The gang race against time to find a way to save Turner from the aftereffects of Electrum. Harvey takes a huge risk in his search for answers. Brody stumbles upon disturbing information about his father.

I’ve never been a fan of terms like ‘hate watching’ or ‘guilty pleasure’. To me, if you are going to enjoy something, you shouldn’t ever feel guilty about it, and if you hate something, you shouldn’t waste your time on it. So it’s not that I hate Gotham Knights, nor that I derive any kind of guilt-related feelings from it, but we have a complicated relationship. It’s not good, but it has a likeable enough cast that I still enjoy it, even as it equally drives me batty (pun intended) with some of its plot decisions.

Last time out, we found out that Batman may have killed Turner’s parents. Of course, we found that out when Turner was in a drug haze and it was being suggested by the villain, but still, it chimed with my guess from episode 1. Here, Carrie finally reveals that she was the one who tore out the missing pages of Bruce’s diary, though their ‘revelation’ still leaves the subject ambiguous, which sits with my original full prediction that he would either be or feel responsible for Turner’s parents’ death in some way and that would be why he took him in. At any rate, this gives Turner an excuse to be moody at Carrie so that she can go be somewhere else for a while.

Or as moody as someone suffering with potentially fatal side effects from the properties of an unknown rock can be. As Turner gets sicker, the gang get increasingly desperate for a way to save his life, but as if that wasn’t enough, the nature of his sickness makes him – and therefore the gang and their hideout – easy to track. Oh dear, etc.

Meanwhile, Harvey continues his dialogue with himself in a more literal sense, as his videotaped alter ego persuades him to do something very silly so they can have a more face to face conversation. I’d like to say Misha Collins is doing his best here, but whoever directed him to play the alter ego Harvey seems to have given him one note. That note being ‘Heath Ledger’s Joker’. Seriously, the tone, the posture and even the dialogue just come off as a second rate copy. It’s another episode where Collins’ scenes are long, drawn-out info dumps as the show tries to get us to guess at a truth that just isn’t that compelling. Ultimately, it doesn’t really even matter whether the ‘other’ Harvey is telling the truth about Harvey’s involvement in the Court of Owls’ machinations, and that’s the real issue here. The whole point of Two-Face as a character is that he’s two sides of a coin – one the brilliant, fearsomely justice-oriented White Knight, the other the impulsive, random agent of chaos. Here, we have a ‘battle’ that doesn’t even approach that, and given how everything else works out in this show, I’m not convinced the writers aren’t approaching another pointless gotcha here.

Speaking of, Brody finds some damning evidence about his father in his safe while looking for pain meds, and inevitably goes to Stephanie who tells him all and leaves him convinced he has to save his mother from his Big Bad Daddy. I wonder how that might end up playing out. Oh, exactly as it obviously was always going to? Gosh, what a surprise…

And on it goes. Will Turner get saved? Will the Gang escape possible detection by way of an extremely silly bit of handwavium? Will romantic attachments flagged for weeks finally happen? All this and more will be revealed at least ten minutes after it was so painfully obvious to the viewer that even this version of Harvey Dent could already have worked it out.

And yet? I can’t hate it. The cast are so earnestly invested in scripts which are completely stupid. The budget of the show is so obviously low and poorly-hidden by various obvious workarounds. It so obviously wants to be a part of Bat Canon and takes so many liberties and uses so many ‘homages’ to do so. It’s a plucky little failure, swinging for the fences in so many wild and ludicrous ways that I can’t help but root for it, objectively terrible as it may be.

Verdict: Dumb, Dumb, Dumb, but I’ll still be here for it next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel. 5/10

Greg D. Smith