I just read online he’s the second character in the show named after a character in Goodfellas.
Read at your own risk, it could be spoilery.
I rather liked the latest episode. The show is best when it sticks to what it essentially is: a police procedural, albeit with crazier criminals in a more corrupt milieu. A murder in a circus with brawling acrobats fits in perfectly.
I appreciated seeing “The Flying Graysons”, but I think the writers are being too heavy handed with the foreshadowing. We’ve already been introduced to Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Joker; Dick Grayson hasn’t been born yet, but apparently Det. Gordon got his parents back together. What’s going to be left for future episodes?
Well, Clayface and the Mad Hatter are still out there. Plus Ra’s al-Ghul and the League of Shadows. and Mr. Freeze.
You left you Szasz, btw.
I appreciate the high-wire act this show is trying to pull off. Move too slowly, they lose the audience. Move too fast, and it’s going to look like the Adam West series. I think they want to finish out the first season having fully laid the groundwork for a ten-year prehistory leading up to the appearance of the Bat Man. With all of the pieces on the board and positioned in relation to each other, they can slow down the overall arc pacing and tell more… well, nuanced isn’t the right word, but more involved stories with short arcs on each canonical proto-villain. I’d hope that they mix those with some minor players who appear and get well and truly ended.
And while JPS can really chew the scenery, I think I’ve seen about all I ever want to see of Fish Mooney. She makes the West-era bad guys look deep and complex. Hmm. Maybe that’s her purpose - to be a completely vanilla Batman Villain who can set the low bar and then be disposed of, so that we are okay with more rounded stories of the canonical ones.
I also forgot that we’ve seen Harvey Dent.
I don’t mind the current Fish Mooney storyline. My first thought when it was mentioned that they were harvesting the prisoners’ organs was the the captors weren’t treating their product very well. Fish figured out the same thing and worked the situation to her advantage.
I’ve never cared for Jada and that actually helped in making her character interesting to me at first; she plays a hard, nasty, frowny faced bitch like she was born for it. Now I just want her to die a painful, elaborate death (Fish or course, not the real JPS)
No kidding. Fish probably cost them $50k minimum when she offed the current leader.
Not to mention you don’t want your transplant donor showing up to lose a kidney while starving, diseased, and recovering from a beating caused by fellow prisoners.
Plus, outside of a few hobos who aren’t good transplant donors anyway, you would think people would miss someone like suit-and-tie guy Fish met, and that brings more questions than is helpful.
Seems just as likely to me that we’ll meet any number of one-shot proto-Jokers on this show, but the “real” one (assuming we get that far) won’t be any of them.
According to the writers, maybe. Maybe not. They say the character matters to the larger story but not necessarily in the way that you expect.
Yes, I think we’ll see more than one Joker-nit. The crappy comedian trying out for Fish in an early episode might have been another. The next episode is “Red Hood” - I think that confirms that they’re going to show us all of the origin stories, and then whip the rug out from under us, as the last two posts have suggested.
I predict that unless this show is cancelled prematurely, the very last scene will be Alfred telling Gordon that ‘Master Bruce’ has left town. Maybe that’s obvious.
Well, they have focused too damn much on the Joker in other shows I feel. Batman has had lots of civilians, not just the one. Besides, the Joke doesnt appear until well after batman is a active crimefighter. Origin stories vary, but it even appears he’s not even a criminal until well after The Batman is established.
I’m kind of hoping Nygma doesn’t become *the *Riddler. He’s a dork, but likeable.
Nygma has some charm, but he is so wildly inappropriate I can see why people don’t like him.
He constantly bothers Ms. Cringle, despite her making it very clear she doesn’t want him around. He completely redid her files, causing her a ton of extra work. He autopsies bodies expressly against the instructions of his captain and the ME, and then plants human limbs on the ME when he gets caught. Bullock has to tell him in basically every episode to knock off on the riddles and give a straight answer.
He’s very smart and wants to be liked, but I can easily see nobody wanting to be around him and him making crime-based riddles for attention.
It’s funny how Gordon & the doctor had to solve a riddle, to solve the crime. Gee, is there anyone they could have asked for help?
I don’t mind The Riddler starting out as a good guy. I think showing his disillusionment with the good side and change to a bad guy could be interesting. I thought we’d see more of this with Penguin but he started out working for the bad guys and he seemed to go from quiet to psycho killer without much of a transition.
Based on the title alone, I predict a would-be criminal who wears a red hood will fall into a chemical vat and at the end of the episode well see him from behind with his head bandaged. He’ll tear the bandages off and demand a mirror from the underworld doctor.
Shocking twist: he looks perfectly normal but the chemicals caused partial facial paralysis, leaving him unable to smile.
Shocking twist: he’s actually really good looking but all the doctors & nurses look like the Joker. 
Hey. Just like to say that I’m finding this the most consistently entertaining, endearing non-reality show I’ve seen in forever. (Feel the same way about Empire, and hey, if anyone wants to start a thread about that, I’m in!) Honestly, I can’t point to any one thing that makes it work. It’s full of action, it keeps moving, it has lots of pretty compelling and some just plain entertaining characters (I never thought Ed Nygma would become one of my favorites, or Sal Maroni, for that matter), there are plenty of nifty twists I honestly never saw coming, and, heck, it’s just plain a great ride.
Something that’s really sticking out, especially since is just the first season, is how utterly ruthless it is. If you’re not someone who absolutely has to stay alive, Anyone Can Die is in full force and effect. I can’t remember a show that had so many characters who got literally one or two lines before they were iced. I’m thinking that if you’re a young actor trying to make your mark, this would be the ideal vehicle, as you get national exposure for a one-shot role you only have to practice a few minutes for.
Other than that, all I really got to add was that I actually like Fish Mooney a lot more now than in the first half of the season. When she started out, she looked and sounded exactly like the Tank Abbott of Gotham, a vapid one-note bully who sneered and scowled and hissed, constantly lording over powerless, frightened girls while not having the tiniest prayer of taking down anyone meaningful. And some of her early dialogue was just plain cringeworthy (that “Do you like boys or girls?” crap was especially atrocious). Now? She’s been thrown in with a mob of hopeless wretches, the lowest of the low, and she’s not only rallied them but hatched a scheme to overthrow their captors and win their freedom. And she did it despite being completely honest about how some of them would be killed no matter what. That is good stuff. The bad guy besting the really bad guy is a tried-and-true device, and in a place as thoroughly messed up as Gotham City, where someone like Harvey Bullock is a legit hero, it works perfectly. For the first time ever, I’m hoping that something horrible doesn’t happen to her. Well, not yet, anyway. 
+1.
This season’s supposed to be “the rise of the Penguin” and I bet next year will focus on the Riddler. But I’ve always thought the latter was doing it for the lolz, not the money, and I’m wondering if he’ll start out by teasing Penguin, which could be interesting.
RE: Fish. I’m a batman heretic. I always liked Eartha Kitt Catwoman better than Julie Neumar, and Fish has a lot of Eartha Kitt in her–the lines seem to purr from her mouth. I wonder if that’s her model for the character.