For the past thirty years, Arkham Asylum’s been home to the best, the brightest, and the sickest Batman’s rogues gallery has had to offer. If the asylum Gotham depicts can be believed, then Arkham was a rather boring place in its early days. The Joker, The Riddler, Scarecrow, Two-Face – these are the kinds of faces you expect from a comic book madhouse, but you won’t any of them in Gotham. I’ll admit that starting off the series with new blood wasn’t half-bad. It’s just a shame that no one from Rogues Gallery, not even a knife-wielding Shakespearian, seems willing to claim a place in my fading memory of the affair.
After the series’ midseason sabbatical, Rogues Gallery sees the debut of Morena Baccarin’s Dr. Leslie Thompkins and Arkham Asylum (or its hallways) as Jim Gordon gets acquainted with his new job with Arkham’s security detail. Like what always happens in these plot lines, Gordon’s knee-deep in another dangerous case of his own when some cell keys go missing and, you guessed it, everyone’s a suspect – if not for very long.
What happens from there proves entirely conventional in its dull game of “Who done it?” from its lineup of cartoonish mustache-twirlers down to a scripted good cop/bad cop interrogation, except there’s no good cops here. In the thirty minutes Rogues Gallery takes to reveal its culprit, I guessed it right in ten, and if you’re ever in doubt, simply ask yourself who’s never been on the show before and isn’t a DC comics character. It’s that choreographed of a twist, and for the episode, and it’s hard not to think of it as almost literal as it concerns a pretentious rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Then again, maybe that’s why Gordon’s detective work was so short-lived.
It doesn’t help that the episode’s rush to catch the bad guy/gal stifles the incredible lore it has to explore here. I wanted to know more about this Arkham Asylum. The staff. The patients. Its history. From what we’re shown, there’s a nurse somewhere and six male guards total and yep, that’s about it. The chilling prospect of seeing Gotham City’s finest trapped behind its walls without a Batman hotline is brilliant on paper, but a saner Arkham’s no Arkham at all. Here, we have nothing more here than a few moderately dirty hallways and a few dimly lit, um, “infirmaries?”
To the show’s credit, the change in scenery arguably does something to freshen up its ensemble cast. Baccarin is a charming addition as Thompkins and Christopher Heyerdahl’s Jack Gruber is an amusing distraction from the episode’s otherwise jumbled run-around, as is The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr. whose guest starring role as Gordon’s hapless, unnerved boss, Doctor Lang. It’s curious where Thompkins stands on corruption, on Arkham’s in particular, but it’s even more so why she and Gordon have eyes for each other – or at least, as much as a couple can inside the looney bin. I suppose Arkham’s staffers have to have wandering thoughts sometimes, especially when they’re treating clown princes of crime in the future. Given all the above, it all feels like Arkham isn’t much more of a pitstop as opposed to the grand series mainstay it screams to be. And like Todd Stashwick’s Mask, I’m hoping our getaway Arkham patient will turn up again with such a neat talent like mind control as a future plot device.
Nevertheless, Rogues Gallery does a fair job at intertwining the place around the rest of Gotham’s goings-on, even at the cost of compromising the claustrophobic appeal of Arkham’s horror atmosphere. Neither Harvey Bullock nor the precinct are gone, and thank god for the former. I’m fond of Bullock, and while he’s always been funny, here he’s essential, proving again that his sort of biting humor’s more valuable to the show than Gordon’s brooding figure.
That Gotham’s chosen to forgo the subtlety of its more recent source material in favor of dark camp and ham-fisted foreshadowing has always been a lesser evil compared to its balancing act of story arcs. Rogues Gallery pays the obligatory gratuities – Selina Kyle shows up randomly, people mill about Gordon’s now vacant apartment, and a spiraling Barbara mopes around a bedroom. And is Gotham really trying to convince us that Barbara would mistake the voice of a sick, giggling ten-year-old’s voice for Gordon’s sultry mistress over the phone? Except for the absence of stately Wayne Manor, we’re left with bits and pieces of the usual subplots, all too short to feel developed and long enough to feel intrusive to Arkham’s story.
You can leave it to Oswald Cobblepot to produce the more eye-catching moments in the series, but even his time in Rogues Gallery seems glossed over. Was his brief jailbird time at the GCPD’s something we really needed to see or does the show think we just always need to see Penguin and Fish’s own side schemes with Butch? Frankly, I don’t know where Fish’s plans to topple Carmine Falcone are going. What I do know is it’s not going anywhere fast with these baby steps each week. Somewhere in the midst of Fish and Falcone’s feud there’s some interesting subterfuge between Don Sal Maroni and Penguin’s ‘alliance,’ but that’s a lot for five minutes out of forty some odd minutes of run-time, especially when you’re introducing an entirely new locale like Arkham.
“It’s a new dawn, a new city” Gotham coyly reminds me, but what I’m seeing is a whole lot more of the same in the new year. As a bizarre patchwork of hurried subplots on one hand and a love letter to comic fans on another, Rogues Gallery bursts with ideas (and villains) left and right without building on any in particular. To that end, I’m curious to see if Maroni’s little head game with Penguin and Falcone’s mob moves forward and I could’ve stood for more Arkham this week rather than paying mandatory fan-service. If insanity really is trying the same thing over again expecting a different result, than Gotham kept a cool head trying something new, albeit it with a hugely disappointing episode.
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Gotham airs Monday nights on FOX at 8/7 Central. Catch all the latest episodes on Fox.com and all the latest reviews here at BagoGames.