For the first time this season, Gotham left me bored although the romantic fans of the show will probably be intrigued. Certainly, not every episode can be as exciting and groundbreaking as we’d like it to be, but this one felt like little was actually accomplished.
A few major plot points were progressed. Bruce meets Theo Galavan’s niece, Silver St. Cloud, who is actually a longstanding paramour of Wayne’s throughout the comic books, while Alfred tells Selina Kyle to leave the young boy alone. [Love triangle, anyone?] Elsewhere, Edward Nygma woos Kristen Kringle, but he isn’t achieving the high that he hoped for. And in the last creepy ‘love affair,’ Oswald Cobblepot starts whacking mayoral candidates to clear the path for Galavan, who holds Cobblepot’s mother hostage.
For those who don’t care about the relationships, Jim Gordon’s life appears to get immensely more difficult, until he realizes that his new boss, Nathaniel Barnes (Michael Chiklis), wants to clean up Gotham as badly as he does. Naming Gordon his second in command and the leader of a new strike force, Barnes tells his fellow cops that there will be no tolerance for any subterfuge or negotiating with criminals, which puts Gordon in hot water again.
Overall, bonds are formed and relationships broken, but the emphasis remains on the way that characters appropriately (or inappropriately) show love to each other. We’ve seen it in the funky relationships that the Galavans have for each other, and that Barbara Kean showed toward Gordon. I Timothy 1:5 states that “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” We’re encouraged to love truly – to love sacrificially, not just for manipulation’s sake or our own benefit. At the moment, Gotham is in a quagmire of inappropriate loves, that aren’t real love in the first place. One can only hope our heroes will weed through this quickly … and move on to the action.
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