Gotham Burn the Witch Television 

Five Thoughts on Gotham: “Burn the Witch”

By | September 27th, 2016
Posted in Television | 2 Comments

Welcome to the first edition of The Gotham Gazette, Multiversity’s attempt to cover exactly what’s going on in the hit(?) TV show Gotham. We neglected this series for two years, allowing to to age like a fine wine into a show that has covered stuff like The Joker, Azrael, and The Court of Owls before Bruce Wayne even hits high school. I also have not watched this show at all until last week, when I caught the last three quarters of “To Reign In Hell”. I will also not do any further research into the show, to provide a unique perspective on Gotham you won’t get on your AV Clubs or whatever. You can check out our recap of what we think happened in Gotham seasons one and two here. Naturally, spoilers are ahead.

1. Fish Money

Last time on Gotham, Fish Mooney whose name is actually Fish Mooney is cosplaying as Calisto from the X-Men and leading her own army of Marauders in the abandoned churches of Gotham. She’s looking for Hugo Strange who apparently ran a lab underneath Arkham Asylum that created monsters and brought characters like Mooney back to life with superpowers because the writers ran out of ideas once they realized that more than one season of “Bruce Wayne without the Batman part” would be boring. The majority of our episode finds Harvey Bullock trying to track down Fish tracking down Strange while Gordon tries to help with the assistance of spunky reporter, Valeria Vale.

The thing about Gotham is that it feels like it should be a CW show, especially since half of that channel’s line up now is hot young people in spandex throwing one liners at each other. But there’s a lot in Gotham – the show’s general look, the costume design, even some of the acting – that places it in that limbo between something like season one of Arrow and a contemporary drama like Hannibal. It’s not Hannibal, nothing is now, but it doesn’t really feel like the show or its characters belong in the same mold that most CW shows cast their characters in. Valeria Vale did not receive that memo and it’s driving me wild. Everything she does is in the interest of being the cool, cute, funny character to the point she’s barely a character. She’s not the only over the top character either. Fish Mooney, The Penguin, and Jim’s ex-fiancee all play this extreme kind of crazy that’s not really crazy? It’s just a lot. Apparently some of these characters have been subject to experiments that drive them insane, but I don’t know what procedures could have turned Barbara Gordon into Jim Carrey.

After a couple run-ins with Mooney and her minions – one of whom is a woman in a get-up that looks like Tom Hardy’s Bane and I’m 90% sure the actress is just impersonating him for the hell of it – the police surround the prison mansion where Hugo Strange has been kept. The Penguin is watching this at home TV and because he’s a man of the people he’s able to somehow summon hordes of protestors outside of the mansion to… scream about Fish Mooney I guess? Gordon agrees to let Mooney go if she’ll spare Bullock but then he calls Penguin to go around back and keep Mooney from escaping. Cobblepot holds her and Strange up at gunpoint but she reminds Oswald that he’s her little “umbrella boy” and he’d be nothing without her. “Umbrella boy” would be the weirdest thing Mooney calls anyone in this episode if she hadn’t called Strange “daddy” twenty minutes earlier.

Mooney and Strange get away, leaving Cobblepot to revel with the armies while they straight up murder some of the marauders and throw their body onto the fire? Gordon and Bullock watch so I’m kind of hoping I’m wrong and they’re not just letting mobs burn bodies in a bonfire but that’s absolutely what’s happening. Valeria shows up at Gordon’s apartment saying that she has a story, that she knows Gordon tried to get Cobblepot to kill Mooney for him so she would let Bullock go. It’s the firs big news story that Vale has, which is huge since she won’t stop insisting she’s a reporter, but then she bangs Gordon and whoops nevermind it turns out we are watching a CW show. Gordon also tells her to straight up shut up before he kisses her so it’s not like this show’s going to get more uncomfortable as time goes on.

Continued below

I’m kidding! Let’s go to the B plots!

2. The Adventures of Creepy Trucker

The most outright creepy storyline in this week’s episode is the struggle of Poison Ivy. Last week, Ivy was 14. She’s now 28. That’s because one of Mooney’s maruaders artificially aged her and threw her into a sewer. Ivy woke up on the riverside, four feet away from a trucker who shows little surprise at the woman who looked like she just walked out of the river. I guess this guy spends most of his time parking his truck next to unconscious women. The trucker offers to take her home which sets off a ton of alarm bells considering Ivy is still fourteen. It sets off even more alarms when she can’t remember who she is. The producers said they wanted Ivy to use her seduction powers which is why they aged her up, so it wouldn’t be weird or anything. But now Ivy’s going to use her seduction powers as a teenager, in an adult’s body, who doesn’t know she’s a teenager.

Nothing relatively bad happens with Ivy and the trucker at least. He offers her his ex-wife’s clothes which would set off alarm bells if I had any left but Ivy kills the guy before anything funny can happen. That’s the best case scenario in Gotham. Murder. Ivy says it’s because he didn’t water his plants and I’m a hundred percent certain that’s not the stupidest reason someone has been murdered on this show.

3. The Adventures of Li’l Bruce

Hey so how’s young Bruce Wayne doing this week? Anything that informs his decision to become Batman like a meaningful conversation with Alfred or witnessing an injustice? Kind of. Bruce Wayne has been straight up kidnapped by the Court of Owls before he even got to high school. Not only that, Bruce talked the Court out of killing him, instead saying he’ll stop looking into stuff like Hugo Strange and his facilities if they’ll, uh, not murder him? They let him go and Bruce ends up back home where Alfred’s happy to have him back home. They discuss taking dancing lessons until they hear a window break and in comes the clone of Bruce that the Owls had commissioned at the end of last season. And thus ends this recap’s most turbulent paragraph. Now for some lightning round thoughts.

4. Some Woman Got Off A Train

The last scene of this episode was some lady walking off a train. Again, I’ve never watched Gotham before so I have no clue who this is and will refuse to look this up until next week.

5. The Mad Hatter is showing up next week.

According to the teasers at the end of the episode, next week’s episode is going to feature the debut of The Mad Hatter. Not some dude named Jervis who really likes Alice in Wonderland. Just The Mad Hatter, with the hypno hats, evil pocket watches and everything. I’m really excited for the next eight months if only so we can get more surprises like this. I want Killer Moth to show up without any origin story whatsoever and for everyone on the show to accept it.


//TAGS | Gotham

James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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