Have I told you how much I get a kick I get out of seeing Jada Pinkett-Smith playing mobstress Fish Mooney? One minute she’s ordering hits on nosey, idealistic beat detective Jim Gordon and his partner, grizzled and weary detective Harvey Bullock; the next, she’s inviting the pair to her club, as if nothing’s happened and flirting with the young, future Commissioner of the GPD for good measure. Hell, I half expected her to channel her inner Sicilian gangster and tell the pair, “Whadya gonna do? This is the business that we’re in!” Like Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, Fish will take what’s hers through bullets, beatings and blood, consequences be dammed. You almost want to root for her in her attempt to knock off Carmine Falcone and take over the crime syndicate in Gotham. Speaking of Don Falcone, he wasn’t too pleased at her stunt of trying to off two beat detectives, and to voice his displeasure, he has her boytoy beaten as a warning to not pull a stunt like that again. The scene between her and John Doman’s Falcone is a great moment because it’s Falcone flexing his muscle and asserting that his grip on the crime family is still strong, and he won’t give it up so willingly, and Fish realizing she’s not quite the hot-shot power player as she believes she is.
The reason I’ve dedicated an entire paragraph to Jada is because the rest of the episode is nearly dull without the subplot of the power balance resting still with the aging crime lord. There’s a duo of sociopaths kidnapping homeless youths off the streets of Gotham, and Bullock and Gordon are assigned to investigate. The man-woman duo turns out to be minions for someone called the Dollmaker, and they’re stopped by the two detectives, until they are recaptured and shipped overseas, posing as bus drivers taking the at-risk youth to juvenile hall, with the exception of one kid escaping: Selena “Cat” Kyle, the girl who spent the pilot episode lurking around Wayne Manor and the streets of Gotham. Carmen Bicondova is about how I imagined the future Catwoman to be: spunky, street smart and a bit of a wise ass. Her interpretation reminds me of Anne Hathaway’s turn as the cat burglar in The Dark Knight Rises, as this woman who does what she needs to do to survive, but does it in style. She’s one of the bright spots in this episode, along with Robin Lord Taylor as the future Penguin, Oswald Cobblepot, the former lackey to Mooney. His appearance isn’t as darkly humors and tragic as Danny DeVito’s in Batman Returns, but what lacks in empathy, Taylor makes up for in madness. He’s seen as this freakshow to the rest of the crime syndicate, and this taunting at his near-penguin like appearance further fuels him to return to Gotham to take over, along with getting his revenge at Mooney for leaving him for dead.
Otherwise, episode 2 of Gotham was just really dull, in contrast to the engaging and exciting pilot episode. It’s a standard police case, with an ending that wraps up quickly near the end. I wish it had gone back to the bits were Fish Mooney was trying to figure out how she was going to one-up Falcone after her setback with trying to kill Gordon and Bullock, but we wouldn’t have gotten to know Catwoman better, or see how deranged Penguin is, so two out of three isn’t that bad, I guess.
