GOTHAM SEASON FIVE (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Season Five improves somewhat on the shitshow of Season Four in three respects. There are fewer episodes, so there's less gratuitous slaughter. For the same reason, the writers didn't have time to introduce any waste-of-space new characters like Sofia Falcone, though they can't be bothered to do much with the villains already in play and so glut Gotham City with their ramshackle versions of Bane, Nyssa Al Ghul, Magpie and The Ventriloquist. Thirdly, the scribes shook up the routine of urban adventure somewhat with a very compressed version of a nineties comic-book arc about Gotham being turned into an isolated, resource-deprived "No Man's Land."

There are a few other improvements resulting from the writers' desire to tie things up. Though they shunt Mister Freeze and Firefly off stage, never to be seen again, and make only cursory use of Scarecrow and Mad Hatter, they finally get some actual use out of Poison Ivy. In the last episodes of Season Four, Maybe-Joker Velasca shoots Selina merely to twist Bruce Wayne's tail, and Selina's doctors tell Bruce that his girlfriend will probably remain crippled. Ivy provides some handy plant-magic that heals Selina's injuries and makes her into something of a preternatural badass, out to gain revenge on Maybe-Joker. 

Similarly, Tabitha, though left alive at the end of Season Four, is quickly dispatched by Penguin in Five's first episode. This stratagem at least gives Barbara Kean a slightly more coherent storyline-- that of vengeance on Penguin-- than the idiotic arc from Season Four, with her aspiring to take over the League of Shadows. She's not any better as a character, though, and she's in no way improved by the far-fetched notion that she inveigles Jim Gordon into sleeping with her. This results in Psycho Barbara becoming a brand-new Baby Mama, thus driving a new wedge between Gordon and Lee Tompkins-- who suddenly have decided that they're back to having feelings for one another. 

Other plotlines are about the same. Riddler's dopey split personality arc gets finessed into an equally dopey one about his committing mass murder thanks to Hugo Strange. Penguin plans to leave the ruined, depleted city at first-- and Selina and Riddler both plan to join him, at least in theory-- but all three change their minds for cockamamie reasons. 

I commented earlier that whatever inspiration Bruce Wayne takes from Ra's Al Ghul in this series is at least an improvement on Christopher Nolan's wretched take on their relationship in BATMAN BEGINS. In the case of Nyssa Al Ghul, she's no better or worse than Nolan's Talia Al Ghul in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, out to avenge the slaying of Ra's by Bruce and Barbara. Maybe-Joker lacks any of the impact he had in earlier seasons, despite an attempt to align him with Real-Joker with a sort of "secondary origin story." But neither that, nor the injection of a "Definitely Not Harley Quinn," yields any strong moments.

The only arc in Season Five that works reasonably well is the one between Bruce and Selina, which leads me to believe that for the writing-staff this was the "true north" around which all the nonsense coalesced. During a plotline in which Ivy enthralls Bruce and makes him do her bidding, Selina thinks the boy billionaire plans to leave destitute Gotham of his own accord. Thus, she whales the tar out of him, thinking he means to leave her behind. Though Bruce comes back to his senses in that scene, Selina's suspicions turn out to be prophetic, for in the next to last episode, Bruce does leave Gotham, and her, behind. Ten years later, during which time Gordon has become commissioner and is thinking about retiring, Bruce comes back as the Dark Knight, having presumably honed his skills enough to be Gotham's foremost protector. A rooftop scene between Selina and the newly forged Batman establishes the dynamic of her scofflaw ethics and his dedication to duty for the Bat-mythos that is to come.

At one point I loosely compared GOTHAM to SMALLVILLE, but I should have specified that this was only in terms of the final episode of both serials, where the costumed hero comes on stage for the final moments of the final episode. But SMALLVILLE was a show whose creators wanted the readers to be invested in the characters' lives. Too often, the writers of GOTHAM seem like Hugo Strange, performing sadistic experiments on the subjects of their narrative experiment.

The fact that the writers managed to keep the Bruce-Selina relationship reasonably intact for five seasons recalls a similar storytelling strategy in another series: LOST, which, for all its chaotic revelations held true to a central plotline regarding the fate of Jack Shepherd. Now, the stories of LOST frequently wrote philosophical checks that the writers' intellectual accounts could not cover. But at least there was an attempt to find some significance in the lives of the LOST characters, however unlikeable some of them were. I don't think the showrunners of GOTHAM ever had that much investment in the Bat-mythos. GOTHAM can be lauded for having provided a lot of fine actors with the chance to strut their stuff on a Bat-stage-- even if the stories signified, if not nothing, far less than the lowly funnybooks on which they were based.