Gotham‘s third season kicked off last week on Fox, and tonight was the premiere of the season’s second episode, “Mad City: Burn The Witch”. You can check out our review here. Jim Gordon is a bounty hunter, Fish Mooney is on the loose with her band of freaks, Penguin is courting public sentiment, and Hugo Strange is locked up in a federal lab somewhere. That may seem like a lot going on, but this is Gotham, after all.
The latest offering from our favorite crime-riddled city featured plenty of Easter Eggs and hints of things to come on the show, so lets go over a few of them.
1. The Court Of Owls Revealed
The mysterious movers and shakers of the Gotham underworld have been teased for a while now, dating back to the end of season 2. We’d seen the mask, but in tonight’s episode Gotham went a step further. After knocking out Alfred and kidnapping Bruce, the Court brought him to their layer. And familiar it did seem. Though only getting a glimpse of a reception hall of sorts, it looked straight out of a page from Snyder and Capullo’s run in the Batman comics. Not only that, but the member whom Bruce was speaking to took off the mask, revealing herself to Bruce and validating his suspicions of the Court’s existence
2. Talon
Who was it that kidnapped Bruce and brought him into the Court of Owls’ headquarters, you ask? It certainly seems like the black-masked mute is this show’s version of Talon, one of the Court’s assassins/henchman. He first appeared last week, and tonight we saw him stand ominously in the background like a good Talon and then proceed to knock out Bruce again after his meeting with one of the members of the court concluded. Surely this is just the beginning of the Court’s story line within the show, so it’s almost assured that we will be seeing plenty more of Talon
3. Poison Ivy
We knew before the season that Ivy was getting a makeover for the show’s third season, but we weren’t sure exactly how or when this would happen. Well, last week we saw the young and quiet Ivy we knew from the past two seasons get attacked by one of Hugo Strange’s experiments. This led to her rapid ageing, and in tonight’s episode we saw the ‘new’ Ivy for the first time. She already looks and acts more like the Poison Ivy we all know from the comics and TV shows and is sure to have an interesting arc for the rest of the season.
4. Mayor Penguin?
Well, not exactly Mayor Penguin…yet. Penguin, in various iterations ranging from Batman Returns to BTAS, has many a time sought to extend his influence over Gotham into the political realm. In last week’s season premiere we saw Penguin issue a rallying cry in front of the press, calling out the police department and demanding they do more to locate Fish Mooney and her gang of misfits. This seemed to strike a connection with the citizens of the city, and in tonight’s episode he takes it up a notch. Again he plays the public figure, rallying people for his cause to successful ends. Could this be the start of Penguin’s political career on the show?
5. Hush?
In the finale of season 2 we saw what looked like perhaps a clone of Bruce emerge with the rest of the ‘monsters’ from Strange’s lab. It immediately brought up many questions among fans of the show, and tonight we finally saw the first face-to-face confrontation between Bruce and his doppelganger. Hush is a popular story from the comics detailing an old friend of Bruce’s past turned foe, with Thomas Elliot even going so far as to get his face surgically restructured to look exactly like Bruce’s. Could this be Gotham adapting the famous arc in some way, or simply a neat shout-out to the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee comic? Time will tell.
Gotham airs Mondays at 8/7c on FOX.
