Gotham’ recap: In which we meet Selina Kyle
She goes by ‘Cat’ and has not yet learned the art of subtlety.
“Gotham,” the fall’s buzziest new show about teens, returned with its second episode last night, following a pilot that a lot of people watched and that most people enjoyed. “Very dark!” we all said to our mothers. “But kind of violently silly, ya know?” Second episodes can be as telling as pilots — they’re often produced under entirely different circumstances, and are the first test of whatever conceit pulls us in. By this measure, episode two, “Selina Kyle,” was busier without bursting, emphasizing the show’s koan-like tendencies even in a story about insanity. What else to say about an hour that cast Lili Taylor as a pseudo cannibalistic and painfully polite child snatcher? Let’s break it down:
Jim Gordon and Selina Kyle: Of course Ben Mackenzie’s detective is assigned to the mysterious shooting death of a homeless veteran, who of course we knew was a witness to the child snatchers. And of course Donal Logue’s Harvey Bullock wants nothing to do with the case — not because it has to do with child snatchers but because it has to do with bums. Gordon keeps digging, first learning from the only (surviving) witness that the snatchers drove a homeless outreach van and attacked using a giant poisoned pen, and then learning that the kids were being drugged with ATP, last in favor among the Arkham Asylum staff. All this, and the Gotham City Police Department resists an investigation. (“Justice!” shouts Gordon. “Bureaucracy!” shouts everyone else. And on and on.) Besides that, everyone thinks they’ve got the new detective figured out since he had to kill/”kill” a snitch; and Gordon, not wanting to lose the advantage, has to maintain the façade of his moral decrepitude. Which ... sounds more like a thing when I explain it than how it plays. So Gordon’s gal Barbara (Erin Richards) leaves an anonymous tip with the Gotham Gazette; and the heat turns up on both the police and the local pharmacist who’s been supplying the snatchers their drugs.
Gordon and Bullock’s visit to the pharmacist — a simple cross-check sent them to the only three companies still selling ATP in the city — ends in gunfire and darkness and the escape of the snatchers andthe rescue of the children, being held in the basement. And still: The mayor spins the case into a larger campaign of “tough love,” rounding up Gotham’s homeless youth to send them to foster families or — more likely — Arkham Asylum. “Justice!” shouts Gordon. “Bureaucracy!” shouts everyone else. Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova) gets caught up in the dragnet: The bus she walks onto just happens to be the bus stolen by the snatchers for shipment overseas. For labor? No, worse: for eating. But Selina (when she finally begins to speak! more than 30 minutes into the episode) is craftier than all that, bucking up the crying boy in the seat next to her before slipping away from her captors at their destination. Gordon, realizing the snatchers are working for some kind of shipping company, swoops in in time to save her. (The snatchers are actually working for the Dollmaker, but that’s an Easter egg that goes nowhere ... yet.) Back in Gotham, Selina — she goes by “Cat” — grabs Gordon’s attention back at the station. We learn that she has a mother, probably a dead mother, and we’ve already seen her fingering a locket. This makes her the second most-sympathetic orphan in town. She really doesn’t want to go to juvie. So, as an inducement, she tells Gordon: I know who shot the Waynes.
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Oswald Cobblepot: The thing that is going to be hard is when Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor) gets sympathy by fans who are attracted by all of his best qualities — those sad eyes; that quivering smile — while ignoring the enormity of sins. For example: Picked up by two douche-y frat guys while hitchhiking out of Gotham, Cobblepot soon stabs one of them in the throat. (“Do you know that when you walk, you look just like a penguin?” That should never be anyone’s last words.) He keeps the other guy as a hostage, hiding him in the closet of the out-of-town trailer he rents in what appears to be the epicenter of nowhere. At night, he stares up at the ceiling he’s covered with a homemade vision board — all pictures of crime boss Carmine Falcone and the streets of Gotham and bright red highlighter. Unfortunately: The mother of his hostage has no time for games and denies his ransom request. So the last we see of Cobblepot is whatever he sees when he looks at his hostage — his “scamp” — with that crooked smile, now the opposite of quivering.
Edward Nygma (Cory Michael Smith): Is around! But no riddles, though.
Renee Montoya and and Crispus Allen: The pair (Victoria Cartagena and Andrew Stewart-Jones) pay a visit to Cobblepot’s crackpot mother, and among themselves cannot decide if his presumptive murder is worth wasting their major crime resources. But Montoya isn’t letting go so easily.
Fish Mooney: Now lacking her least loyal henchman, Fish continues to provide crumbs of info to the GCPD while plotting her eventual ascension against Falcone (John Doman) — even as the don himself turns up at her club to probe her duplicity and even as he has her boy toy beaten before her, just because he’s probably certain that she’s fooling him. The sad thing here is something entirely unexpected: not that Fish goes operatically berserk after Falcone’s insult, but that Jada Pinkett Smith has dropped her northeast-of-Transylvania accent.
Bruce Wayne and Alfred: The way that you know that this Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) is our Bruce Wayne is that he doesn’t take nothing from nobody, instead spending his time burning testing himself with an open flame and doodling creepy pictures while listening to thrashing music. Alfred (Sean Pertwee), that kooky disciplinarian, gives Bruce all kinds of mouthy scoldings, but he saves the heaviest stuff for Gordon. There’s a telling moment in the scene where Alfred asks Gordon to drop by the manor. Gordon asks, “What’s wrong?” And Alfred sighs. “I’ve never raised a child.” “Well neither have I,” Gordon says. We see the shadow of an emotional through-line without yet being allowed to follow it anywhere beyond where we expect. So Gordon tells Bruce, “You’re hurting yourself.” And Bruce says, “I feel bad for those homeless children.” And what neither one of them is saying to the other is, “I know what it’s like to survive.”