Well, it's been back a full week already, actually, but my better half being in hospital meant we couldn't catch up on it till today and, my, what a couple of episodes!
Beware! Spoilers follow...
No, really, they do...
Really.
(One of them's a real doozy too, and, because I'm writing this on my phone, I can't get the spoiler tags to work properly. You have been warned!)
Right. What follows will be unstructured, most likely. You have been warned.
First, I kind of wish Gordon had been an Arkham guard longer, but his stint here is enjoyable enough. The scenes between Bullock, Gordon and Lang are tremendously entertaining and Gordon himself remains a bona fide solo hero for much of these episodes. That he's pitted against self-serving bureaucracy on the one hand and one of the show's more memorable villains on the other really helps, too. The asylum scenes manage to be genuinely creepy without being too over the top. There's lots to like here.
The secondary plotline meanders a bit, although it arrives at an incredibly powerful climax in the second of the two episodes. Falcone is just an awesome character and the moment when
is one of the most compelling and disturbing moments in the whole series. The Penguin rebounds rather nicely from his overstepping the mark in the first episode and his appearance in Fish's bar near the end of the episode made me finally realise something that I should have worked out ages ago: Penguins eat fish. Of course they do... 😊
Overall, then, a couple of tremendous episodes, made (and I hate to say this to some extent) all the more coherent by the total absence of Bruce and Alfred. Not, I should point out, that I hate either character, particularly, but their absence did enable the writers to write a bit more tightly, the rather pointless Selena and Ivy scenes notwithstanding.
One final point. I don't know where Falcone hires his muscle, but I want to see that black girl with the eye patch again and soon. Next episode will do just fine... 😃
