In their continued quest for answers regarding the Court of Owls, the gang track down the living relative of an old Gotham serial killer who may have answers for them. Turner follows up the mysterious death of a lawyer and whether it might connect to his father. Cullen finds he and Stephanie may have more in common than he or his sister had first assumed.

The third episode of this show was really starting to wear thin at the edges, so I approached this instalment with a healthy dose of caution – did it manage to do better? Well, sort of.

Starting out with a deranged man running through a park convinced he’s being attacked by invisible adversaries, the show only goes weirder from there. The leaps of logic required in certain parts are just about the right side of preposterous, though clinging on by their fingernails. A story remembered by Duela about an old Gotham serial killer leads her and Carrie to a nursing home, questioning said killer’s last living relative to try to get clues as to the identity of the Talon. It’s a competent enough start but the scene quickly goes south.

Likewise, Turner and Harper’s trip to the home of a dead lawyer stretches narrative credibility on many levels, not least why a wealthy man in a large property in a crime-ridden city had no burglar alarm, as well as how someone losing their mind would quite so beautifully carve the same phrase over and over again across an entire room with nobody having stopped him. Nevertheless, the clue they obtain there is, I suspect not the point of the scenes. This is about Turner probing why Harper dislikes Stephanie so much, so that this not-at-all burning question can be answered for the audience in perhaps the least entertaining of ways. It’s all about feminine empowerment until you need to stir up some good old-fashioned female jealousy to manufacture conflict, I guess…

Cullen and Stephanie end up putting their respective skills to good use hacking into the Gotham Police mainframe to find patterns in historic cases, and while they’re at it find time to have a little bonding session of their own, wherein Cullen decides perhaps Stephanie isn’t such a bad egg after all when she confesses a family secret. I like the idea that Stephanie’s life isn’t quite as perfect as we assumed, and certainly it makes sense that someone with their own emotional damage would gravitate toward Turner and his current friends, but it all feels a little bit too neat, like ticking boxes off a checklist.

Meanwhile, hero of the hour Harvey Dent finds that he has a lot more on his hands than he expected, especially when Lincoln March throws his own hat into the ring for Mayor and the show painfully winks to the audience with a reference in his campaign video followed by a shot of Dent that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer.

As the show draws to a close, Turner finds he has one less friend in the world than he assumed and the identity of the Talon starts to make things really weird. I’m here for a bat-show with supernatural elements (it worked well enough with Arrow’s early seasons) but it feels a little at this point like the show is becoming more of a random grab bag of ideas than a coherent narrative. Still, it earns points for slightly less hand-waving of details than usual, and it’s still not terrible. But there’s time.

Verdict: Still not hitting the heights it could. 6/10

Greg D. Smith