“Gotham” 2.10 – Son of Gotham (8 out of 10) – Written by Bruno Heller and John Stephens, Megan Mostyn-Brown Based on characters created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Howard Chaykin, Frank Miller, Greg Rucka; Starring Ben McKenzie, Donal Logue, David Mazouz, Sean Pertwee, Morena Baccarin, Erin Richards…; Rated TV14. Aired on Fox 11/23/15.
Gotham is gearing up for the fall finale episode next week so “The Son of Gotham” was full of fights and death. Overall it was an entertaining episode with little bits of ‘are you really surprised by that’ moments. Galavan trial is about to begin and everyone except Gordon are thinking he’s going away for a long time, however when the moment of truth come the old Mayor says he lied about Galavan and that Penguin was the one who tortured him. Galavan goes free and in true super villain mode publicly disgraces the hero, in this case Gordon by baiting him into punching him in the face.
The Galavan/monks of Saint Duma, who comic fans will recognize as the order that Azrael comes from, was anticlimactic as far as the rest of the episode goes. The nine deaths they need with Bruce being the last happened very quickly and seemed pretty random. I would have liked to see them kill descendants from the families of those that pushed them out in the first place for the other eight deaths. Having only one of those deaths, even if it’s the final one seems very un-cult like and just sloppy.
What I did liked about this arc was the fact that Galavan beat the crap out of Gordon when they finally had a chance to go toe to toe. This made sense seeing how Galavan has been trained by assassin monks to redeem Gotham. True to comic book fashion he leaves the actually killing of the hero to his thugs and leaves before the job is done. Penguin shows up and saves Gordon’s life which only puts Gordon futher into his pocket but that’s okay I really enjoy the Gordon and Penguin relationship. I’ll assume the other monks that Gordon fought and beat were new recruits and like the GCPD rookies they are the ‘red shirts’ of the Gotham universe.
Seeing Riddler and Penguin struggle as roommates offered a little bit of humor in a pretty dark episode. I’m interested to see where this goes from here. Will Riddler eventually come out of the good guy closet and join Penguin in the fight to be the King of Gotham’s underground?
Alfred goes looking for Bruce for reasons I’ll go into in a minute but this leads him Galavan’s apartment where he runs into Tabitha. Because she’s crazy they fight and seeing Tabitha go against someone who can actually defend themselves was awesome. It gave us a little more of the Tigress character that Gotham is creating and let Alfred prove to the audience that he is more than capable to train Bruce, or at least start he’s training. The fight ends with Alfred running away wounded with a knife gash in his side and a knife lodged in his back. He falls into a garbage truck to make his escape which given his wounds should cause some problems.
The best part of the episode though had to be Bruce teaming up with Selina to trick Silver into giving up the name of the man who killed Bruce’s parents. Seeing Tommy Flanagan (SOA) as a thug threating to cut off kids fingers was amazing and I liked that Bruce took a few hits to really sell that idea that this guy was going to hurt them. The name Silver gives is M. Malone which made me smile because it seems like a tip of the hat to Matches Malone who is a thug in the comics that Bruce uses as an alias from time to time. Silver giving up the name and then trying to recover once she’s caught in her lie was great for Bruce and Selina to move closer together and further their characters into the people we know they become. Silver even tells Bruce “this isn’t you” and he’s reply “you’re wrong” then walking out was a great glimpse of the composure that Batman has.
The episode ends with Galavan and Bruce facing off and Galavan admitting he wants to kill him. Next week it seems will be race to safe Bruce before he dies to which we all know what the outcome of that will be but I hope we see Galavan either meet his end in a really cool way or get arrested with enough evidence to put him away for good. I think the idea of him on death row and Bruce struggling with wanting him dead and the morality that goes with that could give good insight into the hero Bruce will become.
I liked the episode as a whole and I’m really excited for the fall finale next week. I hope the tie up the Galavan thread and introduce a new threat. Maybe some more villains from Indian Hill or another thread into the corruption of Wayne Enterprises. Gotham season two has been heads and shoulders over season one and I hope it just continues to climb from here.