"Gotham" Recap Part II: "The Anvil or the Hammer"

Written by Shae

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

Last week on Gotham, everyone died.

Just kidding! Instead, Gordon and Bullock continued their search for their serial killer, and Bruce decided to sneak into places he shouldn’t, while Lee is adorably accepting of everything, and Nygma got rid of a body. Wow, that actually summed things up pretty nicely, right?

Said Serial killer has his hands on Barbara, whom may have spent the night with him doing really adulty things. It’s the next morning, though, and she’s got things to do and what not. He’s not willing to let her leave though. I suppose he might actually have a shot at them being together if he wasn’t a clingy murdering psychopath. She tries to get away, tries to scream, but ends up in his room of…adulty things, hanging from the ceiling. He shows her the girls he’d met before her, and gotten rid of. It seems he wants her to fully accept who he is. He really believes they can be happy together, and she’s not willing to give in…yet. Jim and Harvey track down a lead. Seems this guy liked to frequent a brothel of sorts, but the places moves venues as often as possible, as not to be caught. 

They get an in, somehow….okay, Jim gets an invite from the Penguin, who he totally threatened and now owes a big favor to. Why? Because Jim isn’t always smart. Bullock goes there, undercover, and ends up busting the place and getting as many people wrangled up as possible. When they speak to the mistress, they finally get to a girl who first met the serial killer. She’d been kidnapped by him years ago, and held, but he eventually let her go. She tried going to the police, but nobody gave a crap because she was a whore and he was a wealthy person of status. With a lead, they head to the guys apartment.

Only, he’s not there. Where could he be? Seems he’s finally getting to Barbara, because they head to her parents place. Being locked up and mentally tormented might create a bit of Stockholm syndrome.  She watches as the man kills her parents. Jim and Harvey get there not too long after, and it’s a bit of a scuffle before the guy ends up dead. Jim assures Barbara that she’s safe now, but is she really? She might be broken beyond repair…after all, she was somewhat okay with her parents being murdered. Speaking of murder! Nygma is busy getting rid of the evidence of his….breakdown? He snapped and killed Kringle's abusive cop squeeze. He even fakes a letter from the dead guy and sends it to her…she’s heart broken and miffed, while Nygma is already playing games, since the first letters of each sentence on the letter he sent her spell out his name.

And Penguin is busy sending a guy to kill Maroni in the name of Don Falcone. That seems to be going well, right? Not really, said assassin gets killed, and his head is sent in a box to Falcone personally, before Maroni has his men attack several of Falcone’s businesses. Guess they’re no longer mob-friends…but, you know, these things tend to happen from time to time, right? Penguin may be a criminal mastermind when it comes to backstabbing the various men in his pocket. Just like the people that work on the board of Wayne Enterprises. The only good thing that comes from Bruce’s attempt to get his files back, is that he meets Lucius Fox. Lucius tells Bruce that his father was a good man. The board member who had his files stolen and inevitably got Reggie killed, says otherwise. Was Thomas Wayne really going along with the dirty dealings of the company? Or was he up to something else…

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