It’s lights out for “Gotham” this week as “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies” doubles as the show’s wrap-up of its January Jerome arc and the last episode until spring.
Predictably, Jerome blowing up the power plant in last week’s cliffhanger has plunged Gotham into darkness and chaos, with his acolytes torching, terrorizing, and taking over large swaths of the city, including the zoo! While one of his followers bellows at Gordon that “Jerome is everywhere,” Gordon reasons that finding and shutting down the ringleader himself will stem the tide of violence and destruction. He thinks to ask Leslie (who’s still salty with him) about her conversation with Jerome and she recalls him talking about killing Bruce. So Gordon races over to Wayne Manor, making it in time to save Alfred, but Bruce – who successfully played to Jerome’s sense of showmanship to stall for time – has already been dragged off by the Maniax.
A quick sidebar here – while at the manor, Jerome shatters the Court of Owls statue. So that MacGuffin was either a huge waste of time or this is a lame stall, a la Alfred smashing up the computer in the cave last season and it taking, like, fifteen episodes for Lucius to fix it.
Anyway, Jerome has taken Bruce to a fairground on the boardwalk overrun by his followers. After getting Bruce’s face painted like a sad clown (even smearing on a bloody smile), he takes him on a tour, and credit to the show for one of its most effectively creepy setpieces ever. Amidst the lights and sounds of the rides are macabre twists on classic carnival games, with terrified, whimpering victims being pummeled by mallets, beaned by balls, stabbed with darts, and – in the case of one poor guy – perched above a dunk tank full of piranhas. Bruce is clearly horrified by what he’s seeing, but tries to stand firm in the face of Jerome’s taunts about there being no heroes in Gotham, even refusing to flinch at first when Jerome starts shooting staples into his arm. David Mazouz and Cameron Monaghan are really great scene partners, particularly in this sequence, but throughout the episode as well.
And even though Gordon rides to the rescue (there’s an awesome slash gory moment where Gordon decks Jerome and half of his stapled-on face slides off), Bruce really gets to get his proto-Batman on in this episode. He escapes the line of (cannon) fire by using the staples in his arm to pick his handcuffs. He emerges victorious when – in another well-executed sequence – he and Jerome duke it out in a Hall of Mirrors. And while he comes right up to the line, he recognizes that there is one between justice and vengeance and he stays on the right side of it by not killing Jerome, even though he wants to. When Bruce later explains this to Alfred, Alfred recognizes that he’s just established “the first rule” in whatever path his training is taking him and, as a flourish of “The Dark Knight”-esque music plays, Bruce firmly reiterates that he will not kill. It’s a great moment.
Not caring about the blackout is the Penguin, who’s consumed with rescuing Nygma from his captors. But, to his horror, Ed reveals early on that he was the architect of his own “abduction” and charges Oswald with having Isabella killing, to which he cops. The two then go back and forth about betrayal, love, and sacrifice, both getting in low blows (Ed informs Oswald that he “gently” put his father’s corpse in a dumpster; Oswald snarls that Ed would have ended up killing Isabella himself “just like you did the last one”). I still find this story thin (Nygma’s all-consuming anger about her death has gotten twice the screen time Isabella herself did), but Robin Lord Taylor and especially Cory Michael Smith do a good job with this confrontation.
Ed leaves Oswald to die in a deathtrap straight out of the 1960s “Batman” TV series – strapped to Isabella’s crushed car, a cauldron of corrosive acid hanging above his head, and the chain keeping it from tipping restrained in a slowly melting block of ice. A bumbling security guard stumbles upon the scene and rescues him. But it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire as Penguin is then scooped up by Butch and Tabitha (whose “old married couple” bickering I found delightful). Brought before Barbara, she offers him an opportunity to make things better for himself by handing over Nygma. But Oswald has learned his lesson and is now willing to sacrifice himself for Ed.
This turns out to have been one last head screw set up by Nygma. But even learning the depths of Oswald’s love for him doesn’t quench Ed’s thirst for revenge. And so, as the episode closes, Nygma shoots him point-blank in the stomach, his bloody body sinking into the river. This cliffhanger has me of two minds. I’m curious to see if it’s a power struggle or power sharing with Ed and the Barbara/Tabitha/Butch triad come spring. But given how irrelevant Indian Hill has made death on this show, and the fact that the Penguin is, well, the Penguin, it all falls a bit flat.
Meanwhile, the Court of Owls fret that Jerome’s anarchist actions will force them to step in. But in the light of day, they’re able to turn their attention back to their own schemes. Kathryn has tea with Bruce’s doppelganger “Five” (who hasn’t been seen or mentioned in so long that I honestly thought it was Bruce at first), noting that his scars have been erased and that he will soon be called upon to “save Gotham.” And a second court representative – played by James Remar, from a million things, but who I always think of being from “2 Fast 2 Furious” – pays a visit to Gordon, as he’s his uncle Frank. I’m excited to see the Court of Owls come back to the forefront, though, of the two plot threads, I’m way more interested in the Gordon family’s connection to the court.
What lessons did you take away from “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies?” And what are you looking forward to when “Gotham” returns in April? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
