Sunday 7 February 2016

TV Review No. 8 Gotham: Strike Force (S2, Ep4)

Strong Points:
New commissioner is a breath of fresh air
Nygma talking to himself
Penguin is out of his comfort zone
Alfred and Selina's talk
The idea of good and bad criminality
The steps Galavan takes to achieve his goal are clever, however...

Weak Points:
...The brilliant goal for Galavan isn't that brilliant
Over the top violence for certain parts
Galavan and Bruce's talk and introduction of Silver
Penguin doing the dirty work

Spoilers ahead:
In-depth Review:

Penguin is out of his comfort zone and this is a good thing. Galavan has him doing his dirty work for him and is using his mother as blackmail to keep him doing this. It's nice to see another side of Penguin and it will be interesting to see how Penguin reacts to Galavan treating him like a servant (much like Fish, and that didn't end well). However, I did think that Penguin travelling to see Galavan instead of asking Galavan to come to him was a bit out of character for a criminal mastermind.

Galavan compared to Penguin hasn't quite clicked with me yet. Yes, his plan is multi-layered and very clever, but the end result is real estate. The big plan is real estate. To do this he has to become mayor so as to reclaim Gotham for his forefathers and... Jerome was more interesting, sorry. Also, the fake 'everyone get down, that guy's trying to kill me' was so cringy that I'm surprised no-ones picked up on his evilness. Finally, when can we have a villain that doesn't give the audience dramatic irony (like Garret in Marvel AoS)?

Another part to Galavan's plan is to recruit Bruce. The way he is doing this is not to interest him with finding his father's killer but to introduce a girl for him to fall in love with. I can see that it's going to come down to a face off between Selina and new girl Silver but I'm not completely sure if we need another character.

Talking of Selina, we had a nice little convo between Alfred and Selina (finally, not a cringy conversation with Alfred!) that begins with Alfred punching Selina in the face for killing his friend last season. He then proceeds to tell Selina that Bruce will be better off without her, making her leave in tears. So she's been knocked down a peg. Finally. The scene ends with Bruce being forced to run home as part of his new training regime. 2-0 to Alfred.

Of course, we still have Gordon's story arc to watch and that starts with a new commissioner, a no-nonsense soldier, who straight away fires some of the police force for corruption and arresting one of them. That's how you get things done. He proceeds to make Gordon his second in command and stating that he will accept no corruption (of course, Gordon previously did work for Penguin so we will see how this turns out) and goes off to hire some innocent rookies for a strike force (the only people who haven't been bought out).

Back to Penguin now and his task is to kill the other two mayoral candidates for Galavan. He succeeds with one (he would've gotten both to if it weren't for those meddling kids!) by stabbing her repeatedly with a knife. Personally, I thought this was a bit over the top, especially for Penguin's character but I guess he has been pushed over the edge after his mother got captured.

Nygma is the final character we will be talking about today and his character just keeps getting more interesting. After, debating with himself about whether or not to ask Miss Kringle out, his confident side decides to, with no nonsense and proves once and for all that Miss Kringle has an unhealthy obsession with men who boss her around. Anyway, he invites her over to dinner, where they drink from science beakers and he uses 'sciency equipment' to make a crème brûlée. He then, nearly gives away the fact that he murdered one of her ex's, confesses he has voices in his head telling him what to do and they kiss. It will be interesting to see how this develops and which one of Nygma's voices will come out on top.

Conclusion: overall, it was quite a good episode, with lots of changes in status and it will be fun to see what happens next.

Rating: 78%

Thanks for reading, Satamer.

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