GOTHAM Review: Rise of the Villains; By Fire

Warning: This review contains spoilers

Let me start off by saying this was a great episode. With Butch infiltrating Galavan’s crew, Penguin can now finally save his mother. The whole set up was entertaining. Of course Galavan did not believe, and he gave Butch a mallet as his new hand.
Butch is an interesting character to watch this season. After the programing Penguin gave him last season, you get the feeling that one day he is going to snap and get revenge.
Also Bruce was used very well this week.We see him training with Alfred in the cave, and having dinner with the Galavan family. Having Bruce finally involved in something important to the story is what he needed. Up until this point Bruce felt like filler in a series that was just buying time until Batman came to save the day.

The main plot of the episode was about Selina Kyle and Bridget Pike. After the events of last week’s episode we see the two staying in Selina’s hideout. Selina believes that Bridget should leave town with police and her brothers coming after her. Bridget agrees but needs money so she can leave. They start robbing sex traffickers, and get caught on the security cameras.
Selina and Bridget made a good team, giving Selina a partner was a nice change of pace. Jim immediately recognizes Selina and tries to meet with her so they can find Firefly. With the police trying to finds leads on the girls, we see Bullock trying to get answers out of Ivy. It was a nice callback to season one, but hopefully we never see Ivy again.
Bridget is a very sympathetic character, and her brothers are some of the worst kind of people on the planet. While her transformation into the Firefly character felt rushed, you can definitely understand why it happened. With her going to stop the sex traffickers you knew she was trying to do the right thing, even if she was going about it the wrong way. Sadly this ended with her apparent death after a cop shot her flamethrower, and set her on fire.
At the end we see Bridget is alive, and being experimented on at Indian Hill. We also learn that Indian Hill is owned by Wayne industries. I thought this scene could have had some great easter eggs. With them walking down the hall and seeing the others being tested; I think they could have had Clayface, Killer Croc etc. But that’s probably asking too much. The one thing I did not like was that once again Wayne industries is at the center of this this mystery. Everything does not have to lead back to the Wayne family. I hope this theme doesn’t continue going forward.

So after all of that we still have Eddie and Ms. Kringle dating. It starts off nice as her brings her a cup of coffee and invites her to dinner. Kringle tells Leslie that she feels Eddie is keeping secrets from her; Eddie overhears this and wants to tell her the truth after dinner. While it’s not quite clear what Eddie wanted to tell her we do get an idea later in the episode. After the two have dinner among other things, Kringle tells Eddie that she is scarred of her ex-boyfriend because he threatened to kill her if she ever dated anyone else.
Eddie in an attempt to comfort her tells her that he killed him. This was a very sad scene, we have Ed tell the woman he loves that he is a murderer and she is terrified of him! Of Course she didn’t take it well, after he admits to stalking her and killing her ex, he then shows her the guy’s badge as proof! As she is trying to escape Nygma grabs her and accidently chokes her to death.
This was a dark scene because we feel for Eddie, but we know what he did was wrong. How can somebody so smart accidently kill someone? This will likely lead to him going over the edge and becoming The Riddler. I admit that I have not been a fan of Eddie so far, but this was heavy. I did not expect something this depressing coming from ‘Gotham’.

Overall this was one of the saddest episode’s to date, but it was well done . You felt bad for Butch, Bridget, Ms. Kringle and Eddie, which is what the writers wanted. I can’t wait for next week’s episode.