Gotham Season 2 is upon us! While the series has been touting this sophomore effort as “Rise of the Villains” – and it definitely delivered on that front by introducing Theo and Tabitha Galavan, among others – “Damned If You Do” also brought Ben McKenzie’s Jim Gordon over to the dark side for almost the entire episode. So is Gordon one of the villains that we should have been expecting, or at the very least, is he now as bad as they are?
When we meet current-day Gordon, he’s been demoted to traffic cop in what we realize was a ploy by GCPD Commissioner Gillian Loeb (Peter Scolari) to try and get him to quit. Instead of getting brutal with the potentially dangerous Zaardon (David Fierro), Gordon handles that fairly calmly (albeit with gut punches), but then pushes his fellow officer after he arrived late for a shift. It’s this act that gets him in hot water with Loeb and terminated by the GCPD.
His one move is to call in his debt with Penguin, knowing that the favor won’t be one that falls on the right side of the law. Indeed, he’s made to rob Odgen Barker (Otto Sanchez), which he does after getting physical with Barker and his goons. He probably injures a kitchen worker while running through a restaurant as an escape route, and then puts a pair of bullets in Barker in a parking garage. And even though it’s arguable that Gordon had no idea how Penguin was going to threaten Loeb, it still involves Victor Zsasz decapitating a man and using the head to ask for a bottle of beer. (One of the episode’s biggest laughs, oddly enough.)
Now, Gordon definitely did some shady things in Season 1, particularly when he let Penguin go in the pilot. But he was relatively young and inexperienced then, and he always looked like the good guy when compared to the palm-greasing Harvey Bullock, who is now a bartender. (But not my bartender, and that sucks.) So now it seems Gordon is just playing audibles after being backed into a corner, although it definitely does get him his job back on the force, where he can do more good than evil. Sure, he doesn’t have anything to do with the Arkham inmates being broken out by Galavan, but I almost wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the Galavans have a past with him that inspired their plot against Gotham City.
No, we’re not going to find out that Gordon has been The Joker all along, and both his drunken spiel to Bullock and his impassioned apology to Bruce Wayne still make him look like an honorable person. But I think that something inside of Gordon is broken for the time being, and that these loose morals will be what comes between him and Michael Chiklis’ Nathaniel Barnes when the law-embracing latter character joins GCPD as a captain.
Let us know what you guys think about Gordon’s potential new path on Gotham.
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Image Credit@Fox
