Piece of the Puzzle - Gotham S1 E5 - Viper

In which I review the most recent episode of Gotham.

After last week's decision about the fate of Akrham, the Maroni crime family has been hoping to act on their newfound momentum against Falcone, and now they have a weapon perfect for the task: Penguin.  His connections within the Falcone organization gives him access to everything, including the vaults of their casino.  Meanwhile, a new drug, known only as Viper, has begun hitting the streets of Gotham.  It grants its users superhuman strength and the certainty of a gruesome death.  But when Gordan and Bullock find out that the distributor has a political agenda, they realize that everybody - including the young Bruce Wayne - are at risk.

This is easily the best episode of the series thus far, beating out even the incredibly well-rendered Selina Kyle.  Not only is the plot itself incredibly entertaining - watching short-lived metahumans riot in the streets, rob gas stations for milk and cheese and marvel at their own magnificence - but the episode features several loose plot strands coming together in extremely satisfying ways.

Fish Mooney's plan to train a white trash wanna-be singer into an assassin against Falcone finally bears fruit: marking the first time one of Fish's plans has substantively gotten off of the ground.  While she still reeks of over-sexualized writing and campy execution, it's hard to argue with her results: transforming trashy eye-candy into a cultured sophisticate in a much darker take on My Fair Lady.  Additionally, Bruce's research into Wayne Enterprise's under-handed dealings - especially how two crime families could become such big players in a city renovation project spear-headed by his parents - pays off in a big way.  As it turns out, Wayne Enterprises is the OsCorp of Gotham - the font from which all manner of super-powered villainy is sure to erupt in episodes to come.

While I am actually excited for what they started to do with Fish Mooney's character, I can't help but think it suffers from taking her two steps forward, one step back.  Viper brings her completely out of her club: pitting her against Falcone's other crime bosses on neutral territory - trading barbs with her peers in his organization, providing the first, tentative look into why she rose to her position in the first place.  The fact that her latest scheme against her boss actually appears to be well planned and executed gave me hope that we'd see her as something other than sexualized scenery with the thin pretense of progressing the over-arching plot.

The step back, of course, occurred when it came out that she was, in fact, only pretending to fend off the misogynist advances of one of Falcone's other mob bosses.  They are lovers, embroiled in the same coup d'etat against their superior.  Still, even some progress with Fish is better than none.  Perhaps in time we will see the same competant Fish Mooney that the writers evidently do.

The poor writing of the episode was actually reserved for Penguin, of all characters.  Although he's been intelligently stalking Gotham's criminal world up until now, he took an insane gamble on Maroni sparing his life when he told them that he had 1) been lying to him since the day that they met and 2) was a fairly high-ranking member of Falcone's organization until recently.  The fact that his scheme paid off in the end actually doesn't matter: he took stupid, obvious risks that immediately backfired on him, leaving him within a hair's bredth of having his face sliced off in Maroni's kitchens.  And, given that his continued existence is owed to going unnoticed in the city, his incredibly visible position as manager in a known hangout of Falcone's main competator - coupled with the use of his previously well-known alias - seems to have all the ear-marks of a terribly thought-out plan that will inevitably fail, sooner rather than later.

While Viper is certainly a step in the right direction for the series, it is not without its aforementioned issues.  Additionally, the show needs to quickly figure out what it wants to do with both Selina Kyle and Barbara Kean, two characters that have shown a lot of promise in past episodes, but have failed to do anything with that.  Overall, I give the episode a high 7.5 out of 10.

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