Season 1, Episode 6, ‘Spirit of the Goat’
Spoilers and demon purses lurk below.
So far “Gotham” has been fixated, arguably to the point of exhaustion, on the story of Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), the lone upstanding crime fighter in the immoral cesspool that is Gotham City.
But it seems a decade before Gordon there was another Boy Scout on the G.C.P.D. who went by the name of Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue), the man we now know as Gordon’s jaded partner. This week the show made a welcome pivot to his origin story instead, using the classic trope, Return of the Case that Haunts Me, to fill in some of his biography.
The case in question involved the Gotham Goat, a hammer-wielding menace who killed the city’s privileged children and arranged them macabrely for maximum sinister effect. Bullock killed the Goat once before but 10 years later, a new killer is in town aping the crimes with a fidelity that would seem to exceed the knowledge of a mere copycat.
We’ve previously covered the “Law & Order” rule of procedural television — the guest star you recognize is usually the culprit — but “Gotham” threw up a bug-eyed smoke screen this week in the form of the great Dan Hedaya, who appeared as Bullock’s old partner, Dix. That meant he was, conveniently, one of the few who knew the particulars of the Goat’s m.o.
But no: As it turned out, his main role was to reveal that Bullock is really the mensch we’ve started to suspect he is. Bullock’s superficial cynicism conceals a crusading heart of a “white knight,” Dix tells Gordon, to predictable skepticism. Later we discover Bullock’s been footing the bill for the old man’s accommodations, along with some possibly tawdry extracurriculars.
“Is he getting those magazines I ordered?” Bullock asks an administrator at Dix’s care facility.
“Those are awful magazines, detective,” she replies, deadpan, in one of the better lines of the night.
The elimination of Mr. Hedaya from suspicion left the therapist, Dr. Marks, played by Susan Misner, a regular on “The Americans” who has also had key roles on series like “Nashville” and “Person of Interest.” Sure enough, Dr. Marks turned out to be a hypnotist, speaking of hoary old standbys. (I don’t mean to sound dismissive but c’mon, this stuff is old hat.) She’s been the Svengali Goat all along, it seems, tricking her indigent patients into killing the spawn of the one percenters who, she says, have ruined Gotham City with their greed and self-interest.
“Deep down,” she tells Bullock, before she sics another addled patient on him, “we all want to eat the rich, don’t we?” (For a mainstream network series, there’s a pretty militant Occupy Gotham undercurrent at work here.)
I’ve been a fan of Mr. Logue’s since his Jimmy the cab driver days on MTV, so it was gratifying to see him be more, for a change, than just the Grizzled Partner of the often dull and dutiful Gordon. It would be great to see him take on a more equivalent prominence in the story and who knows? Maybe that’s on the horizon.
The other key plotline on Monday surrounded the undead Penguin finally coming home to roost. This has been coming since the pilot, when Gordon pretended to kill the Penguin but instead sent him on journey of discovery and criminal redemption. His arrival at the police precinct presumably clears Gordon of the murder charges but should get him, and by extension Bullock, in even hotter water with Carmine Falcone, who ordered the hit.
The episode closed with Gordon and Bullock facing off in handcuffs, confusion and mutual recriminations swirling all around them. Will the revelation divide them or force them together to defend themselves against a retributive Falcone family? As much as I’d prefer the former, the smart money’s on the latter.
A FEW THOUGHTS WHILE WE DODGE PAINTED LADIES
• “You got tangled in some hussy’s demon purse!” Mrs. Cobblepot hisses at Oswald, her prodigal son, revealing where the Penguin gets his flair for the language.
• Things were pretty quiet out at Wayne Manor this week, although Selena Kyle, the young Catwoman, snuck into Bruce’s study and made off with an ornate silver box of unknown import. Could anyone tell what that was? I couldn’t make it out.
• Riddle me this: What has all the answers but no game whatsoever? The ongoing alienation of Edward Nygma reached a new desperate level on Monday, as he struck out hard with the archivist Kristen Kringle. So there’s at least one man in Gotham who won’t have to worry about demon purses anytime soon.