Gotham – Selina Kyle – Review

Gordon and Bullock’s case in “Selina Kyle” involves a human trafficking ring targeting street kids. The snatchers (one of whom is played with amusingly cheery detachment by “Six Feet Under” star Lili Taylor) are in the employ of the Dollmaker, another eventual enemy of the Caped Crusader’s, though his current agenda is left ambiguous. It’s an okay start for the procedural side of the show.

But more importantly, the investigation is a window into how Gotham works. A beat cop is baffled when Gordon insists he should have protected the integrity of a crime scene instead of checking into an incident at a restaurant that pays him protection money. Bullock doesn’t so much care about the kids as he is confused the kidnappers aren’t just abducting pretty girls. The mayor uses the uproar as an excuse to sweep the city’s street kids into lockup without cause. It all sits uneasy with Gordon, who is still struggling to show he’s with the program after what went down with the Penguin last week.

Given the episode bears her name (although she repeatedly insists on being called Cat, because she’s going to be Catwoman one day, get it!), it’s somewhat strange that Selina is off-screen for the first half of the story. But when she does reappear, she gets a good showcase – showing street smarts, gouging the eyes of one of the snatchers, and impressing Gordon with her survival instincts. She also drops a cliffhanger bomb on Gordon that she saw who really killed the Waynes.

There were also some intriguing bits of world building this week. The drugs the kidnappers use to incapacitate the kids is tied back to Arkham Asylum, which Captain Essen exposits was closed down fifteen years ago, though the Wayne Foundation was apparently about to reopen it. Also, during a tense tête-à-tête with Fish Mooney, Carmine Falcone comments that the Waynes and the Falcones were “the pillars of the same house” and that they understood each other. Whether that means the Waynes merely provided balance to the status quo Falcone relies on or that they were somehow involved with the mob is open to interpretation.

Meanwhile, Oswald Cobblepot is waddling his way back to Gotham, which is bad news for two douchey guys who make the mistake of giving him a ride so they can mess with him. Noting that he looks like a penguin when he walks earns one of them a broken bottle in the neck. Not much time is spent on him this week, but I’m still enjoying Robin Lord Taylor’s performance and I liked the dark humor that came from his failed attempt to get startup money for his revenge scheme by ransoming the second guy to his unreceptive mother.

Speaking of, I was intrigued by the specter of several characters’ mothers this week. The Major Crimes detectives (whose investigation into Cobblepot’s “murder” will surely cause problems for Gordon in the weeks ahead) pay a fruitless visit to his eccentric old bird of a mother, played by Carol Kane. Did her styling remind anyone else of the Poodle Lady from “Batman Returns?” Elsewhere, Fish makes her vow to destroy Falcone on her “sainted mother’s grave,” which made me curious about her backstory. And finally, Selina insists that, despite her juvenile records saying her parents are deceased, her mother is still alive somewhere. It reminded me that, in some DC Comics continuities, Selina is revealed to be Falcone’s daughter. I wonder if the show will go that route.

One element of the show I’m not sure is going to work week-to-week are the Bruce/Alfred scenes. The Waynes’ murder was a solid starting point for the series, but scenes of Bruce doing proto-Batman training like testing his pain threshold with a candle seem like a throwaway, too divorced from everything else. It makes the show seem unconfident in doing a Batman show without Batman when it shouldn’t. Also, I don’t want to spend too much time on Bruce during this traumatic time period if it opens things up to implausibilities like Thomas Wayne specifically specifying that Bruce not receive any psychiatric counseling. That said, I do like David Mazouz in the part and it was a nice touch to see Bruce’s philanthropic public side teased.

Sound off on the second week of “Gotham” in the comments section!