The verdict is in vis-à-vis this week’s episode of “Gotham.” “All Will Be Judged” has another A-plot that’s the show spinning its wheels until the Court of Owls’ master plan goes into motion, but there’s some interesting steps forward taken in the subplots.
Hoping to find where the Court of Owls has stashed the Alice Tetch virus bomb, Gordon and Bullock dig into Kathryn’s holdings (and sidebar – for some reason, Gordon still thinks Kathryn trusts him, never mind him failing her test last week) looking for potential safe houses. They search one and end up finding a different MacGuffin – a duplicate of the crystal owl that Bruce and Alfred stole from the Court in the fall. Their flashlights quickly reveal the map hidden within, but before they can act on this new lead, they’re ambushed by Barnes and Gordon is abducted. Decked out in a bulky, weird-looking leather jumpsuit and wielding an awkward axe on his arm, the Executioner wants to punish Gordon for being an “enemy of Gotham” and Kathryn is fine, just fine, with that.
Luckily, Bullock is able to find Gordon before Barnes can execute him. And this attempted assassination gives them leverage, I guess, to arrest Kathryn, who delights in informing a surprised Gordon that she’s not the Court of Owls’ head honcho. Unfortunately for her, in the melee when Barnes later attacks the precinct, she pushes her luck with him too far and ends up getting her head lopped off. It’s a memorable exit for our season-long baddie, and props to Leslie Hendrix for the great job she did playing Kathryn’s elegant brand of evil. Barnes ends the episode in the wind and, honestly, I wish he’d been killed off too. Michael Chiklis just isn’t suited for the bombastic turn the character has taken, and Gordon’s smug lack of sympathy for his former friend and mentor is also not a good look.
Also on-hand for Kathryn’s death and Barnes’ destruction is Alfred. He enters the episode interrupting a vicious fight between “Five” and Selina, who broke into the manor to make good on her promise to kill him. “Five” manages to knock Selina unconscious before she can spill the beans, but Alfred spots a stab wound she gave him and, realizing he can’t feel it, figures out the switch for himself. But he too is knocked out and “Five” flees into the night (I’m predicting a Bruce vs. “Bruce” fight before the season’s over). Frantic over his ward’s displacement, Alfred first gets into a nasty argument with Selina when she refuse to help (I gasped when he snarled that she’s just like her mother). He then heads to the GCPD to find Gordon, and there’s an amusing conversation where they catch each other up on the Court of Owls of it all (Bullock’s reaction when he hears about the clone is priceless). Alfred eventually brings the shattered pieces of his crystal owl to the cops and a deus ex lab technician is able to put them back together with the map intact. He also gets a great badass moment when he bursts into Kathryn’s interrogation and stabs her through the hand.
So where is Bruce? Well, the shaman has brought him back to Gotham. He’s also still coaxing him into locking away his darker emotions, pointedly saying that he “cannot take what [Bruce] will not give.” But when Bruce is unable to part with the pain of his parents’ deaths (symbolized by Martha’s pearls, natch), the shaman shares a memory of his own. It’s of him punishing a Court member for the Wayne murders and he confides to Bruce that the Court is “a means to an end” for another group (if you keep up with casting news, you know where this is going) and that their day is done. Convinced by this that he’s on the right path to avenging his parents, Bruce metaphorically hands over the pearls. Only then do we get the real reveal – the process the shaman has walked Bruce through is how the Court turns the Talons into pliable foot soldiers. It’s a great twist that took me by surprise, and I’m curious to see how Bruce gets himself out of this.
On to other prisoners of the Court of Owls. The Penguin and the Riddler are reunited in the Court’s holding cells for the first time since one tried to kill the other and, naturally, it’s a little awkward. They threaten each other with death for a while, but eventually realize that they’ll need to work together to escape the “unnaturally damp hellhole” they’re trapped in and make a gentleman’s agreement to table their feud until then. Their bickering was admittedly fun – Ed smacking Oswald’s forehead to make sure he wasn’t a hallucination, Oswald refusing to call Ed by his pseudonym, etc. But not only was this subplot clearly a stall in their story, it also retroactively made the scenes we saw in previous episodes of them trying to infiltrate the Court seem pointless as well.
Last but not least, Leslie. Given the creepy-ass nightmare she has of Mario draining his infected blood into a wine glass for her to drink, she’s clearly not doing great. And things only get worse for her when she pays a visit to Jervis Tetch at Arkham, to confront him about why he didn’t just poison her to get at Gordon. Instead, Tetch’s twisted logic convinces Leslie of what I think she’s thought in her grief all along – that she’s the one to blame for Mario’s death, because she still loved Jim. This leads her to self-destruct and the episode ends with her basically committing suicide by injecting herself with a stolen sample of the virus, an evil smile crossing her lips as it takes effect. Uh oh.
How would you judge “All Will Be Judged?” Come deliberate about this week’s “Gotham” in the comments section.
