It's Villain Time: Gotham Season 2 Preview
Gotham season 1 finale in three words: shock and awe.
Coming across as weak or inept: that's a superpower. People will presume upon my loyalty and write me off as harmless, which helps me stay under the radar until the moment I hit them over the head with a lead pipe.
Or stab them to death. Or shoot them in cold blood. Or push them off a rooftop into the water, as Penguin did to Fish Mooney, complete with Leonardo di Caprio impersonation "King of Gotham!"
Drowning is a convenient plot staple because, with no body, it's TV code for "we leave ourselves the option to bring that character back." It happens so often, we've almost come to expect it, especially with a character named FISH?!
Please bring Jada Pinkett Smith back from wherever she ended up. She was delicious as the conniving Fish Mooney, who worked "the enemy of my enemy" like a boss.
Hey - even Butch, Fish's dufus enforcer, dufus'd himself right into being a season 2 regular!
(Ms. Mooney was an excellent role model for young women today because she did not tolerate being the talked-down-to "babes" number 2. OK, minus the part where she had a bullet on hand to prove it.)
Oswald Cobblepot, the poster boy for school bullying, checked all the boxes on the list: weird name, weird walk, accurate but demeaning nickname, and a bumbling idiot, kiss-up affect.
But Penguin ended season 1 on top by playing not both sides, but ALL sides of the dangerous Gotham crime game, even calling in favors from the police, and getting them - from an inconveniently honorable Detective Jim Gordon.
If Gotham was 1 hour of nothing but Robin Lord Taylor, I'd still watch it.
Even Barbara, the might-as-well-have-been-nameless blonde everybody felt compelled to coddle (and who seemed incapable of making a firm decision on anything, including her sexuality), otherwise savvy people who capture criminals for a living never once suspected her of her parents' murders.
It wasn't that she was too ethical. She was just too much of a wet noodle basket case to go all Basic Instinct on her therapist.
Who, for a therapist, was pretty clueless herself.
Not very bright to agree to treat your boyfriend's ex at her house over tea and cake, like you're some kind of creepy BFFs. Especially not when she starts psycho-analyzing you about your new relationship.
The kitchen knife was a dead giveaway, if you don't mind me saying so.
Another character everybody except Fish Mooney underestimated: the homeless cat burgling teenager Selina Kyle, who played everyone, even Jim Gordon. (That was low.)
Even though Selina met Bruce Wayne early in season 1, she doesn't appear to be either friend or foe to him right now. Maybe as he learns more about his father's secrets, it will be clear why she came into his life when she did.
We've been told the underground room Bruce and Alfred found is not the Batcave, but it still has a lot of potential for dark secrets, including this all-important one: is it really true that no-one else knew about it?
Which begs the question: who's the better detective in Gotham, the ones on the police force, or Master Bruce?
So, we get two somewhat parallel story lines in season 2:
1. Power struggle in Gotham, with villains led by Penguin - he thinks, but we'll see - and good guys led by Detective Gordon and his fedora-wearing partner Detective Harvey Bullock, who brought to the season 1 party what seemed like an awful lot of favors to call in from some really bad people.
We hope he didn't use them all up.
2. Bruce discovering more about his father's secrets, and what Mr. Wayne might have died trying to expose, prevent, or both.
Gotham season 2 has been billed as the rise of the villains, the natural result of the vacuum left by the exits of all 3 major crime players in the season 1 finale.
Highlight: the rise of an iconic Batman villain, with "that laugh" - and the backstory of how The Joker got it.
Which is why, as crazy as it sounds, a policeman (Jim Gordon) is disappointed when a crime boss (Carmine Falcone) decides to retire and leave town.
There's some truth to the orderliness of the buck stopping with someone, even someone on the other side of the law, as long as they're strong and predictable. Even Falcone says "there cannot be organized crime without law and order." Jim Gordon realizes that, too.
Falcone thinks it's time for Jim to be the one to lead Gotham, and lets Jim in on a secret: Falcone and Jim's father, former Gotham District Attorney, had been closer friends than Jim thought.
Then Falcone re-gifts a knife given to him by Jim's father.
Your father was the most honorable man I ever knew, says Falcone, but he still carried a knife.
Like the Boy Scouts: always be prepared. Like Ronald Reagan: trust, but verify.
