The clock is ticking as Rebecca puts her final, devastating plan into motion, one from which nobody will emerge unscathed.

I feel like I’m in the Bizarro world this week – Superman & Lois dropped the ball spectacularly on its season 3 finale, setting up a fourth season about which I am struggling to remain optimistic. Meanwhile, Gotham Knights, a show which has been mediocre at its best and utterly dreadful at its worst, just pulled off a finale that genuinely had me interested and made me curse when I remembered that this is all we are ever getting.

Harvey, tied up and at Rebecca’s mercy, has an awful choice to make as she presents him with a little motivation to unleash his wilder (and as far as she’s concerned more fun) side. This gives us some of Misha Collins’ best work, as he finally gets to give us the goods on both sides of that fractured personality and surprises us with the nuance of which his ‘villainous’ side is capable. I’m not even mad at how dreadfully obvious and stupid the final piece of his transformation is – Collins here deserves all the plaudits and I am actually genuinely upset we’ll never get to see him properly assume the mantle of Two-Face now.

Meanwhile, the Gotham Knights (absent Duela) are locked up and being interrogated about ‘their’ murder of the great and good of Gotham, all of whom happened to be wearing party masks. It’s interesting how this one plays out – I mean it’s silly in the way that all of Gotham Knights’ main plots are silly, but we do get a left turn with regards to Turner’s parents that I didn’t see coming and a setup for what feels like it could genuinely have been a decent storyline for season 2.

Then there’s the inevitable part where the cops decide to trust the gang because everything is going decidedly sideways, and they must figure out a way to do the impossible against a ticking clock. Do they manage it? Of course, this is a show which delights in handwaving its way past any sort of logic so that our heroes can Do The Thing. But there’s good stuff on the way, genuinely emotional stuff, connective tissue which makes you actually care, coupled to performances which frankly dare you to not.

But then, it’s over. We get so many redemptive conclusions, setups for what comes next. A genuinely interesting set of questions about what this version of Gotham and its inhabitants could look like is left to go unanswered, and a show that never seemed like it would get above middling on its best day takes its shot and teases what could have been, had anyone had just a little more faith in it.

Verdict: Unexpectedly leaves me bereft knowing none of what’s set up will ever get answered. A damned shame, but at least it gets to go out on a high. 8/10

Greg D. Smith