The action moved to Arkham Asylum on Gotham Season 1 Episode 11, although we use the word "action" very loosely in this case.
Because, wow, was the Gotham 2015 premiere hideously boring.
The crux of the installment centered on Jim Gordon working as a security officer and keeping an eye on the criminally insane.
Someone has been conducting electroshock therapy-type experiments on the inmates and Gordon was tasked on finding the culprit.
A lot of time was wasted and a lot of filler thrust at the audience as he went about this case, but it eventually led to a prisoner named James Gruber.
He succeeded in essentially turning a fellow inmate into a killing machine and he left Jim a taunting letter after that killing machine murdered the asylum boss and the pair escaped into Gotham
So now we have an ongoing villain out there, a concept that has room for possibility. But was a painful exercise by a series that still needs some kind of big jolt in order to get us there.
Elsewhere:
- Don Marone taught The Penguin a lesson about where he stands in the hierarchy (he’s a monkey, Marone is the zookeeper) by getting him locked up after Penguin tried to raise the tariff on fishermen without Marone’s okay.
- Barbara called Jim to make nice and was shocked when Ivy (crashing there after Cat broke in) answered the phone and pretended to be an older woman.
- Butch killed one of Fish’s rivals after the mobster, an old friend of his, tried to talk Butch into turning on Fish.
Sit back and watch Gotham online to see how the episode concluded with that latter scene and to understand why the show is struggling: who the heck cares that Butch killed a gangster viewers don’t know at all?
Producers need to work on developing these characters a lot better if they want to keep our interest… let alone if they want to end episodes with them, using them as cliffhangers to bring fans back.
And speaking of coming back: despite having just come off a long hiatus, Gotham Season 1 Episode 12 won’t air until Monday, January 19. Sigh.