7, 9,10, 13 and 16 for the salty meme, please :)
Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?
Plot twists and deviation from existing Plot Exposition. Plot twists can be fun and keep your audience on their toes but when you have to twist and bend your characters/continuity into severely OOC forms to do it then you’ve devolved from ‘plot twist’ into ‘meaningless shockvalue’.Gotham (particularly in S1) sometimes does offer a descent plot twist that works within it’s characterization and narrative. The best example, Oswald playing both Falcone and Maroni in the Gang War (as we found out via Penguin’s Umbrella), was brilliant. Harvey Bullock originally aspiring to be a white knight of Gotham early in his career was another. As was Jerome Valeska turning out to be baby!Joker at the end of The Blind Fortuneteller. …And I’ll hand it to S3, Carmine Falcone helping to orchestrate Peter Gordon’s death worked really well (for me at least). As did the twist with Oswald turning Ed into his own personal frozen butterfly. Unfortunately, the bad plot twists have started to far outweigh the good plot twists on the show. Just to name a few:-Jim Gordon secretly wanting to kill (despite all evidence to the contrary).
- Mario’s deep dark secret being jealousy when he’s known Lee for like six months or something. As opposed to, oh I don’t know, struggling to live under (or above) the Falcone name? Honestly, a secret urge to kill had the potential to fit Mario and his family history a hell of a lot better than it fit Jim.
- Butch Gilzean secretly being Cyrus Gold. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that we get to keep Drew Powell….but there are people who have known Butch since childhood (Jimmy Saviano) and he has family that share his name (his nephew Sonny) who have never mentioned the name change from Gold to Gilzean. I suppose they could make it work but it takes some hand-waving.
- The mess with the Galavan family and the monks and how the Court of Owls would just stand by and let (probable) members of their organization annihilate each other, losing resources the court could have made use of.
- Isabella’s physical appearance, introduction, and death. Honestly, all of Isabella’s plot is one giant, senseless twist.
- The executioner/Barnes being okay with the spread of the Tetch Virus when a bunch of innocent people were bound to get killed by those infected by said virus. Yes, he’s out to punish the guilty but part of his reasoning for doing it is because he wants “the innocents to thank him”.
-Falcone withdrawing the hit on Jim (the S3 hit) just because Lee asked him to.
- Of course, the worst plot twist of all is Alfred’s apparent love of quiche. I could literally be here all night writing bad plot twists. I’m very aware that I barely made a dent here but you get the picture.
Most disliked character(s)? Why?
Don Falcone. I was having a conversation with @mymycorrhizae about this here and I’m just going to copy and paste my reasoning: “The main reason I can’t hate Jim is because of his family. Or in this case, the lack of family and the way Jim’s image of family has been so abused. We need some flashbacks or exposition about Jim’s life after his father’s death like yesterday (this is one of the many problems that I have with Gotham’s writing). We don’t know much about Jim’s family, other than the fact that he over-idealized the memory of his father, which isn’t surprising given the manner of his death.What we do find is always revealed in a terrible manner. First by Carmine Falcone, who came along in the pilot episode to tarnish Jim’s father in the worst possible way for the most self-serving of reasons. Season One Jim, who hadn’t turned into a complete asshole yet, definitely didn’t deserve that-especially when you consider that Falcone helped orchestrate Peter Gordon’s murder. In retrospect, it’s nauseating to think of the way Carmine called Jim “son” and tried to cozy up to him like a father figure.
As a side note, I feel sorry for Mario but I really can’t dredge up an ounce of sympathy for Falcone for this reason and for Liza (I’m always going to hate Falcone for Liza).” As I said, do think that this is a genuinely good plot twist, one that fits in well with the snake-oil salesman approach that Falcone has always taken with Jim. Going back and watching the S1 scenes between the two of them is a genuinely repugnant, but oddly compelling experience. And Jim…well, I have my issues with Jim but one of the few things that he’s consistently cared about has been his father’s memory and it’s painful to think of how Falcone perverted that memory.
The same way it hurts to think of how Ed abused the corpse of Oswald’s dad, effectively spitting on the genuine devotion that Oswald displayed for his parents. Jim may not be the best person but there are some things that just aren’t okay.
The Dulmacher arc was pretty pointless but at least we got some very solid characterization for Fish, so I suppose it gets a pass. So I’m going to go with the most recent because it ties in to my answer for the next question. The whole Jim secretly wants to kill thing, as we’ve talked about before, it makes no sense. The events of the Red Queen and the trip into his psyche showed us that Jim wasn’t interested in killing. Instead we saw a Jim that was feeling depressed, terribly guilty, and was desperately trying to live up his childhood idealization of his deceased father.
Unpopular opinion about XXX character?
1. This is more rarely discussed than unpopular but I do think that Jim still struggles with suicidal tendencies. Not as badly as he was at the beginning of this season but I believe that they’re still there. Barbara was right when she told Lee that Jim was “death obsessed” but it’s not other peoples deaths that he obsesses over most.
2. Barabara also called him a “sadist” but actually I think it’s the opposite, sadism requires forethought and intent that doesn’t really fit Jim’s actions. “Masochism” on the other hand…. I think Jim displays a certain level of purposeful masochism. (I’m not really talking about Sadism or Masochism in sexual terms, btw.)
If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?
Tying into the two previous questions: I would have only hinted at Jim’s suicidal tendencies in the earlier Tetch arc and not given it (supposed) resolution so early in the season. Then in the final episode, when Jim was infected with the virus, I would have changed his (ridiculously OOC) desire to kill others into a struggle with his desire to kill himself. It may not have had the exciting fight scenes or all the hoopla that we got in the finale but there would have been a lot more in terms of emotional resonance. Jim coming to terms with his guilt and grief and finding genuine meaning and purpose in his desire to help Gotham City himself with the assistance of others (Harvey, Bruce, Lucius) and maybe a little self-realization that he might always struggle with his demons but the name of the game is progress not perfection. Don’t we all want to see Jim make some genuine progress, rather than the post S1 perpetual plunge that sets him ten steps back for his single step forward?
