Gotham S01 E06 – Eat the rich

Previously: People did free drugs, drank a lot of milk, and then crumbled. It was a show high point for 3/3 Snark Ladies.

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Spirit of the Goat

Alex: The consensus last week seemed to be that the episode was about 2% better than the previous ones, so things might slowly be moving in the right direction. That said, this episode is called ‘Spirit of the Goat’, so don’t hold your breath.

Sweeney: I think the trick is in keeping our expectations nice and low. Terrible show, terrible titles, etc., etc. so that we end up pleased if it even achieves general mediocrity.

Marines: Even sentiments like, “it can’t be worse than the balloonman!” aren’t safe. Expect worse, always.

Alex: We open somewhere in Gotham, ten years ago, where a big bald dude is looking in the mirror and saying ‘I am the spirit of the goat’ over and over. He puts on black gloves and what looks like a very badly home-made Batman mask as his voice gets progressively growlier, until he finally snaps and puts a fist through the mirror. It’s creepy, but the soundtrack goes overboard with the dramatic music and the effect is slightly comical. Especially since he’s calling himself the ‘spirit of the goat’, which is just lame. (M: Not even, like, an actual goat. Just the spirit of one…)

Oh! I forgot to give this out in my last recap, but here you go, weird bald dude!

Elsewhere, still ten years ago, the TV is playing a news report to an empty room in someone’s apartment. The reporter is talking about a mysterious masked killer known as ‘The Spirit of the Goat’. Sorry, news guy. I know we’re only a minute into the episode, but you’re too late. I gave the star away already. The camera pans through some floaty curtains to the balcony, where a pretty lady in a spangly dress is hanging out. She turns to go back inside, but she’s ambushed by the masked killer.

Bullock and his ten-years-ago partner are in the car, pulling up outside an abandoned building where they’ve tracked a van belonging to someone called Randall Milky. Bullock tells his partner that they’re in the right place, and it very much sounds like he calls the guy ‘Dick’, but that surely can’t be his name. Bullock gets out of the car to check it out, while his partner radios for backup and in the process confirms that his name is, indeed, Dick. Heehee. Anyway, I actually missed the ‘ten years ago’ caption at the start on first viewing, but it was around this point that I realised this must be a flashback, because Bullock is super-keen to do police work. Detective Penis says they should wait for backup, because Milky is a dangerous psychopath who thinks he’s the reincarnation of a murderous goat. Um, OK. He reminds Bullock that Gotham’s golden rule is ‘No Heroes’. Bullock, however, is determined to save the girl from becoming Milky’s third victim. He sprints into the building and Dick reluctantly chases after him.

Sweeney: Donal Logue failed miserably here. This earnestness that we’re supposed to believe he once possessed still came across as sarcasm. They’re trying to humanize Bullock a bit and make us see that he wasn’t always THE WORST, but Donal Logue played him the exact same as he plays him in the current (era unknown!) timeline. Definite fail.

Mari: Maybe he’s channeling the spirit of a police officer. Not an actual police officer, just the spirit of one. (Sorry.) (Not really.)

Alex: I’d also just like to pause for a moment to point out that this cop duo are named ‘Dick and Bullock’. Got that? OK, moving on, Dick and Bullock poke around inside the dark building, which looks like it might be an abandoned theatre. Dick whines that the girl is probably dead anyway and they’re wasting their time, and Bullock tells him to shut up. They soon find Spangly Dress Girl, now changed into a Pretty White Virginal Dress instead, strung up by her arms on some kind of platform and not looking very alive. Bullock detects the shit out of the candles and notices that they’ve just been lit, so the killer can’t have gone far. They start shouting to Milky to give himself up, but a voice replies from the shadows that Milky is gone and that the Spirit of the Goat is here instead. They’re going to keep making me say that, aren’t they? Sigh. Fine then, I guess I’ll start abbreviating it.

Bullock tries to crack a joke and SotG responds by pulling a lever, opening some kind of trap door underneath Dick. He crashes to the floor below, but when Bullock runs to help him he’s attacked by SotG, who tells him that he can never stop The Goat – even if this body fails, the spirit will always come back. Bullock replies ‘come back from this’, then shoots him a bunch of times. He unmasks the now-dead killer and confirms that this is, indeed, the ‘Milky’ guy they were looking for. He then remembers his partner and runs to check on him, but he’s too late. He shouts ‘Dick, Dick’ over and over again and I find myself wondering whether Donal Logue needed a few takes to do that with a straight face.

Present day. Bullock is standing on a pier with a ‘well, shit’ look on his face. He’s looking at a dead woman in a Pretty White Virginal Dress, who’s been strung up by her arms in exactly the same way as the victim ten years ago. Nygma taps him on the shoulder and asks if he’s figured out the answer to his riddle yet. It’s something about a wolf, a cabbage and a GOAT, but Bullock has zero time for riddles and just wants to know the time of death. From her ID they see that the victim’s name is Amanda Hastings, and Bullock immediately guesses that she’s the eldest child in a wealthy family, because that’s who SotG always went for. They have a copycat killer on their hands. Nygma asks if Bullock is OK, and he yells that he’s not – he already solved this case. Nygma tries to cheer him up by telling him the answer to the riddle, but Bullock is too busy trying to get Gordon on the phone to listen. Nygma looks pissed, but if he wants people to pay attention to him then maybe he should stop trying to pass off riddles from The Office as his own.

 

Sweeney: A+

Alex: At Gordon’s apartment, his phone is buzzing on the table as he ignores Bullock’s call. He’s busy arguing with Barbara, as she continues to push for details of his work. He says he came to Gotham to be a cop, but that the city needs ‘something else’. (M: THE SPIRIT OF A HERO?) She understands, but she just wants to shoulder the burden with him. Eventually she talks him around, and he agrees to tell her everything. It’ll have to wait, though, because he’s late for work. They kiss and make up, then he hurries to finally answer his phone.

At the dock, the Major Crimes Duo question a homeless man about a recent shooting on the nearby pier. They’re extremely lucky, because the homeless man just happens to have a pair of binoculars, through which he saw Penguin’s (fake) murder in its entirety. Montoya pulls out of photo of Gordon, and the guy quickly identifies him as the shooter. Montoya looks ecstatic and says ‘we got him’.

Back at the crime scene, Gordon has finally showed up to work and Bullock fills him in on the details. He complains that the case is giving him extreme déjà vu, and that the GCPD will get a lot of shit once the press finds out that someone is hunting the firstborn children of the richest citizens. Gordon says that they’ll just have to catch the guy quickly, and for once Bullock has no sarcastic comeback for him. He instead suggests that the killer probably knew the victim somehow, and they leave to go question the family. Nygma doesn’t look too happy about being left out, but he should really be thrilled that he’s getting so much screen time in this episode.

Sweeney: Should he, though? Screen time hasn’t been doing the other characters many favors. We should be thrilled, but I don’t know about him.

Alex: At Amanda’s family home, her father is telling Gordon and Bullock that he’s been having a recurring dream about a ‘dark, overbearing presence’. Hmm, I wonder if that’ll be relevant later. Gordon asks if Amanda had any worrying people in her life, but her dad says that everybody loves her. As he speaks, he’s making a strange repetitive clenching motion with his fist, which Bullock notices and asks if he’s OK. His therapist, who has been listening in on this conversation, quickly sends Mr. Hastings and his wife out of the room, then tells Bullock that her patient isn’t capable of dealing with this kind of tragedy. (S: Therapist is Sandra Beeman from The Americans!) (A: Sandra who from what now?) Bullock snaps back that nobody is capable of dealing with something like this, and makes some rude comments about her work. Gordon shuts him up and the therapist leaves.

Police station. Nygma enters the records room and greets a woman called Miss Kringle who looks like she belongs on the set of Mad Men, adding to my ‘what decade is this?’ confusion. She looks very uncomfortable and tries to leave, and he sniffs her as she passes him. Ugh, Nygma, please don’t turn into a creep the moment you get to be in more than 30 seconds of episode. Anyway, he’s come to look for information about the SotG murders from ten years ago. He chats happily to her about the case, seemingly oblivious to how much she doesn’t want to be talking to him, and goes on to laugh about how funny her name is – Kristen Kringle – and what hilarious people her parents must be to have called her that. He seems to mean it as a compliment, as he goes on about how important humour is, but she’s clearly not taking it that way. He then insults her filing system, and that’s the final straw. She warns him not to mess up her stuff OR ELSE, and storms out.

Sweeney: The fact that everyone refuses to speak to him for more than 30 seconds probably doesn’t do a lot for his absent social skills.

Mari: Kristen Kringle? Is Gotham already preparing for a very special Christmas episode?

Alex: Gordon and Bullock are at Amanda’s fancy apartment building, which is the last place she was seen alive. Bullock thinks she must have been taken from here, because Milky always abducted his victims from their homes. He was a maintenance man who had access to all their apartments, and since there were no signs of a break-in, they need to check out all the employees who had access to Amanda’s building.

Oswald turns up at his crazy mum’s apartment and announces that he’s alive. Rather than being pleased about this, she’s furious, because he didn’t call her at all during the eight seconds that he was missing from Gotham. She’s convinced that he ran away with some ‘hussy’, which annoys him. He says that all he ever wanted was some respect, but instead he’s been having a shitty time with everyone trying to kill him. His mum calms down and tells him that the ‘bullies’ have always just been jealous of him. He gives her a villainy speech about how he’s on his way up in the world and will soon Be Somebody in this town.

Back at the police station, Amanda’s autopsy is finished, but Bullock tells the doctor in charge to check for a small cut at the base of her skull. The doctor finds the incision, which he had indeed missed. Bullock also knows there’ll be a penny inside it, and he’s right once again. This means that the murder definitely has the same M.O. as the ones ten years ago, but the pennies were a detail that nobody should have known about.

A little later, Bullock explains to Gordon and Essen that SotG always sewed a penny into every victim’s neck, for reasons that he never figured out. They deliberately left that detail out of the files to try to deter ‘copy goats’ (I didn’t make that up, Bullock actually said that). The only other people who knew were the coroner who performed the autopsies ten years ago (who is now dead), and Dick (who, it turns out, isn’t). Bullock agrees to go see Dick (teehee) and make sure he didn’t tell anyone about the pennies, but he doesn’t look at all happy about it.

Wayne mansion. Alfred and Bruce are watching ‘Goatwatch’ on the news, which is being read in an inexplicably sexual manner by the female reporter. (S: More lines that must have been nearly impossible to utter with a straight face, evidenced by the fact that we only see her for a few seconds.) She says that all of the city’s wealthy elite are running away to their summer homes and ski chalets and whatnot to escape the killer. Alfred suggests that perhaps they should leave town too, since Bruce is also the firstborn son of a wealthy family. Bruce isn’t going anywhere, though. He’s made himself a Big Board of Teenage Sleuthing and says that he can’t leave town because he’s busy investigating. He adds that nobody would abduct him anyway, because there’s no one to take him away from. Alfred looks hurt.

Sweeney: Aww, Alfred. Your guardian negligence is off the charts, but FEELS! But also maybe Bruce wouldn’t think that way if you stopped being so negligent.

Alex: Police station: records room. Nygma has gone ahead and started rearranging Kristen Kringle’s filing system. She walks in and he gleefully tries to explain how much better his new system is.

She’s furious, and convinced that Nygma is just messing with her to be a dick. She asks if he’s trying to get her fired, and he looks horrified. He clumsily tells her that he likes her, and would never want her to lose her job. He finally guesses that maybe he shouldn’t have messed with her stuff, and leaves. Sniffing aside, Nygma with a crush is just the cutest.

Sweeney: Agreed! I mean, I can’t hate on this girl not reciprocating because he was also terrible dealing with this crush, but it was still adorable and endearing to watch.

Mari: I bet his filing system was fantastic and Mrs. Claus was doing something super basic like “alphabetizing.”

Alex: Bullock and Gordon arrive at a retirement home. Bullock wants to see his old partner alone, but Gordon insists on going with him. They find Dick in a wheelchair, and it quickly becomes apparent that he blames Bullock for putting him there. If he hadn’t tried to be a hero, this never would have happened. Bullock brings up the SotG and asks if Dick ever told anyone about the pennies. Dick snaps that keeping that detail a secret was his idea in the first place, so of course he didn’t. The only explanation is that Milky wasn’t working alone: it must have been some kind of conspiracy. Bullock is dismissive of that theory, and Dick sympathises with Gordon about having to work with him. Bullock storms out, but before Gordon can follow, Dick warns him that Bullock always wants to be a hero and it’ll get them both in trouble if he’s not careful. Gordon is all ‘Huh? No no, you’ve got it wrong, I’m the Good Guy on this show’.

Out in the hallway, Gordon finds Bullock talking to a nurse about how Dick is doing and checking whether he’s been getting the dirty magazines he’s been sending. He shares a look of understanding with Gordon, and they leave.

Sweeney: Again, we’re meant to see the softer side of Sears Bullock here because LOOK! He pays for Dick’s care! But it rings hollow and contrived.

Mari: We said a lot about the over the top, corrupted cop spiel they played in the the five episodes, but I guess it worked because here they are all, “hey look! Bullock has a human side,” and we’re all, “naaaaaah!”

Alex: We’ll talk about this more at the end, but yes. It feels like they took the easiest route to try to bring some depth to this character.

In a nice, fancy house, a young woman is on the phone to her mother saying that she’ll be ready to leave town in the evening, as a maid helps her pack her bags. As she heads upstairs for a moment, her maid tries to follow with a plate of snacks, but she’s ambushed a dark figure who knocks her out. The rich girl is grabbed as she descends the stairs again.

Bullock is soon at the scene, where we learn that the abducted girl’s name is Amber. He explains to Gordon over the phone that there were no signs of a break-in, so again the killer must have had keys to the building. They can now look for someone who had access to both women’s buildings and, since he’s been busy lately, probably someone who recently called in sick. Bullock reckons they have about eight hours before Amber is killed, and suggests getting Nygma to go through the employee records to check for possible suspects.

Outside the police station, Barbara confronts Montoya. She offers to tell her whatever she wants to know, as long as Montoya promises to keep an open mind. Montoya says that it’s too late for that, and that Gordon is right to keep her in the dark because knowing too much will get her killed. She has a warrant for his arrest, and begs Barbara to get out of town when that happens. Barbara insists that if Gordon is going to be arrested, then she’ll be right by his side. Montoya walks away, telling Barbara never to come to her again. Given that she was the one sneaking around Barbara’s apartment uninvited just a few weeks ago, I’m going to go ahead and say Go Fuck Yourself, Montoya.

Sweeney: HARDCORE COSIGN. Who the fuck are you to be saying shit like that now, Montoya? I hate her more with each episode.

Mari: They really have a warrant for the arrest of another cop based on the testimony of a homeless man? OKAY.

Alex: Back inside the station, Nygma reveals that he’s been through the list of maintenance employees and the most likely suspect is a ‘Raymond Earl’. Gordon starts to read out the details of a squat where the guy’s been seen hanging around, but Bullock interrupts as soon as he hears the location and announces that he’s 100% sure it’s the right guy. Nygma is pleased with himself and I think I love him a little bit.

Mari: And it all starts with a question mark on a coffee cup. Soon: spandex.

Alex: Gordon and Bullock arrive at the location, which turns out to be the abandoned possibly-a-theatre building from Bullock’s earlier flashback. Amber is tied up on the platform, still alive, while her kidnapper fiddles with a bottle of chloroform. The two cops charge in and Gordon rushes over to the girl while Bullock pursues the killer up onto a balcony. Gordon unties Amber and she sleepily confirms that she’s OK. Meanwhile, Bullock is ambushed by SotG 2.0. He gets tangled in a plastic sheet and falls down the stairs, leaving him unable to reach for his gun this time when SotG 2.0 starts gloating over him. Gordon runs over to help him, and there’s some punching which eventually ends with the bad guy getting knocked out. Gordon tells him that he’s under arrest. Then he and Bullock just sort of sit down and chill, which seems like an odd thing to do when they haven’t even handcuffed the guy yet. I start cheering, thinking that this is the end of the episode, but there are actually still 11 minutes left. Damn.

Wayne Mansion. Bruce is asleep in front of a roaring fire, making cute sleepy noises to himself. A window opens and Selena slinks into the room. This house seems astonishingly easy to break into, especially given that there’s a rich-kid-murderer on the loose. Bruce should really invest in an alarm system, or at least some locks for those windows. Selena snoops around a little, then steals something from the desk in front of Bruce’s Big Board. She hears footsteps and disappears out through the window again. I can’t figure out what it is that she stole. Maybe you guys can?

Sweeney: Not a clue. It reminded me of the Catwoman break-in in the last Batman movie, though, which was neat in a “That’s all this show has to hang its hat on,” kind of way.

Mari: Not a clue. I was distracted by, “oh gosh, let this not be a Edward-Cullen-I-watched-you-in-your-sleep” thing. I was almost relieved by the thievery.

Alex: 3/3 Snark Ladies have no clue. Excellent. Hopefully some of our readers can enlighten us.

Mama Kapelput’s apartment. Oswald is having a bath, and his mum walks in to deliver him a clean suit. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she then picks up a sponge and starts washing him. EW. She tells him she’s worried that he’s doing something illegal, and that he can’t trust anyone except his mother. He replies that he’s finally found someone he can trust: a policeman who’s a real friend and who will make sure everything works out for him in the end.

Police station. Bullock and Gordon did, in fact, arrest SotG 2.0. They’re watching him through the window of an interrogation room while they rattle off a list of his prior misdemeanours and history of mental illness. Essen congratulates them on their good work, and it really sounds like she’s being sarcastic but I think it’s actually a genuine compliment. They’re laying on the ‘phew, we got him’ stuff just a little too thick, so you know something’s not right (plus, you know, 10 minutes of episode left). Essen leaves to spread the good news, and Gordon notices that Bullock doesn’t look very happy. Bullock says he can’t work out why this guy would just start copying a 10-year-old crime, or how he could have known about the coins. Gordon suggests that they go back through the case files again and see if they’ve missed anything, but Bullock wants to think things through on his own and sends him home. As soon as Gordon leaves, the suspect starts freaking out, screaming ‘no’ and clenching his fists. Bullock realises something and says ‘holy ghost on a bicycle’.

Gordon comes home to a panicking Barbara. She begs him to run away with her, but there’s a knock at the door. He tells her he can’t run, and opens the door to find himself being arrested by the Major Crimes Duo. Montoya is smirking like an asshole, and only glances briefly at Barbara as she handcuffs him. Allen looks at her for a few seconds longer before closing the door behind them.

Back at the first house they visited, Bullock interrupts the therapist, who’s doing some kind of relaxation technique with Amanda’s father. He asks if he can pick her brain about the case for a moment. She excuses herself from her patient and steps into the hallway, where Bullock asks her about the hypnotherapy work she’s been doing for various pro bono clients over the last twelve years. The fist-clenching is apparently some kind of coping technique where the patient learns to make a repetitive motion instead of acting on a particular compulsion. It also turns out that Milky (SotG 1) and Earl (SotG 2) were both patients of hers. Bullock suggests that she hypnotised them into believing this ‘Spirit of the Goat’ crap and sent them after her chosen victims. It seems like he had all of this pretty clearly worked out before he got here, so I’m not sure why he showed up alone and asked all these questions instead of just arresting her straight away. (S: Or at least calling for backup and explaining this theory to someone else, like, say, his partner.) Anyway, the therapist confirms his suspicions and gives a villainy speech about her motives, which are more of the same thing we’ve heard in previous episodes: the city is sick and this was her way of giving it therapy. By using the murders as ‘negative reinforcement’, she hoped to stir up ill feeling against the rich. This really makes no sense if you think about it in any kind of detail, so let’s just not. (S: A+) (M: AND WHY A GOAT?) At that moment, Amanda’s dad comes out to check if everything’s OK. The therapist quickly says ‘there are three flowers in a vase’ ‘the golden temple is open’, which triggers him to start attacking Bullock. They grapple on the floor while she stands around doing something really weird with her leg.

Mari: It’s what Mia Thermopolis does when she gets kissed.

Alex: That was actually my first thought when I saw it too. The Snark Lady mind-meld is starting!

Bullock eventually manages to get the upper hand, and shoots the therapist in the leg as she tries to flee.

Back at the police station, Bullock is getting a hard time from Essen as he tries to explain why he shot the nice doctor in the fancy house. They’re interrupted by the arrival of the Major Crimes Duo, dragging Gordon with them. Gordon insists that he didn’t kill Oswald, and there’s an amusing exchange where Bullock’s all ‘No, of course you didn’t, wink wink’ while Gordon tries to make him understand that he actually didn’t do it. Bullock soon finds himself being arrested too, as an accomplice to the murder. Essen rages about them arresting two of her officers and it looks like things are about to get messy, when suddenly… in walks Oswald.

Bullock turns to Gordon, calling him a son of a bitch, and the episode abruptly ends there.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this episode. This definitely felt like an improvement over previous weeks, but I’m still not sure if it was actually a good episode or just a slightly-less-bad one in a show that’s been pretty awful so far. Giving Bullock an ‘I used to be a Good Guy until it got someone hurt’ backstory was very clichéd and predictable, but it was nice that they finally gave him some more depth, particularly as I was completely sick of the one-dimensional lazy cop thing he had going on in previous episodes.

Sweeney: I agree with your final point, but I think this failed to give him depth. I don’ t know if it’s the writing, the direction, or Donal Logue’s performance – probably all of it – but it felt painfully forced and like some super bullshit retcon. “See, he WAS a good cop, but now he’s jaded!” I’d have preferred that they ran with the lazy one-dimensional thing and fleshed that out / potentially let him grow in the main timeline. All they’ve done now, is given him/themselves permission to keep with what they’ve been doing, coasting on the idea that they gave him a heart in that one backstory episode. The only moderate success they’ve had with Bullock so far was in his rapport with Gordon. It would have worked far better, both for his character, and for giving the show some sense of purpose, if they’d concentrated on the Gordon/Bullock relationship and let that be the path (albeit a slow one) to making Bullock redeemable. The path they chose was cheap, but that’s to be expected because that seems to be standard practice for writing this show.

Alex: All very true. I think this is basically me giving credit for things which a better show wouldn’t get away with. On another show, I’d be all ‘ugh, what a cheap, lazy way to give this one-dimensional character some depth’, whereas here I’m like ‘well done, you actually had a stab at developing this character a little bit!’ I suppose it’ll be interesting to see what they do with him now, but I’m not hugely optimistic.

I also think that for the show to improve any further, they probably need to move away from the mystery-of-the-week format, or at least come up with some stories which aren’t completely lame. Or just continue to leave Fish out of the episode, which on its own improved things by about a million percent.

And from the looks of #gothamsnark, lots of you feel the same way. Here are this week’s highlights:

Donal Logue is much better at lightly spitting in people’s faces than “earnest young detective.” This feels fraudulent. #gothamsnark

— Nicole Sweeney (@SweeneySays) October 28, 2014

“There is a much better way to do this.” Geez – Nygma is snarking on the show now! #GothamSnark

— Scar-man GORE-ison (@GeekyGeekyWays) October 28, 2014

While fucking with the girl’s organizational system was way stupid, Nygma, that’s the most feels I’ve had so far with this show #gothamsnark

— Nicole Sweeney (@SweeneySays) October 28, 2014

This episode has been free of Fish so far. I feel like the quality has risen a bit… #gothamsnark

— Ryan (@meatloafbandit) October 29, 2014

Just what this show was missing, incestuous overtones at bath time. #GothamSnark

— Regina (@ReginaD83) October 29, 2014

Penny for your thoughts? Too soon? #bapunisbad #gothamsnark #Gotham

— Wilhelmina Upton (@WillieSun) October 28, 2014

There are 3 flowers in a vase. Oh sorry. I mean, the golden temple is open. #gothamsnark #melliewouldfinishthejob

— Jessica Smith (@antiscian) October 28, 2014

All kidding aside, I think this is the best episode of #Gotham so far. Probably because of the distinct lack of Fish Mooney. #GothamSnark

— Scar-man GORE-ison (@GeekyGeekyWays) October 28, 2014

The complete absence of Fish automatically makes this my favourite episode! #GothamSnark

— Regina (@ReginaD83) October 29, 2014

 

Thank you to everyone for tweeting along! Be sure to join us next week for #gothamsnark (even if you’re watching a day or so behind – we’ll keep checking for tweets until the post goes live!)

Next time on Gotham: Gordon might start to regret letting Penguin live in S01 E07 – Penguin’s Umbrella