tek's rating:

Gotham, on FOX
A.V. Club; Council of Geeks; DC; IMDb; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Warner Bros.; Wikia; Wikipedia

Caution: Spoilers!

Season 5: Legend of the Dark Knight
This is the final season, consisting of 12 episodes, instead of the usual 22. It begins on Day 391 of the city being a "No Man's Land" (based to some extent on the 1999 comic book story arc of the same name). We see Riddler, Penguin, Bullock, and Jim each separately preparing for battle. Surprisingly, the four of them come together, along with the GCPD, to fire on an invading army. The story then flashes back to Day 87. Jim communicates with officials on the mainland via CB radio (or something like that). He wants them to send help to the city, or to let citizens evacuate from the city, but both things are disallowed by the government. Meanwhile, Gotham has been divided into different zones controlled by different people. The GCPD controls one zone, Penguin another, Barbara and Tabitha another, Scarecrow another, Victor Fries another. (Though Fries is having a turf war against Firefly, which surprises me, since they used to work together. But neither of them play an important role this season, anyway.) Other zones are controlled by various random gangs. And Jeremiah Valeska is leading a group in secrecy, working on a plan of his own. (Oh, and I'm pretty sure that at the end of last season, when there was a montage of the city being taken over by different villains, I believe I saw Manbat... but he was never in this season, which confused me.)

Well... Penguin ends up killing Tabitha when she tries to kill him in retaliation for Butch's death. So Barbara swears to kill Penguin for Tabitha's death. Meanwhile, Selina is in a hospital (still in Gotham... which surprised me, I could have sworn she had been evacuated in last season's finale). So Bruce visits her often. But she's paralyzed, and has lost her will to live. A nurse tells Bruce about a "witch" who she believes could help, and Bruce later goes looking for this witch, who turns out to be Ivy. He convinces her to give him a seed for Selina to eat, which would fix her spine, but also change her in some way. After Selina recovers, she decides to go looking for Jeremiah, to kill him for shooting her last season. And Bruce becomes worried that she's no longer herself. Meanwhile, Riddler has been waking up in strange places, with no idea how he got there or what he'd done. He believes the Ed Nygma part of his psyche has been controlling him, and he wants to find out what he's been forced to do. Also, Ecco is now insane (apparently because she had shot herself in the head, as a sign of loyalty to Jeremiah), and she dresses in an outfit reminiscent of Harley Quinn's. And she's now recruiting people to work for Jeremiah and help with his plan.

Jim and Lucius set up a home called Haven for Gotham's refugees in the GCPD's safe zone, but someone blows up the building, killing many people. It eventually turns out that Riddler had done it, though he has no memory of it. Eventually he gets a bit of memory back, which makes him think Penguin had "broken" him, but it turns out that he'd actually had a chip implanted in his brain by Hugo Strange, that allows him to be controlled. At one point, Jim and Barbara have a one-night stand (which makes me wonder if that's when Batgirl is conceived; I guess time will tell). Selina eventually finds and stabs Jeremiah, apparently killing him. But he's later revealed to be alive, having wanted Selina to believe he was dead. And eventually a Delta Force team led by an old army buddy of Jim's, Eduardo Dorrance, comes to Gotham to help restore order. The team was sent by someone named Theresa Walker (Jaime Murray), who I guess is one of the people Jim has been talking to on the radio, this season. And it turns out that Walker and Dorrance are the ones who have been controlling Riddler. Walker eventually shows up in Gotham herself, and her motive for all the horrible things she's responsible for is revealed, but I don't want to spoil what it is. I will say, however, that she gets Hugo Strange to perform an operation on Dorrance that turns him into the supervillain Bane.

Well, lots of other stuff happens, and I'm not sure how much of it I want to reveal. There was an episode that had a thief called Magpie, who I quite liked, so it's a shame she didn't last long. And as I suspected, Barbara turns out to be pregnant with Jim's child. And Jeremiah eventually blows up Wayne Manor. Penguin and Riddler team up to construct a submarine, so they can escape from Gotham together, but they never actually end up leaving. Jeremiah has an accident at Ace Chemical plant, which disfigures him (so at this point it's pretty safe to say he's definitely going to be this show's incarnation of the Joker). There's also an episode that introduces the villain Scarface, which I found amusing. Jim and Lee eventually get married. And the show eventually catches up to where the season started, so the standoff is explained, but I don't want to spoil what that was all about. Lee delivers Barbara's baby, who will be named Barbara Lee Gordon. (And I guess Jim and Lee will sort of share custody with Barbara.) In the penultimate episode, Bruce leaves Gotham, after the good guys manage to stop the latest threat to the city. Gotham is finally reunified with the mainland, and Jim becomes police commissioner. The final episode is set ten years later, when Bruce returns to Gotham for the first time... though we don't really see him, he's just mentioned throughout the episode. So, we learn a bit about what's been going on in the past decade. And there is a new threat to the city, the nature of which I don't want to spoil. But I will say that various characters have undergone some changes... most notably, Selina is now played by a different actress. (I had been kind of worried about whether she and Bruce would be played by the same actors in this episode, because I didn't believe they could believably look ten years older. But I guess I needn't have worried.) And we do finally get a brief glimpse of Batman.

And I don't know what else to tell you. It's been a wild and crazy ride, these past five seasons, and I guess I'm reasonably satisfied with how it all ended.


drama index