazy writing, shark jumping, and just going off on tangents that nobody cares about.
Gotham is dangerously close to falling into this trap in season 1.
I hate to see so little emphasis placed on Harvey Bullock. I thought that a cornerstone of the show was the rivalry between Jim Gordon's good honest cop and his corrupt partner. Whatever happened to this storyline?.
All of the show's ills fall upon Fish Mooney.
Ok, I think you have beaten this character up enough now. Ease off please, I think we know where you stand.
We start off with Milo Ventimiglia and Barbara having just woken up, apparently they must have used his BDSM playhouse. He loves her, she doesn't give a tin sh*t about him. I wonder how she's gonna feel when she finds out he - oh, this is how. He outright tells her he was going to kill her, until he fell in love with the "real" Barbara. She doesn't think it's funny, and she's downright scared that she might be the woman he's been searching for this whole time. He wants to have breakfast, she wants to escape. To bad for her his apartment is apparently decked out like a fortress for apparently no reason. He black bags her.
Gordon isn't trying to eat, sleep, or anything while trying to find Barbara. Leslie is concerned with him. Bullock drags somebody who "knows who the Ogre is", but he's not too eager to give up any information. Where the hell did Bullock find this guy? Nygma is trying to be very sneaky with these two suitcases he's dragging around the room. He examines them and there's... stuff in them. Anyway, Gordon and Bullock are interrogating the "witness", who wants money for information. Gordon violates procedure, and sadly, we don't get to see it. He and Bullock go to see the Penguin.
Milo Ventimiglia is being ridiculously calm while talking to Barbara, who's strung up to the ceiling with a weird BDSM gag in her mouth.
Bruce has gotten a... a what? Came by messenger? Did someone, in this digital age, send Bruce a telegram? Anyway, Alfred's going to go identify Reggie in the morgue, and Bruce is acting coy about it, doing an admirable job of acting like he wasn't there to watch the man die. Oh, he got a key from Selina. I see.
The Right Hand Fatman is back at what I assume was that bar from another episode, and he's putting a series of weapons where the guys Penguin hired to whack Maroni can find them. He's then talking to Penguin back at the Iceberg Lounge, and then Gordon walks in. He demands to know where the Fox... Glove? Club? Is, but Penguin is very coy about it. Gordon grabs Penguin, pulls his gun, and gets the info he needs. Bullock is going in as a "john" undercover.
Milo Ventimiglia is still talking to Barbara, but now he's letting her down and somehow the gag has come out of her mouth. She calls him a psycho, and then I think he slaps her? I was out of the room for a second. I came back as he hands her a glass of water, and asks her to look at something after threatening to kill her for not looking. He shows her his photo collection, and he's murdered quite a few more women than the previous episodes suggested. Why did Gotham wait until episode 19 to introduce a villain I actually want to see?
Bruce is... somewhere. Wayne Enterprises, I think. He'd set off the fire alarm in an earlier scene that I didn't mention. Anyway, he goes into somebody's office (I missed the name), finds the safe, opens it with ease, and then that guy walks in and tells Bruce he'd been expecting him. Holy anticlimactic sh*t, Batman...
Well, the guy offers Bruce a cookie. Apparently, he stole out of the cookie jar often. He's about to give Bruce "the talk", but we have to know it's not the one we all got at one stage in our life or another. It seems it's a time honored tradition for Wayne Enterprises to commit illegal and immoral actions for... what, exactly? Anyway, Lucious Fox is introduced, and it appears as though he's helping Bruce, but I missed a scene there while out of the room again.
Riddler's choice girlfriend walks in, asking for some files. She sees the man that he murdered, and he falsifies what happened and who it is. Since "She Who Will Not Be Mentioned" hasn't shown up yet, I'm tempted to start putting frowny faces on Riddler scenes. They really do suck considerably.
Penguin's meeting with one of his hired guns, and proves to him how he knows Maroni will be at this bar that he's going to be murdered at. It appears that Maroni's awaiting a friend who just got out of the joint.
It's called the Fox Glove, apparently, and Bullock's there, mingling and looking significantly more sophisticated than he normally does. There's a man upon which some strange form of sexual act involving him wearing a bunny head and some sort of maraca being shaken in front of him. How the holy hell that works, I don't understand. Bullock freaks out when something odd appears on stage, and judging by the sounds, it involves a pig. He flashes his badge and tells everybody not to move, "especially you two!"
I'm sorry, Mad Max: Fury Road, "more crazy" is not proper grammar. "Crazier" is. Some form of apocalypse is no excuse to toss the correct form of speaking the English language out the g*ddamn window.
Milo Ventimiglia is walking around his apartment while Barbara sleeps. He tries to get her to wake up, and it works. Is this entire episode going to be about him seducing her to the dark side? Just kill her already! I don't care if she doesn't want you to, I want you to! Set us free of her, please! "I will take your life right now"? Do it! If you're not gonna kill She Who WIll Not Be Mentioned, kill Barbara!
Gordon walks into the Fox Glove and asks the woman who runs the place about the Ogre. She points him in the direction of one of the other women, who was apparently beaten and scarred by the Ogre. It seems she's the only one he let go, since it was before he started killing. She describes the apartment, and tells them the one clue they need to find the place. Thank God for that.
Penguin's assassins come in acting like they're there to pay respects to Maroni with some alcohol from Falcone. He pulls the gun that Penguin hid, but apparently the guns jammed... Hrm... I wonder if this is Penguin's way of starting a gang war between Falcone and Maroni so that he can take over from the Iceberg Lounge.
There's a band on stage at the Iceberg Lounge, and the Right Hand Fatman tells Penguin about the bad news. It looks like I was right. Penguin's setting up a mob war. Cool. Why has this show wasted so many episodes setting up the awesome stuff? It's like it wants to drag me back for season two.
Yeah, there's a Riddler scene here, but I'm just gonna leave you this :(
Gordon and Bullock find Milo Ventimiglia's apartment, and his special BDSM torture room. There's 15 minutes left in this episode, what the hell else is there? Oh, well. There's a phone call. Gordon answers it and it's Milo Ventimiglia. Gordon asks where Barbara is, and the Ogre taunts Gordon by telling him that she's with him and safe, then he hangs up. Gordon and Bullock go through the "identify the bridge" scene from Sneakers and discover that the Ogre and Barbara are at Barbara's parents' place. This woman is so not giving birth to Gordon's future kids.
Man, why is it that Kevin Bacon can never actually kill James Purefoy?
Gordon arrives at Barbara's folks' place to find Barbara's folks dead. Barbara walks into the room downright confused, asking Gordon why he's there. Bullock, in another part of the house, is knocked down some stairs by Milo Ventimiglia. Milo then ambushes Gordon adn a fist fight ensues. Dammit, I was hoping this would be saved for the season finale, now I have to assume that She Who Will Not Be Mentioned will be the final villain of the season. Anyway, Milo's got Barbara by the throat with his knife, Bullock distracts Milo, Gordon puts a bullet in his skull, and the knife cuts Barbara, but doesn't seem to kill her just yet.
Alfred walks into Bruce's office, and Bruce tells him the truth about Reggie's death. Bunderslow, that's the guy who's office Bruce broke into earlier. Bruce tells him about what happened at the office, about the secrets that his father and grandfather kept.
Gordon walks into the precinct a hero, everybody's clapping. Leslie tells him that she was scared that their relationship might have been torn up by this because Gordon would have blamed himself if Barbara died.
Riddler. :(
Bruce defiles a picture of himself and his father and puts the father's part of the picture on his cork board of mysteries. Falcone receives a box. What's in the box, you ask, Brad Pitt? Duh, it's a f*cking head. Maroni and a couple of his guys shoot up a car for some reason. Essen walks into the precinct and tells everybody that a mob war has begun. Penguin laughs.
I saw a boat on the preview. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Okay, odds are good there will be no Gotham review next week, folks.
(Then again, Zod and Vladimir Bierko shared the role of Jor-El in Smallville... I guess it's not too weird.)
This show had plenty of decent villains as well. The Red Hood Gang, despite just offing one another to take the mystique of the hood, was handled well. Penguin was a pretty okay character. Falcone and Maroni were both good mafia dons that I wanted to see a whole helluva lot more of than we ultimately did. Zsasz is now my favorite TV hitman mostly because of his ringtone.
And then we had the sh*t villains. I'm practically a broken record at this point, but Fish Mooney was hands down the worst. I've outlined my feelings on her more than once, so I'm not going to bog this season review down with even more Fish Hate. I can't even remember all of the villain-of-the-week characters, but that's because most of them were just horrible. Special mention has to be given here to the Electrocutioner and the Dollmaker, both poor villains played by great actors. Electrocutioner was amazing in his introductory episode, but in his second episode, he was just there to further the plot confrontation between Maroni and Penguin, and was very underutilized. The Dollmaker was just... No, actually, I want to know just what the Dollmaker was. He was a human trafficker, I get that, but he didn't really do anything except threaten Fish and a bunch of people we didn't care about (even if you liked Fish, I really don't believe you gave half a sh*t about all those redshirts down in the shantytown prison). That early hint of him in the episode "Selina Kyle" should have suggested him as a season-long villain, but he was completely unmentioned between that episode and when he finally popped up and f*cked with Fish. Even the Joker himself was nothing but sh*t and nothing but wasted.
Now with our protagonists, some were handled well. Gordon, Thompkins, Bullock and Alfred were all dealt with well, played well, and given some real good arcs. Gordon got to experience life as both an honest cop and a corrupt cop, and was fast becoming a mafia don unto himself, but that sadly didn't pan out as well as I'd hoped. Bullock kept straddling the line between honest and corrupt cop, and always seemed very tortured whenever the choice between right thing and easy thing came in front of him. Leslie Thompkins wasn't much to start out with (I kinda felt like they were forcing her on us in her first episode), but she grew and got stronger as her appearances piled on. Alfred has been handled the best in this show as he struggles to deal with what Bruce might be turning into, and how Bruce feels about the secrets being revealed to him. Plus, there's that added bonus of he can kick whatever ass decides to put itself between him and his ultimate goals.
Other characters were handled as well as can be expected given the frame that this story has decided to set itself in. Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle are the three I mean specifically. This show has actually been kind of a waste of Harvey Dent, seeing as he can't really do much, and any hints of his future self have to be relegated to a coin flip and a growl in his voice when he grabs somebody's shoulder. If we see Two-Face somewhere down the line in this show, it's not going to be a good thing, and that's sad because I like the actor who played Dent. Bruce and Selina haven't exactly been well utilized, either. All Selina needs to become Catwoman is skintight leather (and maybe a whip). Batman is such an interesting character that it's such a sad thing to see that Bruce Wayne as a teenager is utterly worthless and uninteresting. And what's with the sudden OCD tendencies that popped up in the last couple of episodes? That's just poor handling.
Last and almost certainly least are the characters that weren't handled so well. Barbara, Nygma, the Wayne Enterprises board room. Barbara's last minute revelation that she's just as twisted as the Ogre was handled poorly. Very poorly. She showed no hints of this prior to his taking her under his wing, when she seemed like she genuinely didn't want to be anywhere near him or his crazy BDSM playhouse. Nygma as the weird forensics scientist was okay, Nygma the poor guy who couldn't get his girl was bullsh*t. One hundred percent. The plotline about Wayne Enterprises and their nefarious doings was spread so thin, all so that it can be dragged along season two as well, it seems. Why even bring it in now? As far as I'm concerned, this show got lucky to get a season two, they shouldn't have been saving anything for it.
And so, here we are, at the end. As we close out the show's first season, Maroni's dead, Fish's dead, the Right-Hand Fatman is dead, Barbara's dead (but is she loving it?), Bruce has discovered his dad's Batcave, Gordon's discovered that his father and Falcone were fond friends, and Penguin has declared himself King of Gotham.
Does this make me hopeful for season two? No. Will I come back for season two? I'll have to see by the time the fall comes around. Fish's demise has rid my mouth of the bad taste that she left me during her life. It was more than a little stupid that her being shot and in a helicopter was resolved by her having changed her hairstyle and on a boat. It makes me wonder if two endings were filmed for her last episode and they forgot which one they were going to go with when they filmed this one and decided "boat". I'm gonna miss Maroni, because he was a great character.
Will I give this season a rating? I'll rank it a solid 5/10. The pilot, Pre-Crow and Ogre episodes were strong, and worked well. If the second season can reach that mark for more episodes, it would be a good thing. Season one's problems were that it was bogged down by too much Fish, or too much crap that didn't feed in to anything in any way. The show needed to be tighter. Hopefully, season two gets a reduced episode order. I think 13 episodes per season would help this show, it would make everything tighter, it would make everything work better, it would rid this show of the baggage that came from having to expand it from 16 episodes to 22.
So, yeah, 5/10 for season one. Maybe, assuming I'm still watching it, I'll write a review for season two when it's all over. It'll be a nice compare/contrast, assuming the show gets better.
Maroni's the guy who throws acid on Harvey Dent. Maroni's dead. And Falcone, who is very set on retiring, is still in power and enjoying it by the time Batman comes around. Comic continuity means nothing to these people.
I don't know if comic continuity means anything to this band of TV writer hacks but I have to agree with @JCRendle. I think she's just knocked out and she is the future Mrs Jim Gordon and like I read online, the actress will be back. Besides if they were gonna kill her they would have made it clear, like showing her being stabbed or shot in the head like Maroni. She's gonna wake up with a monster concussion.
When I started watching this show, I was one of its staunchest supporters. I defended it against my friend's skeptical low expectations and rants about its presentation, attesting to its ability to get better over time. At the end of the first season, I now more resemble his prickly demeanor towards this show. I started being hopeful for it and had great interest in seeing how Nygma, Selina, Bruce and more would grow into the people we know them as in the comics. However, as the finale has shown us, the writers have no idea who these people really are.
The finale was...a mess, I'd say. It was underwhelming and full of such shoddy writing I don't know where to start. It's like the writers had no idea how to end it and they were scrambling to plot things out, so much so that we spend fifteen to twenty minutes with Jim, Bullock, Falcone, Penguin and Butch as they ran off, got captured, ran off again, and got captured again before, you guessed it, they escaped again.
Worst of all, the characters in the finale weren't acting at all like themselves. Maroni may be a power hungry man, but he knows Fish's power and short fuse, so why would he constantly berate her when he has the city in his fingertips? It's like he was begging to die in that moment. It's a loss of what was a great character, one of the few who still held up after twenty plus episodes.
Selina is someone who has never struck me as a follower, yet she up and joins Fish without a second thought, doing things Selina wouldn't do, namely taking orders and following the pack. She's always in everything for herself, and wouldn't allow anyone, especially Fish, order her around. Sigh.
Falcone, the king of Gotham would never just throw in the towel, and never for such stupid reasons. He had it way harder earlier in the season when he had Maroni, Fish AND Penguin to contend with, but now that one is dead and the other may well be a goner, he's done with it all? It makes no sense. This is not the powerful, intimidating Falcone we met at the start, and he doesn't resemble the Falcone of the comics either. I about upchucked when he was talking to Jim at the end and both of them were growing friendly. I mean, really, Jim? Don't you remember all the damn times this guy tried to have you killed?
Barbara. Oh, silly little Barbara. I'm not even going to bother going there. Barbara was special, truly special at the start of the season, and somehow along the way she became a completely different character with no resemblance to the loyal wife we saw in episode one. In the haze of her infidelity, crack snorting, pill popping and whatever other substances she toyed with over the season, we saw behind the veil of a clueless writer's room that knew jack about their characters. At the end of the season she's now apparently a hardened, mind-warped killer with more than a few bolts loose. Wait, what? If you'd have told me that this is how her character would've ended up after twenty episodes, I'd have laughed in your face, on the sheer implausibility of it alone. It's such a shame too, because Barbara had the chance to be so interesting, especially with her dynamic of being married to a cop who doesn't toe the line. I have no freaking idea how they're going to make Jim and her get back together to have Barbara or Jim Jr. in the future, but it's going to suck and I'm going to hate every second of it.
Nygma. I was so excited for this character, one of the best casting choices in the show, and now, that's all gone to sh*t. It was predictable from the start that Nygma's moment where he broke bad would be because of something involving his office crush, but how they've done it is bonkers. In two episodes they've made the methodical man of riddles a crazed lunatic with multiple personalities and a penchant for crazed grinning, like he's some poor man's amalgam of Two-Face and Joker. It would have been far better if he'd caught the cop in the act of beating his crush and in a moment of tension, killed the guy, leaving the two of them with the weight of the guilt. How they did it in the show, however, was beyond poor. Smart, always ahead of the curb Nygma kills this guy in the middle of a street where anyone in the line of apartments could see him and then later, he takes the man's severed body parts and attempts to dispose of them AT THE GOTHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT, the last place you would want a body stewing away. Nygma is smart enough to find a quiet place to do this, and has all the resources at the GCPD to utilize, yet fails to do any of this. Jesus, how they've ruined him.
Looking ahead to season two, this Batman fan isn't that interested. The only things keeping me watching are Bruce, Alfred, Lucius, Bullock and Jim, but who knows if that'll be enough. So many characters have been trashed beyond recognition over the course of just one season, with continuity thrown out the window along with it, leaving me skeptical of its future. I foresee a sharp decline in viewership leading to an eventual cancellation, likely between the end of season two and what would've been the start of season three. The way the show is now, they'd need to do a time jump to really shake things up and make it a show about more than just a villain of the week that presents characters that can't grow to be more because of the canonical restrictions. The greatest shame then would be losing some great young actors from the show, including Mazouz, who is a brilliant Bruce. I just don't know how this show can successfully sustain itself with this model as it currently stands.
And worst of all, something tells me Fish isn't dead.
What vow is that? The whole, "I'll stop criminals from taking more kids' parents away from them like they did to me," thing?
Ladies and germs, my alter-ego for this evening!
Selina's turn with unshakable conviction annoyed me. Fish's death was unsatisfying as it is possible she could have survived even from that height. Something more definitive like a bullet to the brain would have been better. Barbara is off her rocker, completely deranged and the batcave discovery was alright.
All in all I found this season finale to be somewhat of an entertaining mess.
It seems a largely held thought that Marvel runs movies and DC takes television, but with Daredevil alone Marvel has shown DC that they've come to play, Arrow and Flash be damned. I can't wait to see the rest of their Netflix line-up, especially since the lovely Krysten Ritter is the lead of Jessica Jones and Mike Colter is stacking up to be a superb Luke Cage. I'm interested to see how Iron Fist develops too. Marvel's reign continues.
22 episodes versus 13 episodes. Daredevil had more room to tell a coherent story because they didn't have as much room. Gotham got 22 episodes pretty early on and they've failed because they believe they have enough room to spread out, when they really don't.
In short, Marvel Studios knows what they're doing. Gotham's producers don't know sh*t.
Perhaps Gotham writers feel the same way toward this series.
As for characters being so "out of character" in the finale, I chalk that up to lazy, subpar writing that we seem get from time to time.
I honestly don't know if there's a show on TV that got wrong as much as Gotham did.
Supergirl is heading this way.