Several plotlines came to a head this week as an electrifying villain caused problems for Gordon and Bullock.

LIGHTS OUT

Note: The following review goes into detail about the episode. SPOILER ALERT!

Gotham’s up and down debut season took a definite dive this week with the disappointing “What the Little Bird Told Him.” A lot of things felt off to me here, and many of the show’s ongoing plots have either been ended or rebooted in some way. In some cases that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the abrupt nature of it all threw me off completely.

Mooney’s plot to overthrow Falcone has taken up a lot of screen time so far this season. It started to drag on a little however, so seeing it end here could be good for the show. What isn’t good though is how Mooney’s plan was ridiculously stupid to begin with. There has been a lot of time spent building up Mooney’s dislike of Falcone and showing us her meticulous plans to take him down. It turns out though that she respected Falcone too much to kill him, and was simply going to kidnap Liza and get him to retire in exchange for her life. After so much build-up, Mooney’s plan solely came down to whether Falcone had strong enough feelings for Liza to walk away from his entire empire. As soon as Falcone found out that Liza was a plant, he just walked into Mooney’s club, had all of her men killed and took her and Butch into custody. Poor Liza ended up as dead as Mooney’s plan, at Falcone’s own hands.

Now I have to say that I find the timing of all of this a little suspicious. This seemed like something that could have been used for a midseason or season finale, and not the second episode after coming back from a midseason break (and then a week break). This suggests to me that perhaps there were some radical changes to the story made behind the scenes, and maybe the decision was made to scrap the rest of the coup plot and find a reason for Mooney to stick around. This is all just conjecture, but Mooney has been a good character on the show who also seemed destined to meet an unhappy end sooner rather than later. It wouldn’t surprise me if the story was altered so she can stick around a bit longer.

Unfortunately the low quality wasn’t restricted to one storyline this week. Gordon returned to the GCPD and quickly got an offer of 24 hours to get his job back. It was clear from that very moment that Gordon would not be returning to Arkham Asylum as a security guard anytime soon. I mentioned my excitement last week about Christopher Heyerdahl appearing as the villain of the week, but his return offered up more frustration than anything else. It was fun to see Maroni wrapped up in the electrifying madness, but the Electrocutioner was a woefully ineffective villain. At one stage he had Maroni and his men completely disoriented and vulnerable, but then decided to not take advantage of that and instead wait until they were in a heavily fortified position later in the episode. I did get a good chuckle out of Gordon defeating him with a cup of water, but overall it wasn’t good to watch.

A dark cloud has appeared over Gotham in the shape of a potential love triangle. Barbara had one completely random scene with her horrible parents this week, but we know she’ll arrive back at some stage to find Jim in the arms of his new paramour, Leslie Thompkins. I find that I don’t normally agree with fans of a show who pick on one character for dragging a whole show down, but Barbara sure has been pretty dreadful so far. Leslie has been a much better presence on screen in her short time on the show to date. My only complaint about her kiss with Gordon is that it didn’t feel particularly earned yet. This is only Leslie’s second episode and they haven’t even shared a huge amount of screen time yet, so I would have liked to see the passionate kiss happen a few episodes later.

THE BREAKDOWN

Not having Selina, Bruce or Alfred show up this week provided plenty of time to deal with all of the other various plots. Unfortunately, several of these just weren’t dealt with particularly well. Gordon is a cop again after basically one episode away from the force. Despite spending half a season on a diabolical plan to overthrow Falcone, Mooney’s ridiculously weak plan fell apart in a matter of minutes and she’s now at Falcone’s mercy. To be honest, it kind of felt like Gotham was flicking a switch and rebooting the show in a way. Gordon is a cop again and he now has the kind of attitude a lot of us wanted to see from the very start of the show. Penguin is proving his worth, and neither Falcone nor Mooney look like they’ll be dying anytime soon. I find it rather bizarre to say this considering this was one of Gotham’s worst episodes so far, but I’m genuinely curious to see what happens next.

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Were you as disappointed as I was, or do you feel this episode was a lot better that I thought? Feel free to share your thoughts with me on Twitter @OldSnake24 or in the comments below. Also, be sure to follow us @YouNerded.

60/100 – Okay

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