Previously on Gotham, a villain was killing people by attaching them to tiny weather balloons, it was confirmed that Barbara and Renee were in a relationship prior to Barbara being with Jim, and Oswald showed up on Jim’s doorstep after his “murder.”
This episode is a HUGE mood whiplash from last week’s campy goodness. There’s a war simmering between the two big power players in Gotham (Falcone and Maroni), and Arkham Asylum is set up to be the battleground. It’s revealed that the Waynes had plans before their murder to develop the Arkham neighborhood, restoring the asylum and creating homes for the homeless. Bruce wants to carry on their legacy, and it’s adorable. We see a bit more of Edward Nigma (the future Riddler) and Oswald continues to be a major player. The villain of this episode pokes people’s eyes out and lights people on fire; a far cry from the silliness of weather balloons. Your mileage may vary on which you prefer, but I would rather this show veer in the camp direction.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I love the cinematography of this show, and there are a number of particularly excellent shots in this episode. The actor who’s playing Bruce (David Mazouz) is quite good; it’s so easy for a child actor to get on my nerves, but he hasn’t yet. He does a good job of making us feel for Bruce. Sometimes I find it difficult to follow all the political alliances of the show; a few of the names are similar, and I’m not good at keeping track of names at the beginnings of shows. Barbara and Jim have a very important conversation in terms of their relationship, and I’m curious where that will go next week. I’m also curious to see what Fish was holding those auditions for.
Watch Gotham at 8pm EST Mondays on FOX.
Nerdy But Flirty 
This was indeed a good episode. I also wanted to point out that I love the film style of the show. It’s great, and I like that it takes the retro feel that was in the show Pushing Daisies and makes use of it here, forming an ambiguous time period.
One thing that was odd though was that on the forms about Arkham that Bruce was holding, there was a date listed, which was “9/8/09,” which would imply this is pretty much present day, given Alfred’s comment about how they’d been working on it for years. I could have misread it and it was 2001 rather than ’09, but still. I have considered chalking that up though to an error in production or something. 😛
I still need to watch Pushing Daisies! It’s been on my list for a while, and I really like Bryan Fuller. The cinematography is absolutely wonderful, I agree. 😀 I didn’t catch the date on the forms! That’s interesting, because I was thinking it was somewhere in an ambiguous 80s/90s timeline which would leave Bruce to be an adult in the present day.