Gotham, “Burn the Witch…” Review!

This week on Gotham we were picked up right where we left off from the season premiere with Penguin rallying mobs against Fish Mooney with Gordon and Vale coming after her. Mooney ends up kidnapping Bullock in order to find the location of Hugo Strange. When they do find him the GCPD aren’t far behind, with Gordon in tow. Penguin shows up soon after with his mob. Gordon negotiates a deal with Mooney to get Bullock back by giving her Strange as a distraction. Gordon intended for Penguin to catch up with Mooney and Strange, but Mooney is able to convince Penguin to let her go. At the end of the episode we see Gordon get together with Vale, right as Lee Tompkins comes back into Gotham. As usual there is more than one thing going on in Gotham as Bruce meets the Court of Owls, though they have no been named as such yet and agrees to stop investigating the death of his parents. Shortly after he is returned to Wayne Mansion, his doppleganger shows up as well. Finally we have Poison Ivy (now played by Maggie Geha) as a full grown adult and showing her murderous tendency towards anyone who disrespects plants.

This honestly wasn’t my favorite episode of Gotham. The whole thing with Vale feels more manufactured then authentic and having Lee show up the moment they get together certainly doesn’t help matters. I’m also not a huge fan of how they are handling Ivy. Ivy hasn’t had any truly memorable leanings towards the protection of plants in the past two seasons. In most of her previous incarnations, she had some sort of reason to be nuts for plants. Now, its almost out of the blue how she loves plants and is willing to kill for them. Also, adding sex appeal to someone who is the mental age of a twelve year old is very disturbing. There are some things I did like about this episode though, and that mostly has to do with Bruce meeting the Court for the first time. I am excited to see where this goes and having Bruce meet the enemy for the first time is great. I imagine we won’t get more of this until later in the season but it will have to do for now. Overall I give this episode three out of five batarangs.