GOTHAM, SEASON 2 (2015-16)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

I have a theory about the great shift in storytelling priorities as GOTHAM went into its second season. It's not a theory for which I've done any research, but I think it's supported by many anecdotes about DC Comics-- all stating that the company is often extremely protective of even minor IP when they're being farmed out to other media for adaptation.

In Season 1, the showrunners tacitly received DC's okay for reworking the story of Bruce Wayne, many support-characters in the BATMAN franchise, and three major Bat-villains-- Catwoman, Penguin and Riddler-- all of whom receive major continuity-alterations. There are also an assortment of lesser support-characters reproduced without much alteration, like mob-boss Carmine Falcone and D.A. Harvey Dent, with Dent apparently set up for a villainous transformation that never comes to pass. For the most part, though, the writers concentrate on the warring factions of the Gotham City gangland. We see most of these conflicts between the bosses-- Falcone, Boss Maroni and Fish Mooney-- through the gimlet eye of Oswald "Penguin" Cobblepot, who essentially plays the powerful criminals against one another until the final episode of Season 1, in which he becomes, in his own words, "king of Gotham." 

One writer for the show described the first season as a "police procedural," which is nonsense. From first to last, GOTHAM was a big, splashy gangbusters-melodrama, closer to DICK TRACY than DRAGNET. But throughout Season 1, the writers largely avoided most of Batman's rogues' gallery. A single episode is devoted to a character who somewhat resembles the Joker, but seemed at the time to be an unreasonable facsimile. A comics-villain named Victor Zsasz makes a few appearances as an underworld hitman, and James Gordon starts out with a girlfriend whose first name suggests that she might somehow relate to Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon-- only to diverge, making any connections dubious. As for non-gangland villains, the scripts largely produced one-offs with names like "The Goat" and "The Balloon-Man," which suggests to me that the staff didn't have any okays about adopting even lesser Bat-villains. 

But Season 2 shifts into "villain overdrive," and I suspect that the show's respectable ratings meant that DC became less parsimonious with its properties. Gang wars between mundane thugs became a thing of the past, replaced by a surfeit of super-crooks, more in line with the beloved 1966 teleseries than any commonplace cop show. Indeed, Season 2's episodes were divided into two distinct arcs, given the respective umbrella-titles of "Rise of the Super-Villains" and "Wrath of the Super-Villains"-- though neither is a particularly apt title for describing the events.

"Rise" begins with a three-part continuity stressing the return of Jerome Velaska, acting more Joker-y than he did in his single Season 1 appearance, and leading a contingent of Arkham escapees on a murderous rampage. However, Jerome is apparently killed in the third part of this sequence by the real "Big Bad" of the arc, Theo Galavan. Both Galavan and his sister Tabitha are very free-form takes on characters not originally associated in DC Comics, and as such I don't view them as true adaptations. The same goes for a smattering of characters with the same names as DC characters but no other similarities, such as "Silver St. Cloud" and "Richard Sionis" (in comics, the father of the villain Black Mask, who never appears in GOTHAM). The "Rise" storyline focuses upon Galavan's meteoric ascent to the position of Gotham's mayor and his secret allegiance to an ancient order devoted to exterminating the Wayne family-- though the evildoer's descent is just as precipitate. He makes one more appearance in the "Wrath" arc and fades from the series, though his sister goes on to multi-season appearances.

"Wrath" focuses on the long-running plotline of Arkham Asylum, which has become a birthplace of horrors since falling under control of the mad scientist Hugo Strange (B.D. Wong). Strange either takes control of newly-formed super-villains like Mister Freeze and the Firefly, or creates new menaces from the bodies of the risen dead, such as altering the deceased Theo Galavan into a warrior named Azrael. But Strange doesn't seek to control Gotham in the way Penguin or Galavan do. Gotham is simply Strange's experimental laboratory, where the scientist plays God by unleashing on the city various malefic forces, including Penguin, after the latter spends a little quality time at Arkham. In contrast to "Rise," this arc goes absolutely fannish in embracing its massive "super-villain team-up," far beyond anything any other live-action Bat-adaptation had attempted.

How much of Season 2 is aesthetically pleasing? Well, though GOTHAM remains a very violent show, the injection of super-menaces forced the writers to use the violence more carefully, instead of just having Penguin kill random people for effect. The Galavan arc often drags, except for the three-parter with Valeska-Joker, which has a great resolution and sets the scene for more "quasi-Joker" stories in future seasons. "Wrath" is more devoted to pulpy goodness, like having the Firefly and Mr, Freeze engaging in a "fire and ice" battle, or having a new Clayface take on the appearance of Jim Gordon. Even a resuscitated Fish Mooney is a bit more tolerable once she has super-powers. Also, the hints from Season One about the "Court of Owls" are finally given form.

There are misfires too-- the short-lived pregnancy of Lee Tompkins, for one-- but it might be argued that such miscarriages (so to speak) are practically inevitable with a series focused on so many characters. Even Jim Gordon is often treated like nothing more than a loose cannon, on whom the writers can depend to keep the plot-pot boiling. But I appreciate that they retained a good sense of the character of the future Caped Crusader. In the first season, David Mazouz's Bruce is often still a bereaved, confused child. Here, the scripts begin to imbue his character with a deeper resolve, yet not without a sense of the compassion that many comics-scribes omit from the hero's character. Even as a child, Bruce is capable of facing death or refusing temptation. And yet he's capable of showing mercy to Silver St. Cloud, even when he knows she intends to betray him. His quixotic relationship with Selina, the future Catwoman, also hits all the right notes, with Camren Bicondova consistently putting across a complementary sense of a "cat who walks by herself."