Season 1, Episode 5, “Viper”
Spoilers and lethal ATMs lurk below.
On Monday we opened on Bruce Wayne channeling Encyclopedia Brown, digging into the mystery of how his parents’ good intentions ended up lining mobster pockets in last week’s Arkham boondoggle.
He wants answers from the board of Wayne Enterprises, he tells Alfred, who wearily considers Bruce’s mushrooming investigation and sees a lad still trying to make sense of his parents’ murder. He cuts to the heart of things: “What if you never get to wreak revenge?”
“I don’t want revenge,” Bruce says, signaling a new era in the ongoing education of Batboy. “I want to understand how it all works. How Gotham works.”
It was a bit of a curveball, which in itself was a welcome development. Because while Bruce may still be figuring out how Gotham works, it feels like, five weeks in, we know more or less how “Gotham” works.
There will be an eccentric villain that provides the crime of the week and also, ideally, illuminates some broader aspect of the narrative. The crime will have a fancifully malevolent edge, for better (I enjoyed Balloonman) or worse (last week’s silly flute spike).
We’ll get some Penguin scheming on the fringes. Fish Mooney will purr something sinister and manipulative with malicious relish. Bullock will scarf street food and get beaten up by a perp. Gordon will put everything together right before the penultimate commercial break.
How you feel about “Gotham,” in other words, will largely be dictated by your appetite for this sort of predictability, and also by how well the series fleshes out the intrigue on the margins of the sturdy crime plot.
This week felt better than average, by the show’s own standards. The Gordon-Bullock partnership felt less forced than in previous episodes and the main crime was ghastly but sort of fun. It surrounded the Viper of the title, a toxic pharmacological compound that was fueled by calcium, giving its victims superhuman strength until they crumbled in a heap of their own disintegrating bones. A hopped up busker stole a whole ATM with his bare hands and held it aloft, only to collapse beneath it like a jumping-jack that lost its string. It was an inventive demise — Donal Logue, as an onlooking Bullock, deserves credit for his convincingly bewildered reaction shot.
Even better, the plot, hatched by a damaged crusader of a chemist, deepened the larger story, circling back and pointing toward the nefarious elements of Wayne Enterprises that Bruce aims to root out. By the end of the episode Alfred has stopped chastising his young charge and is plowing through company records alongside him, finally beginning to embrace his destiny as bat-aide-de-camp.
The Penguin chronicles, meanwhile, began with our hero climbing the ranks in the Maroni organization, briefly stumbling on his own ego, and then returning to the boss’s good graces by the end of the episode. Which is another way of saying it didn’t really go anywhere, in the big picture, although I suppose the Penguin incrementally improved his position, all the better from which to launch whatever power play he’s planning. (I hope he figures it out soon — not sure how much more Maroni we need here.)
The Penguin also, by revealing his and Gordon’s twisty relationship to Maroni, managed to get the detective mixed up with the other main crime family in Gotham.
The other main storyline involved Fish Mooney’s ongoing development of Liza, the girl she plans to use to undo Carmine Falcone. There are shades of “Pygmalion” in Fish’s sculpting of Liza but the more pertinent myth here is “Oedipus” — in a nice, icky touch, it turns out the most lethal seductress for Don Falcone is one who reminds him of his mother. (I couldn’t identify the aria she was humming — can anyone help?)
A FEW THOUGHTS WHILE WE LOOK FOR BULLWINKLE
• Another week, another stereotype: this time it was a cartoonish Russian gangster named Nikolai. Whatever. He’s harmless, more or less, and if it leads to more screen time for Jada Pinkett Smith’s Fish Mooney — briefly seen playing the Natasha to Nikolai’s Boris — then I’m O.K. with it. It can feel at times like Ms. Smith and Robin Lord Taylor (the Penguin) are in a different series — one that knows exactly how to capture and translate the gutter-baroque charm of the source material.
• Edward Nygma gets more Riddler-iffic by the week. Did you catch his delight at the drugged beast-people ransacking the police station? Can’t be long now, can it?
• How do you rate this week’s installment? Are you in on this series or are you still waiting to totally commit? Please let us know in the comments.