The gang get into more scrapes as a plan to steal from the Mob goes predictably sideways.

Honestly, it’s difficult not to feel like the Gotham Knights writers are doing this deliberately now. I said last time out that the show felt like a grab bag of ideas and oh my goodness if it hasn’t repeated the trick.

Last time out, you may remember we got the revelation that the Talon is basically over a century old and a formerly notorious circus performer-turned serial killer from Gotham’s distant past. Were you, like me, looking forward to how that one might play out? Tough, because the show has another set piece adventure for our heroes(?) to get caught up in.

This time, the required McGuffin that’ll allow Stephanie to do some magic hacking offscreen is located in the warehouse base of operations of notorious crime family the McKillens (from the famous On-The-Nose part of Ireland). So we know these are really bad men, we see them predictably (and woodenly) destroy the bar of a couple paying them protection for ‘being short’ (which seems the worst protection racket ever but that’s by the by).

Of course, the added complication which comes to light part way through the operation is that Harper has a more than passing historical acquaintance with the Mob. This causes some dramatic ‘Oh no you didn’t’ between her and brother Cullen, but before it can threaten to make Harper too interesting as a character by injecting some genuine darkness, she confesses a completely milquetoast justification for it all and Cullen instantly forgives her, apparently forgetting the moral objections he had mere moments before. Good stuff.

Other character focus goes to Carrie, whose homelife we get to see so that there’s some sort of context later for her missing a school thing which her busy doctor mother has switched shifts to be able to attend, but despite this seeming like it could be Very Bad News for her secret identity, nothing really seems to come of any of it.

Oh and we get to see Stephanie’s mum at the same event. She drinks a lot and is basically an abrasive, loud embarrassment, in a bit of showing-not-telling that might have worked better if Stephanie hadn’t already told us last week.

Elsewhere, Harvey’s having the key to the Mayor’s limo suddenly shifts into a plot revolving around worries he has about being potentially a split personality, just like his father before him (well hello there, sudden shoehorned retro-logic) and a discussion with Dr Chase Meridian (who is much less fun here than she was opposite Val Kilmer’s Bats) serves mainly to dump some exposition with regards to that whole thing before Harvey ends up waking from a weird bender with no memory of how he got there. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see what any of this could possibly signify…

As to the resolution of the heist? As asinine as it is predictable. The whole thing seems to have been engineered by the writers for the purpose of bits of exposition, many of which weren’t needed and others which just resolve deeply unsatisfactorily. It’s still relatively early days, but this is one show that feels like a second season is anything but inevitable.

Verdict: Thrown together, rushed and hackneyed. Not good at all. 3/10

Greg D. Smith