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Everything Old Is Old Again: ‘Gotham’ Is Stuck In Batman’s Shadow

CREDIT: JESSICA MIGLIO/FOX
CREDIT: JESSICA MIGLIO/FOX

As is the way in pop culture these days, even our origin stories have origin stories. Sure, you know how Batman begins. But have you wondered about the start of Commissioner Gordon’s illustrious career in law enforcement? If you have, you are sort of luck! If you haven’t, too bad, Gotham is happening anyway.

Why do we love origin stories so much? There’s the industry piece: movies and television shows are expensive, original ideas are riskier than known entities. No matter how much evidence we get that perhaps we could use a bit more breathing time between reboots, nothing will stop the likes of Marvel from declaring its comic book flicks will own every desirable weekend from now until today’s tweens graduate from high school. There will always be new children with zero institutional memory (and, no offense to children, not especially discerning taste) to buy the toys from the movie inspired by the comic.

And of course we, the audience, are suckers for origin stories. We self-mythologize. We begin in the beginning. We like to pop the back off the watches of our heroes and see what makes their gears turn. In fiction, and in life, we want to believe in cause and effect. And there is this element of wanting to believe that extraordinary lives spring from ordinary beginnings; that we, too, are just one spider bite, one military experiment gone wrong, one tragedy (+ ninja training) away from greatness. I’m a fan of good origin stories, myself. I love watching Giles tell Buffy that “in every generation, there is a chosen one.” I am into the flashback segments in Scandal. I could read the sections of Harry Potter that describe Voldemort’s psychotic exploits at the orphanage a hundred times and never tire of them.

The trick with this stuff is to reveal a backstory that is both consistent with the information we already have and as independent as possible from the material it purports to set up. An origin story still needs to be a story, with an arc unto itself. Oxymoronic as it may sound, an origin story has to be original. The news is old; in the retelling, the narrative needs to explore or reveal something new. In other words, if the only people who can love Gotham are people who will love everything with a Bat-Signal on it, Gotham has fundamentally failed.

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What’s working in the Gotham pilot is, for now, not quite breaking through what’s broken. There are two major problems with the Gotham pilot, and only one can (hopefully) be solved by next week. The other is embedded in its DNA: the shadow of Bruce Wayne.

First, briefly, the Bat-shadow: though showrunner Bruce Heller swore up and down that “I don’t think Batman works very well on TV” and that, had he been told to “Do Batman,” “I would have said ‘No,’” you would never know of this Bruce-Wayne-aversion from the Gotham pilot. I wish that instead of using the fact that “we all know” the story as an excuse to rehash and show off the familiar — watch the Waynes get shot in an alley! Watch Selina Kyle scale a skyscraper while wearing a hoodie! — Gotham had done the braver thing and omitted the expected.

The scene in which Bruce’s parents are killed is the pilot’s most egregious offense. You have 42 minutes to introduce us to this world and these characters, and almost ten of them are wasted on the part of the canon we were promised would not be Gotham’s focus. Seriously, I am nowhere near an expert on the Bat-mythology and even I have that script down so cold I was like, “Wait, why are they at the movies? I thought it was supposed to be an opera.”

The best part of the show, not coincidentally, is the element that deviates from the already-established Batman bits: Fish Mooney, an original character played by Jada Pinkett Smith. She is the owner of a burlesque sanctuary for murder-planning and criminal-framing. She issues commands, threats, greetings and dismissals with a smooth, delectable cadence, like she just loves how her words taste in her mouth.

The should-be fixable issue with the Gotham is how it abuses many of the worst pilot tropes. By this, I mean it explains things in a language that does not really resemble the speech with which actual humans communicate. The language is what I will henceforth call SPED, sloppy plot exposition through dialogue. SPED sounds like siblings referring to each other has “little sis” or “big brother.” It includes expressions in this structure: “Well, if it isn’t [name of person], [title of job]!” (That’s a real one from Gotham, by the way.) This language assumes that we, the viewers, immediately forget everything we see and need to be reminded of basic information over and over and over again, even when dealing with such a widely known universe as the one in which Batman takes place. It is annoying at best, insulting at worst, and all over the Gotham premiere.

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At every possible turn, Detective Jim is referred to as “rookie” or “kid” and, sigh, “hotshot.” In a one-two cliché punch, he is accused of making a “rookie mistake.” He is told things like, “Listen, kid, you got juice,” and “You’re the new guy, huh? How do you like Gotham so far?” (Sure, it’s funny to see the guy who was once told “Welcome to The O.C., bitch!” be introduced to a new city, but… this many times? Also, I don’t think Gotham is in on the Ryan Atwood joke.) Do these writers honestly think we will be confused as to the status this young detective? Like, one commercial break in, are they insecure, thinking we’ve already forgotten whether or not Jim is new to the force? “I wonder if Jim has been at this job a while,” said no viewer, ever. “I hope they clarify that, maybe through super-casual nicknames that people definitely use in real life.”

Are you not sure if Jim is a nice guy? Are his universally nice actions not proof enough of his niceness? Can you tell if Gotham is a bad city? Is the rampant crime and grim, Christopher-Nolan-inspired grayscale color scheme not communicating that fact to you clearly? Fret not; Harvey will say to Jim, “You seem like a nice guy. But this is not a city or a job for nice guys. Understand?”

The rest of the cast is filled out by fan service faces (a young Ivy, kid-Catwoman, and so on). Jim has a cute girlfriend anachronistically named Barbara. She runs an art gallery because of course she does; were it not required by the premise of the show, Jim Gordon would be an architect. Jim and “B,” as he calls her, live in a comically large apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, Restoration Hardware décor, and vampire lair lighting. She is looking forward to “being Mrs. Gordon” so they’ll probably break up soon.

Given the copious amount of time spent on unnecessary exposition and characters calling Jim a rookie, there’s not a ton of action in the episode. Jim does wind up in a huge fight where damage is absolutely done to his face, but when we see him post-combat he has only a very telegenic and sexy injury that involves erotically wrapping his palm in an ace bandage. Jim’s face will remain unscathed even after literally taking a boot to the jaw. (Hold on a second, does JIM have superpowers? Because I would watch that show so hard.) I am also confused by why Jim has a hang-up about shooting people; I thought that was supposed to be Batman’s thing.

Ben McKenzie’s performance as Jim is better than the material he’s given. He carries himself like someone who is reluctant to draw attention away from What Really Matters Here, and he’s got that just-trying-to-be-a-decent-guy tone of voice down. I believe we are supposed to leave this episode confident in Jim’s competence, and McKenzie delivers on that front, but why can’t he discover a supposedly high-level conspiracy using methods more elaborate than “this so-called killer’s shoes are UNSHINY yet the traumatized orphan’s report from the scene specifically mentioned how shiny the killer’s shoes are!”?

If anything about such a predictable pilot could be considered a spoiler, here goes: Jim goes over to Bruce Wayne’s mansion, where Bruce, no joke, is standing on the edge of the roof. I *thought* this was because, as a sad, recently-orphaned youth, Bruce was suicidal. That would be a logical progression of events. But no, Bruce is “learning to conquer fear.” As your twelve-year-olds are wont to do. Then Jim just straight-up tells this child who he has known for all of two days that the police department and the mafia worked together to frame the wrong person for the murder of Bruce’s parents. Jim is putting his entire life and career in the hands of a kid who was just having a little will-they-or-won’t-they with FEAR. Bruce — how many times should I tell you he is twelve years old? As many times as Gotham told me Jim was a rookie? Anyway, Bruce is like a sixth-grader — takes this information with the calm, steely demeanor of a future sociopath. He would like to avenge the death of his parents personally. Jim, despite his ostensible role as the moral compass of our depraved universe, seems to have a “NBD” policy re: vengeance.

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All of this being said, there is some thematically appropriate hope in the darkness. The talent is there; the concept, by the episode’s end, is clicking into place. Maybe this was just some throat-clearing, an effort at getting the fan service out of the way so we can get on with the good stuff: a city where the cops and the criminals maintain an uneasy truce while citizens pay the price whenever something slips off-balance.

At the end of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, Batman finally left Gotham. If Gotham wants to flourish as a drama in its own right, it’s going to have to leave Batman.