Yes, we are finally back! It took us two and a half months of waiting before we were at last rewarded with a new episode of Gotham. Was the hiatus worth it? Maybe, it does feel like a fresh start after the circus madness from Jerome’s last performance. Anyhow, let’s not linger in the past, but look at the bright future Gotham has to offer her residents. This is how The Riddler got his name.
We start off right after the last episode back in February. Not much time has past and the GCPD is still finding bodies from Jerome’s adventure. Not that they are short on dead bodies because a couple of Gotham’s finest and most intelligent residents were found dead. Most of them under suspicious circumstances. The way that they were found dead was not really suspicious once you know who is behind it: Edward Nygma.
Nygma is on a killing spree. He has already killed six people and he will continue until he gets what he wants. And that is not money or power, but he is looking for a mentor. Someone to replace Penguin in guiding him to be the best villain he can possibly be. We see this in action in a lab with an academic professor. Nygma asks him riddles, but sadly for the professor, he doesn’t know the answer. So Nygma casually blows up the lab.
I feel like Nygma has gone off track a bit since he uses drugs to get visits from imaginairy Penguin with ‘advice’. He honestly should have never killed him. With the help of his imaginary Penguin, he comes to the conclusion that he can’t find himself a suitable mentor. So instead of a mentor, he goes on a hunt to find himself an enemy. And he knows just the guy: Jim Gordon. Even imaginary Penguin thinks this is a bad idea, he even puts on a very strange dance to convince Nygma that he can’t be The Riddler without the Penguin.
Source: HeroVue.com
Nygma’s next move is to send a man dressed as a bunch of grapes to the GCPD to deliver a message. This message is for Gordon, his enemy, but he is out on a break so Lucius Fox gets the note instead. It is a riddle (of course) and leads them to a chess tournament. Nygma has sabotaged the game clocks so that the player get executed once they press the buttons. Luckily for all the players, Fox, Bullock and some officers get there in time so just a couple of players get electrocuted. Nygma watches the whole scene from the balcony and is surprised that it is not Gordon who comes storming through the doors. But as soon as he sees it’s Fox he knows he has found the perfect opponent to play along in his games. Back at the GCPD Fox discovers that there are numbers under the chess pieces they confiscated. These numbers together turn out to be Nygma’s phone number. But honestly, how did Fox get the number so fast? He had to know exactly in which order the chess pieces needed to be placed to get the number. In the phone call, Nygma gives a clue about his next victim. It can be found in the Belly of the Beast at the pawn at queens. This leads Fox and Bullock to a pawnshop that is located on a street with the word queen in the name. They arrest the guy working there, but he has no clue what they are talking about. He also tells them that he covered the shift from a guy named Thirío since he didn’t show up that day. The GCPD finds the dead body of Thirío sometime later and Fox then realises that Thirío means belly in Greek. He asks Lee to cut open his stomach and Bullocks GCPD badge appears. Fox now knows that it is Bullock that Nygma will go after.
Bullock has no idea what is about to happen since he is preparing himself (as the captain of the GCPD) to give a speech to the cadets that graduate from the academy. He never gets to actually hold his speech, because when he is standing backstage he is kidnapped by Nygma. When Nygma is holding a ‘replacement speech’ he releases a toxic gas in the room full of cadets.
In the meantime, Fox gets another visit from a fruit person, now it is a woman dressed as a strawberry. When she asks if he is Foxy, Fox realises that the person responsible for this madness is Nygma because he is the only one calling him that. He rushes to the graduation location where he gets a call from Nygma to go upstairs. Nygma has Bullock dangling above the stairwell on three ropes. Around his neck is the remedy for the toxic gas to save all the cadets. If Bullock falls, the remedy will also be destroyed. In order to save Bullock and all the students, Fox has to answer three riddles. For every riddle he answers wrong, a rope will be cut. He only needs to answer one right, because then Bullock will be saved. Fox answers the first two wrong, or at least he didn’t give the answer Nygma wanted him to give. But the final riddle was answered correctly, and Bullock was saved. He did nearly fell down the stairwell because the rope snapped, but Fox was there to catch him but Nygma gets away.
Later that day when Fox goes home he gets a visit from Nygma in his car. Nygma admits that he killed his best friend and that he deeply regrets it. But on the other hand, he now knows who he is and how he needs to be that person without Penguins help. He now calls himself The Riddler. He then visits the docks to express his regret about killing Penguin but he convinces himself that he doesn’t need Penguin to succeed. Nygma decides to let Penguin go by throwing away the drugs and embraces his new persona as The Riddler.
Somewhere outside Gotham, Gordon goes on a hunting trip with his Uncle Frank where the latter reveals the reason why he came back to Gotham after all these years. He is a member of the Court of Owls, just like Gordon’s father. But now wants to destroy the Court and bring democracy back to Gotham. He also tells that Gordon’s father wasn’t killed in a car accident, but that the Court had something to do with it. The Court now wants Gordon as a member and Frank thinks this is a good way to destroy the Court together. Gordon doubts becoming a member, especially because of Franks sudden return to Gotham. Gordon’s instincts are not letting him down, because when they are back in Gotham Frank pays a visit to Katherine, telling her that Gordon might take the offer. So Frank is either lying to Gordon or to Katherine.
Bruce is still upset from everything that happened with Selina in the past couple of episodes. He is quite reluctant when he gets a note from Selina to meet her at their usual spot but Alfred encourages him to still go and hear what she has to say. Bruce waits for her but she doesn’t show up. When he is on his way home he gets into an encounter with Sonny Gilzean. Selina comes into view to stop Sonny from beating up Bruce. She also denies sending him the letter and orders him to stay away from her. Bruce still gets beaten up by Sonny but he defends himself quite reasonably. When he walks through an alley to get back home he meets his dopplegänger who drugged him. The dopplegänger takes Bruce’s his place in Wayne Manor while the real Bruce wakes up in a dungeon with a view of snowy mountains.
Meanwhile, Penguin wakes up in Ivy Pepper’s apartment after surviving the gunshot wound.
And that was already this episode. It was nice to get more Fox in the picture, usually, he is a secondary character that we only see once in a while. I also think that choosing Fox as Nygma’s potential arch-nemesis was an excellent choice. And what will happen to Bruce? Why did the Court send him to the mountains?
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment, I’d love to know!
