Tuesday, May 16, 2017

My Review of Gotham's 3x18: "Light The Wick"


Written by Tze Chun
Directed by Mark Tonderai

Barnes (to Kathryn): "James Gordon is guilty and I will be his executioner."

Is it me or is the Court of Owls just basically snatching all of the male cast at this point? With Gordon in their pockets of sorts and Nygma's hubris getting himself snatched by them along with Bruce in the middle of nowhere, this week two more men ended up in the Court's hands.

First of all, Barnes got snatched during a transfer from Arkham gone. Barnes is hardly the most interesting of characters for me and his Executioner act just hasn't been as interesting as it could've been. Here though we saw him getting captured by Talon while Jervis Tetch looked on in amusement and then we saw Kathryn giving Strange the go ahead to extract parts of the virus from Barnes for her own little experiment.

The experiment at first being some random test subject getting a little rabid before moving onto bigger things such as a bunch of socialites being endangered by the Court's whole scheme to cleanse Gotham and whatnot. Needless to say all the effort Gordon made to get into Kathryn's good books went out the window when he teamed up with Oswald (that reunion was particularly delightful) to cause more headache for the Court.

This lead to Kathryn realising that Gordon was a liability. She should've picked up on that bit a lot earlier but the end scene with Barnes breaking out of his restraints and vowing to kill Gordon didn't really inspire much. Can we just lose Barnes already? We need to lose some cast members and Barnes truly is expendable if I'm being honest.

As for Oswald, well he spent his time away from Ivy this week to hook up with Gordon in his mission to get back at Nygma. The only thing Oswald achieved was that he antagonised the Court by having Firefly roast Talon a bit but at least he got the reunion he wanted with Nygma. Except for the bit where they're both in cages but the reaction the two had to seeing each other was simply the best bit about the whole episode.

As for the rest of the episode, Leslie somewhat tested my patience in this one and I was kind of glad when Gordon snapped at her while Ivy briefly interacted with Tabitha and managed to break Selina out of her coma. Seeing Ivy having Selina's back was one of the highlights of this episode along with the latter in full on revenge mode too. Bruce on the other hand seemed to be in more training mode and while his scenes were good, they didn't really progress anything to be honest.

- Strange somehow managed to cure Fish before they got seperated from each other. She'll be back in two weeks time.
- No Barbara or Butch in this episode and I liked the parallels between Barbara/Tabitha and Ivy/Selina here.
- The show has been renewed for a fourth season but will be moving to Thursdays when it returns in the autumn.
- Chronology: Not long from where The Primal Riddle left off.

A solid episode but not entirely the best we've had. While I did like some of the returns we had in Light The Wick, it was really the last scene and the Ivy/Selina bits that made the episode for me. I am liking the Court stuff but I'm also eager for it to come to it's messy ending too.

Rating: 7 out of 10

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