“I’m king of Gotham.”
The king is dead, long live the king! But who exactly is the king is the $64,000 question. Galavan’s murder at the hands of Gordon has left a power vacuum in Gotham where any of the players have an opportunity to seize the crown. This clearly makes for interesting television storytelling.
The first season was hampered by case-of-the-week procedural stories; the showrunners wised up and crafted a longer narrative arc for season two. Galavan was the focus of Gotham, his warm and fuzzy philanthropist shtick a façade to mask his real intentions of settling a centuries-old blood feud with the Wayne family by killing Bruce. That was Gotham’s first attempt at sidestepping the procedural handcuffs. A rogue’s gallery of villains popped in and out of season two’s first half which on one hand was entertaining, but also felt uneven at times. There seemed to be a challenge juggling the need for new villains, which is a necessary component of every superhero TV show, and advancing the main story of Gordon’s crumbling morality.
Crumbling may be too soft a word, now that Gordon hopped, skipped and jumped over the line after killing Galavan in the fall finale, but that event allows Gotham to move forward and raise the stakes. Continuing with the same structure as the first half of the season, this episode presents a villain that should be around for a while; where the show faltered with Galavan was the character arc was built on shaky to little backstory. The Order of St. Dumas was a pivotal element of Galavan’s revenge plot; yet we as an audience learn absolutely nothing about them, which removes any significant stakes to the storyline. Gotham makes the effort in this episode of setting up Mr. Freeze not only as a villain, but one with clear motivations that at the very least the audience can sympathize with. Freeze also is an individual who is significantly more dangerous than any other villain Gordon has encountered.
Mr. Freeze has the typical backstory you all know and love from the comic books; Victor Fries is a sympathetic villain who goes too far trying to save his terminally ill wife.
Gotham sticks with the fairly typical Mr. Freeze backstory, painting Victor Fries as a somewhat sympathetic villain, a man who goes to far while trying to save his terminally ill wife. Gotham doesn’t excuse his behavior so much as ground his deadly experiments in a certain amount of pathos. For the first time in awhile, Gotham actually takes the time to explore how a villain is created in the city of Gotham—you would think that a season branded in its early going as “Rise Of The Villains” would have done so sooner—and it certainly pays off. Nathan Darrow takes some time off from pleasuring the Underwoods to turn in a solid performance as Victor Fries, the desperation of his situation coming across in Darrow’s often vacant, pained look. He’s a man at the end of his rope, and Gotham does a good job of showing how the city of Gotham can turn a man from desperate to dangerous in a hurry.
Tune in next time – same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
