Gotham “Nothing’s Shocking”

I am aware that the final season of Gotham was basically just a half-season compared to the first four, so there’s a good chance that some of the stuff that the writers and producers of the series had planned was maybe cut short, and some classic or even lesser-known Bat-foes were just kinda shoved out there for what may have in the past might have been a multi-episode arc.  I mean, Magpie came and went in one episode.

This time around, it looks like the show knocked off maybe three of ’em, but I got Dan Hedaya back after an all-too-brief turn as Bullock’s former partner Detective Dix, so it can’t be all bad.

Anyhoo, three potential Batman foes in an episode that doesn’t seem to add much to the overall story.  One of ’em is a bit of a stretch, but Bruce and Alfred go looking for a woman’s missing husband over near the river where it turns out all those chemicals that got dumped in there in the previous episode are doing things to people who live near there.

Case in point, some guy got changed into a large, ugly, cannibal with what seems like impossible strength and speed while living in the city’s sewers.

So, that’s maybe Killer Croc.  He doesn’t look like a crocodile in any way, nor does anyone even try to address him by that or any name, but he is eating people and he smacks Bruce and Alfred around before they do a team-up to bring the guy down.

That one was a stretch, but the other two were more direct.

See, the show decided to bring in the Ventriloquist and Jane Doe.

Oh boy.

Now, the Ventriloquist was, in fact, the Penguin’s timid accountant Mr. Penn.  He was shot and left for dead.  In fact, he looked dead.  But no, he woke up in the morgue and just wandered off despite a gunshot wound, then he found Mr. Scarface in a magic shop.  From there, he took the Penguin and the Riddler hostage in a move that prompted me to ask more questions than usual.  Oswold, for example, sure does figure out to address the dummy pretty quick.

But then the Riddler manages to blow Scarface’s head off.  And then he shoots Penn while the Penguin was thinking how Penn was basically harmless.  So, really, there was an abbreviated plot line for a fairly recognizable Batman foe, one that had been planned since Penn’s first appearance, and then rushed through in what was essentially a B-plot.  As for the A-plot…

See, Jane Doe…she’s kinda scary in her original incarnation.  She’s a heavily scarred woman who doesn’t really have an identity or personality of her own, so she steals them from other people…often with their faces.  Eventually, she gets caught after she’s tried being someone else long enough for Batman to notice.  I don’t expect Gotham to be comics accurate or anything, but this version of Jane is very different.

This Jane can shapeshift after coming into physical contact with someone, and Harvey, Dix, and two other cops had basically pressured a juvenile Jane into fingering her mother for the murder of her abusive father, and now Jane wants revenge by assuming different shapes, starting with Dix, to murder the others.  She even takes Barbara’s face at one point while posing as Barbara, leading to a rather impressive greenscreen shot of two Barbaras.

However, in the end, Jane not only has a perfectly fine face, but Harvey ends up shooting her in self-defense.

So, this episode gave us Jane Doe, the Ventriloquist, and maybe Killer Croc, and at least two of them are dead and the other unlikely to return unless I missed Alfred taking him out.  The overall plot for the season didn’t really advance much at all, and the three plotlines didn’t even really connect well to each other.  So, really, what was the point of this one?