Gotham Premiere Review

Apologies, this review was due on Monday but owing to laptop failure I could not upload it on that date. But, I intend to reconcile for that now, as here is the review of Gotham, from last week

Episode 1 – Pilot

Welcome to Gotham, please enjoy your stay and be gone as soon as possible

Who knew Thomas Wayne was a film critic. I respect him more already

So we begin with the Wayne murder, shocker right? He murders the parents and for no reason whatsoever (that we know of) doesn't murder the kid. Gee I hope the kid doesn't become a bat-like vigilante that will make your life hell for years to come. Just saying

So Police Station looks shit. Jim Gordon manages to rescue a cop without shooting the guy with the gun at the cop (and probably the cop as well) much to the disdain of Harvey Bullock, yeah this isn't a recap… I'm not gonna bother recapping the rest and get on with reviewing it.

Well, let's have a look at the check-list of pilots

Does it introduce all the main characters? Yes

Does it introduce their characteristics? Yes

Is the setting established? Yes

Does it establish any on-going plot-lines? Yes

Does it do anything else? No, not really

This felt very paint by numbers, nothing for shock value aside Bruce Wayne standing near a rooftop trying to conquer fear. You could argue it introduce too many characters. People like Ivy Pepper (The Gotham universe version of Pamela Isely AKA poison Ivy) and Edward Nygma (aka the Riddler) were a tad unnecessary.

But they made it clear from the outpost that Gotham is a city of corruption, with Jim Gordon being basically the only good guy (Montoya and Allen I'll judge later, they seem to be assholes rather than downright villains) this is good thing, but it's a tad hard to swallow that Jim is the only good cop in a swarm of bad ones.

It had some dumb moments too. Jim Gordon at the end went to Bruce Wayne's house and said that the killer they thought they found wasn't the real killer. Gee, I hope that doesn't haunt the kid's nightmares for the rest of his life, forcing him to have an outlet of putting fear into criminals dressed as a winged rodent, nah, that would be just silly.

Fish Mooney is a new character, and quite an interesting one, she wants to overthrow Falcone from the inside. She is combined with an interesting flunkey. Oswald Cobblepot (aka the Penguin) who in no way whatsoever resembles the Penguin we know of today.

We see Carmine Falcone, crime boss of Gotham (and flunkey to Hush's design in Batman Eternal, assuming there isn't someone else behind Hush) and he gives an interesting speech about organised crime requiring the police, and people to be calm. It's all rings true, which is a good thing, because since this isn't involving super-heroes or supervillains, it's gonna have to keep things grounded in mostly reality.

Rating 6.5/10

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Images used in this review are from Gotham and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.