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Raziel

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So, the 2nd episode of GOTHAM:

Jesus, the first half of this episode was a trainwreck. Just too much shit going on. Gotta check in on Young Bruce's latest attempts at self harm. Gotta check in on Penguin. Gotta check in on Fish and Falcone. None of which has anything to do with the main storyline about the kidnapped street kids!

The second half improved once they zeroed in on the main story. It wasn't especially good, but it was passable TV. Frank Whaley and Lili Taylor were giving some interesting weirdo performances. Unfortunately, they got squeezed out by all the other stuff going on.

And at some point, Gordon is going have to become more than a pillar of moral rectitude. Right now, he is solely defined by 1) being nice to kids, and 2) glowering at literally every other person on the show for not meeting his standards. He's a brutal bore. He needs to have a beer and cheat on his wife STAT.

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I didn't mind Gordon like you did, but I can see what you're saying.  It would be better to have him do something funny or clever once in a while.  And maybe don't have him be the ONLY honest cop in the whole department.  When absolutely everybody around him is "bending" (or outright corrupt) it makes it look like he's the asshole.

 

Once again, I didn't care for anything involving preteen Bruce or Selina.  I guess the way they handled Selina attacking the guy's eyes was as good as it could be -- foreshadowed, then done offscreen.  The 'hiding on the bus' deal was lame.  Agreed that Whaley and Taylor were fun (and so was the dude who was supplying the knockout drug) but it's hard to figure out what tone they're going for here.

 

Has anybody explained why the death of the Waynes is so disruptive to the Gotham status quo?  If not, that's fine; they can get into that later.  Just want to be sure I didn't miss it.

 

Overall, okay but not great.  Lots of stuff needs to be straightened out with tone, direction, characterization, etc.  I'm still going to optimistically mark it down as growing pains.  

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It seems like then they made Gotham, they focused on the critisism of SHIELD that it didn't have enough Marvelverse stuff in it and focused only on that, and thought that since Arrow was successful, they can load up on DCverse stuff and it'll be awesome.

 

Its not.  It's forced in there, the timelines make no sense, since by the time Bruce becomes Batman, all the villians they're tossing out there now will be too damn old to be a serious threat (yeah, Penguin in his 50's/60's is the norm because he's a mob boss, but Riddler, Joker, Pyg, all them in their late 40's/early 50's by the time Batman rolls around?)

 

Not fond of Selina being older than Bruce either.

 

Its a good premise though that can work, but this is FOX, they have a notorously short leash when it comes to new shows, and if it doesn't sustain an audience long enough to correct in the back half of the season, its not going to be able to.

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Has anybody explained why the death of the Waynes is so disruptive to the Gotham status quo?  If not, that's fine; they can get into that later.  Just want to be sure I didn't miss it.

 

No, all we've got is what Falcone hinted at about how they "understood each other." Which I believe is the exact same thing he said to Gordon regarding HIS father in the pilot. Falcone is apprently really good at coming to understandings with people. Except Saint James Gordon, of course.

And can we talk for a minute about what an insane asshole Alfred is? Or maybe Thomas Wayne was. "No therapists! Mr. Wayne left very specific instructions about how Bruce was to be raised!" Really? Did he write up a contingency for use in the event that he and Martha were gunned down before their son's very eyes? Or are you just being a hyper-literal idiot?

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Yeah I think Bruce is supposed to be 12, and Selina is 13. Personally I think (if the show makes it that far) that in a couple years when the kids all have growth spurts, they'll just jump everything ahead a couple of years. 14 year old Selina from season 2 will probably be 16 years old in 3.

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the timelines make no sense, since by the time Bruce becomes Batman, all the villians they're tossing out there now will be too damn old to be a serious threat (yeah, Penguin in his 50's/60's is the norm because he's a mob boss, but Riddler, Joker, Pyg, all them in their late 40's/early 50's by the time Batman rolls around?)

If Bruce is 12 now, and if he can be Batman by age 25 (just throwing that out there; no idea if there's a canon age for his Bat-debut), then that's 13 years. Riddler could be early 20s now, so he'd be just shy of 40 then. That seems reasonable enough to me. Probably the Joker, too. It's not like either of those guys are known for going toe-to-toe with Bats, anyway.

I forgot about the whole "NO THERAPISTS!" thing. What an odd way to navigate to the plot requirement of a Bruce-Gordon relationship. Were the Waynes Scientologists?

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I feel like I would like this show so much better if they just slowed the fuck down and focused.  Such a busy show.  Arrow is able to stroll out well known characters all the time because it is spaced out, and the door is always left open for them.  They didn't shoehorn Deadshot or even Deathstroke(AS Deathstroke) into every episode.  That is the difference between that and Gotham.  As mentioned above, it's like they are taking the criticism of SHIELD and just going full tilt in the other direction. 

 

This would work so much better if it focused in on Gordon dealing with the crooked cops while having the overall arc of him trying to solve the Wayne murder.  Have the Fish Mooney stuff as background filler for the BIG plot that drives the series.  Bring in Selina and Penguin sporadically.  This seems too easy to make this show good for it to be so mediocre.

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There's just no need to check in on all of these disparate stories every episode. Like, what real purpose did all that business with Penguin serve this week? I mean, besides hilarious product placement (IT'S GOT THAT HEMI IN THERE.) There was nothing urgent that couldn't have been handled, or simply alluded to, in a later episode. And that would've freed up three whole scenes for stuff that actually mattered.

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I still haven't gotten around to watching Gotham's first episode, which is odd.  Nothing I'm hearing about it is shaking me from my rather firm belief that they fucked up by setting it the way they did instead of just adapting Gotham Central more or less in whole, but with Gordon running the MCU for the name recognition.

 

Being cops in the city that Batman will be in 15 or 20 years from now is just not all that different than being cops in any other city on tv.  But being cops in the city that Batman (and his rogue gallery) currently operates in, now that's a premise worth running with.

 

But...  nope.

 

Still, though, it's a major comics property being adapted to live action, and it just feels like I should care enough to at least watch it.  I mean, fuck, I bought Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on blu-ray.

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As i told someone the other day, there is so much nerd pr0duct now, people should not feel beholden to flag the geek flag for every single tv show or movie.

Nothing wrong with being discriminating and not supporting stuff blindly.

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I will give them credit for dialing back Nygma this week. It was a quick scene, and it was more about him being a smart, socially awkward guy who desperately wanted more recognition for being smart than anyone in the room was willing to give him, rather than OMG RIDDLES HE'S THE RIDDLER.

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IThis would work so much better if it focused in on Gordon dealing with the crooked cops while having the overall arc of him trying to solve the Wayne murder.  Have the Fish Mooney stuff as background filler for the BIG plot that drives the series.  Bring in Selina and Penguin sporadically.  This seems too easy to make this show good for it to be so mediocre.

 

I caught up on Ep2 last night after the Pirates debacle ended early and had basically the exact same thought as you while watching it. I don't want to just keep posting the same stuff over and over but once again the kiddie stuff was pretty awful - that opening scene with Bruce was like an SNL parody called "Batboy: Emo Wonder" or something it was so so corny. And while I can see why every review I've read has raved about CatGirl - that actress is not only good but has some fantastic charisma about her - her insertion into the main underlying story was clumsy at best. They did a good job dialing back the Riddler this week, they more than made up for with the whole "She wants to be called CAT" nonsense. Ugh.

 

I will take issue with the one above comment about Alfred being an asshole. Every iteration of Batman we've seen has shown Alfred as more or less a surrogate father figure to Bruce. Well, outside a few flashbacks here and there in the movies, we've never actually seen the development of that relationship. I guess you could just assume Bruce always loved his trusty butler but what Gotham is doing is showing us an Alfred who has no kids and is totally unprepared for the task of raising a child, never mind one with major issues. It's actually one of the more fascinating twists on the legend they've done.

 

I don't mind the brief asides with Falcone/Fish and Penguin - every show has a B-plot that sort of runs concurrently yet feeds into the main one (ie the murder of the Waynes and Gordon's quest to uncover the truth) - so those scenes did serve that purpose. But I do agree it was all too busy. The Fish/Falcone stuff should've been this week and Penguin stuff next week but cramming them all into the same episode was like Crash TV booking. Every episode doesn't need EVERY character. Not to mention while I like the mystery and think the Penguin actor is absolutely brilliant, the show should be primarily about Gordon and Bullock. When they hit the pharmacy to shake down that weasel guy, that was when it really hit me, "Man, this would be a great cop show if they just focused on them like NYPD:Gotham and treated the Batman mythos stuff as just side dressing."

 

Oh and Fowler was spot on about Joker - I guess Fish's boy toy was Red Herring #2.

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I still haven't gotten around to watching Gotham's first episode, which is odd.  Nothing I'm hearing about it is shaking me from my rather firm belief that they fucked up by setting it the way they did instead of just adapting Gotham Central more or less in whole, but with Gordon running the MCU for the name recognition.

 

Being cops in the city that Batman will be in 15 or 20 years from now is just not all that different than being cops in any other city on tv.  But being cops in the city that Batman (and his rogue gallery) currently operates in, now that's a premise worth running with.

I mostly agree that the best stuff about this show doesn't require it to be set in Gotham. But I think Gotham Central would piss off a lot of casual viewers. If Batman exists -- in that city, in that time -- most people are going to want to watch Batman, not the (perceived) jabroni squad doing cleanup. Heck, if they cancelled all Batman comics when they debuted Gotham Central, I imagine a lot of comic readers would have said, "Um, this is nice, but... can't we see what Batman is doing?"

I suspect that they're leaning hard on the heavy Batman-centric stuff (which mostly doesn't work) because they don't have confidence they can keep an audience for a show in which the Batman mythos is in the deep background. So they shove things in your face to keep reminding you that it's a Bat-show out of that fear.  My hope is that they'll get more confident in the appeal of the non-super characters as the show goes on (though, as noted before, it wouldn't hurt if they made the character of Gordon a bit more appealing). The specter of Batman can still loom over the show, but it should loom high over the show so that he's not constantly in the corner of your eye.

 

To me, the biggest hurdle is what to do with young Bruce. At least Selina is out there in the world, doing stuff. What do you do with a rich 12 year old who lives out in the country? I guess he can start being Boy Detective in regards to his parents' murder, but there are logistical problems (It doesn't make much sense for Bruce to be constantly running around Crime Alley unsupervised) plus the fact that there are only so many times he can get chased and kidnapped and such before it gets old. I hope they have some really awesome idea, but I'm dubious so far.

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Actually, I really liked what they did with Bruce in regards to the homeless kids.  Highlighting that the whole point of Batman is to fight for people who can't fight for themselves.  The best use of young Bruce is probably stuff like that, showing him as someone who wants to help the city no matter what the cost is to him.

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