Hey youtubers it’s Charlie and since Gotham is premiering next Monday I wanted to start
off with a non-spoilery review of episode 1 and explain how it fits into the Canon of
the tv shows and the comics.
So important stuff first.
Episode 1 airs Monday September 22 at 8PM Eastern Time on FOX in the United States.
In the UK it’s on Channel 5.
For other international countries just check your local listings.
I will be doing weekly episode videos for all 4 DC TV Shows That’s Gotham of course,
The Flash, Arrow and Constantine, all of the new ones are great so be sure to subscribe
to get all that stuff.
I’m probably going to be giving away some DC Swag throughout the year for each of the
shows.
Here’s my non-spoilery review of Gotham Episode 1 with some set up on what the show
looks like compared to all the other movies and tv show:
The show is told from Detective Gordon’s Perspective played by Ben McKenzie.
It has all the DNA of the Batman Universe from the comics without looking like it’s
straight up trying to copy the Gotham from the Christopher Nolan movies.
The thing about the Christopher Nolan movies were that they treated the Batman Mythos as
if it were happening in modern day with real people.
No wacky super powers or anything like that.
Gotham the tv series is a little more open to the idea of superpowers, even though it’s
not going straight to Justice League like Arrow and The Flash.
It’s starting out with James Gordon in his first year on the force, which is where you
get a lot of the Batman Year One similarities.
I didn’t watch Ben McKenzie on Southland, but the way I thought of it when I was watching
the episode was this is Training Day and McKenzie is playing the Ethan Hawke character and Donal
Logue is the Denzel Washington Character.
I’m just talking about their relationship and where Gordon’s character fits in with
everyone else.
Detective Bullock, played by Donal Logue is the other shining star of the series of course.
If you’ve ever seen any of the characters he’s played on other TV Shows, you totally
get why he’s perfect for Bullock.
It’s not the Bullock from Batman the Animated Series, he’s not that sleazy, yet.
But he’s close.
I know I made the Training Day Denzel reference, but on the show I think of him as being true
neutral, he’s not straight up dirty but he’s not the quarterback Jim Gordon is trying
to be.
In the timeline, when Gordon shows up in episode 1, he’s already a detective transferring
in from another city.
So he’s not a total rookie, but he is a rookie to Gotham City.
The city itself is just as big a character as anyone else.
I feel like that’s something that’s always really important in the comics and the show
deals with that in a good way.
And one of the most fun things about the show is the way it sets up the character arc for
the city.
Visually it takes a lot from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
The difference is that in that movie, it was Los Angeles of the future and Gotham has always
been an analog of New York City.
Just like Blade Runner you get the sense that the city is slowly dying.
There’s this belief that Matter only has two states of existence, growth and decay.
The implication being that if you’re not evolving, you’re in the process of dying.
The City, when we first see it, is already in a state of Decay.
The idea is that over the course of the entire series, the city will turn into a chaos vacuum
that just eats all light and goodness.
That’s when Batman puts on the cowl to fill the vacuum.
I think it was said at some point that where we start in season 1, Bruce Wayne is about
8 years from putting the cowl on.
He’s pre-highschool age.
Quick Sidenote, there is actually a batman comic set in gotham city with high school
kids.
It’s called Gotham Academy.
I recommend you check it out on comixology.
The rogues gallery of villains that creates that vacuum is led by Jada Pinkett Smith as
the crime boss Fish Mooney and Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepot one of her underlings.
If you’re a walking dead fan, you might remember him from Season 4.
He was Sam.
The guy Carol and Rick ran into and almost killed.
Smith is interesting as a villain.
I wasn’t really familiar with her character going into it.
Because this is a 16 plus episode season, we’ll see a lot more character development
from her counterpart big mobster characters from The Dark Knight Trilogy.
I’ll give her a chance, since she’s one of the bigger actors on the show we should
expect to see a lot of her in season 1.
But the majority of this first episode focuses on Oswald Cobblepot, which made me really
happy.
The penguin is definitely one of my favorite batman villains and his character arc is a
lot like that of the city itself.
Gotham City slowly descends into madness, Cobblepot slowly descends into madness.
Until eventually he takes on the Penguin persona.
The interesting thing they’ve already teased about season 1 is that they’re bringing
on Hugo Strange and developing Arkham Asylum as a new big location.
Gotham is a Batman origin story and it’s an Arkham Asylum origin story.
Arkham will be the mystery briefcase of pain that the writers reach into to pull out Batman
villains for the show.
If you never heard it, Joss Whedon had this big story about the briefcase of pain.
He said on the set of Thor The Dark World he asked Anthony Hopkins about some of his
inspiration for characters and Hopkins said he keeps a tiny mental briefcase where he
stores painful things.
And when he needs a character to go crazy he just reaches into the briefcase and pulls
out something.
So Arkham Asylum will be Gotham’s tiny briefcase of pain.
In terms of villains the first episode mostly focuses on The Penguin, but it does introduce
The Riddler, Catwoman and Poison Ivy.
The show treats them in this very precog way, like you know what their future is and it’s
the job of the series to show you how it all unfolds.
The Riddler is one of the bigger characters I’m really looking forward to seeing more
of, he doesn’t have a big part in the premiere, but his role inside the show.
His day job puts him right next to Gordon and Bullock.
On the other side of the fence, young Bruce Wayne and Alfred.
They don’t have as much screentime in the first episode as they will later but the story
sets up the triggers for the cowl.
David Mazouz, who plays young bruce wayne does a really good job and I’m interested
to see how often the show visits his character.
He’s not the main character of the series, but he’s one of the most important ones.
He might be short, he’s a little kid.
But he does cast a very long shadow.
I actually found myself staring at the shadows whenever he was on screen to see if they used
any digital effects for cape and cowl easter eggs.
Alfred is played by sean pertwee from the musketeers.
If you watch my doctor who videos you’ll also know him as the son of the Third Doctor
Jon Pertwee.
They play up a bit more of Alfred’s history in the British Military.
Pertwee is a much bigger Alfred than the Gandalf version of the character Michael Caine played.
So I’m expecting to see Alfred get in a couple fist fights this year.
Look forward to that.
It would be very cool to see Alfred teach a young Bruce Wayne to fight off bullies.
The other young members of the cast, Catwoman and Poison Ivy are also only briefly seen
in the episode but that’s just because of the time limitations.
We’ll see a lot more of them in future episodes.
They tease a really interesting relationship developing between Bruce Wayne and Selina
Kyle so I’m interested to see where the show takes it.
Generally, what I think the show proves is that Gotham City can be interesting even without
a fully actualized Batman.
I was really happy that the show didn’t present the absence of Batman as a big thing.
It doesn’t try to be too self aware about what’s NOT there.
So you don’t walk away feeling like something’s missing.
Officially Right now, Fox has already ordered a full season.
So they’ll probably break it into 8 or 10 episodes this fall, then the rest in January
or February.
So it’s not like we have to worry about it getting cancelled.
They are shooting all 16 of those episodes.
They’ve still got several to finish.
As I start doing videos from the episodes, I’ll be sure to include stuff from behind
the scenes as they continue to finish filming.
Be sure to subscribe to get everything.
But generally you can expect several more new batman villains to show up before the
finale.
We won’t know about season 2 until after the first several episodes, so don’t worry
about that yet.
I will be doing videos all season.
I was really happy that I stuck with Agents of SHIELD for all of season 1.
A lot of people dumped that show before it got good, it took it about half a season to
get there, but I’m also really excited for that to come back.
I’m working on a season 2 preview video for that to post tonight.
Next week during the premiere what I’ll do is a top 10 video, since this is already
kind of my review.
I’ll also be live-tweeting, without being super spoilery of course, but if you want
to play along with me, my twitter and facebook links are in the description.
Right now you can click here to learn more about some of the villains coming to Gotham
and you can click here to start getting ready for Arrow and The Flash.
Thanks for watching, see you guys tonight.
High Fives!