Duck Fox

Oswald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Courtesy of Fox.

It’s become increasingly clearer as the series moves on that Gotham really is the story of Batman’s greatest foes, rather than the rise of his greatest non hero ally, or the man himself. “Viper” continues to chart the politics of life in Gotham’s criminal underworld, featuring Gordon, Bullock, Bruce Wayne and Alfred only tangentially. And while this has been interesting in the preceding weeks, there’s one glaring problem with how the underworld story is handled this week: nothing happens.

While that’s obviously hyperbole, it’s not a stretch to say that the events of Gotham’s crime families are hopelessly forgettable, with the notable exception (again!) of Oswald Cobblepot’s continuing misadventures in Salvatore Maroni’s restaurant. This interaction even includes Gordon in an unenviable position.

Gordon’s main adventure involves tracking down a mysterious drug dealer who is leaving druggies and street thugs vials of something called “Viper.” Just “breathe in” and you’re granted super strength and a great high… But then you die when your skeleton collapses as your body’s calcium stores are used as fuel for your muscles. So fairly dangerous, and definitely something GCPD should be looking into—assuming you’re not Harvey Bullock, who believes they should just let the underworld implode “The end of crime” he says. Donal Logue may not be getting as much screen time as anticipated based on the pilot, but he’s still the clear MVP among the GCPD.

After realizing that a highly sophisticated facility would be needed to actually create Viper, GCPD concludes that the only lab that could handle the production is WellZyn, a subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises. It’s not fun for Bruce Wayne to start drawing the same connections at Wayne manor. The group at GCPD call down WellZyn amidst the madness at the precinct as super powered druggies are very successfully resisting arrest before collapsing into broken husks. Taylor Reece (Margaret Colin), WellZyn’s legal representative, arrives and points the investigation towards Stan Potowlski, a lonely loser who worked on biochemical stuff.

The GCPD spends the rest of the episode imbibing itself in the generic criminal investigation you expect from a show like Law and Order. It’s competent, but not very compelling, and throwing in an old man who takes the formula feels like just a zany way to grab eyeballs and make the detective work stand out.

Elsewhere, Maroni is planning to rob Fish Mooney’s casino, but anticipates losing a few men to the assault. Cobblepot steps up to help, providing inside information that he believes will limit losses. His approach to Maroni has been sensible before now, but it’s clear that he’s become a little overconfident when he starts telling Maroni all about his real past. It’s believable that Maroni already suspected much of what Penguin tells him, but as a badass mobster, he’s got to make sure he can trust the little snitch. Especially because he’s a little snitch, so he co opts Gordon and has him tell Cobblepot’s story. Gordon, ever the virtuous hero, manages to save himself and Cobblepot by simply telling the truth. And when it’s run through in one single scene it’s hard to believe that the show has spent four weeks basically spinning its wheels on Cobblepot. As fun as that wheel spinning was (especially when Cobblepot is slicing people’s throats for a pair of loafers), we really did need this episode, as it is finally fully reincorporating Cobblepot within the criminal underworld. Now we just need Montoya and Allen to pick up some story.

The less interesting aspect of the underworld comes, unfortunately, from Fish Mooney. While Jada Pinkett Smith’s performance is as campy and enjoyable as ever, it’s hard to do more than roll your eyes at Mooney’s new weapon against Falcone—the street girl from last week, Liza (Makenzie Leigh). Liza is being setup as the perfect woman for Falcone, and it’s an interesting development, but we do not need to see every single one of her training sessions. The series apparently wanted us to wonder what Mooney was doing before the meet-cute between Liza and Falcone at the end, but the scenes feel wasted rather than illuminating by the end. There’s an even less interesting coda to Mooney’s personal story, where we find out she’s in an alliance with another of Falcone’s capos, Jeremy Davidson’s Nikolai.  

So when it’s all said and done, Gotham, both the show and the city, appear to be in a funk. There’s a lot of difficulty in making a 22 episode season of television, and a significant amount of difficulty comes from the pacing. Making every single episode a pulse pounding thrill ride is possible, but it also tends to become anticlimactic at some point. Which is to say, even though this week’s installment was less than interesting, it’s not a dealbreaker for the series as a whole. A more solid integration of storylines between cops and robbers would definitely help—we know very little about Montoya and Allen, and the payoff to Mooney and Bullock’s relationship hasn’t been fully explored either.

“Viper” was hardly a total wash, though. For once, Bruce Wayne’s integration into the story makes perfect sense, and the denouement features Alfred beginning to help him piece together the puzzle of Wayne Enterprises’ corruption and perhaps, for the first time, realizing what Bruce is doing is worthwhile. Selina Kyle makes a brief appearance that is less sensible, but hey, baby steps.