Gotham Recap “Balloonman”: When Vigilante Justice Goes Wrong

The latest Gotham recap where Gordon is putting out fires all over Gotham while tracking down a new vigilante called “Balloonman” who is taking out the city’s trash by the most extreme measures possible….

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

When we last left Gotham a week ago, Oswald Cobblepot aka The Penguin was slowly working his way back to the city after taking a college kid hostage while working to get a ransom from his well-to-do parents while Gordon and Bullock continued to fight the crime of the week, this time freeing captured kids from being turned over to an evil entity known only as ‘The Dollmaker’. As we pick up this week, Cobblepot is officially back in Gotham, although outside of the finely knit sweater he’s now wearing, there was no conclusion on what actually happened to the college frat boy he kidnapped. I guess there’s an underlying assumption he’s dead?

Gordon and Bullock are charged with finding a masked vigilante dubbed Balloonman, who has been handcuffing rather scrupulous sorts from the around the city to hot air balloons that lift them hundreds of feet in the sky, only to watch the air run out and they come crashing back down to Earth. Gordon is also trying to find out if Selina Kyle was telling the truth or pulling his leg last week when she revealed that she saw who really killed the Waynes.

With that let’s get into the recap for this week’s episode of Gotham:

Vigilante or Villain

The release of the latest financial swindler from jail has the people of Gotham on edge. The guy who helped rob pensions and paychecks to the tune of millions is back on the street and like all of the crooks from Wall Street, he’s probably not going to do a day in jail. This doesn’t sit well with a new masked vigilante in town nicknamed Balloonman. He likes to distract his victims, chain them to a gigantic hot air balloon and lift them in the sky where they float until the contraption runs out of air and they fall thousands of feet to their deaths.

The Ponzi schemer doesn’t get an ounce of sympathy from the cops, especially Bullock who probably would have put extra air in the balloon just to make sure the torture lasted for at least a few more hours before the guy hurdled towards the ground just waiting to die. Gordon, of course, has other ideas. He doesn’t believe vigilantes should take the law into their own hands so he begins an investigation to find out who this Ballonman really is.

The rest of the police force only gets on board after one of their own — another crooked cop — because the second victim of the Balloonman and at that point Bullock and the rest of the force can’t wait to find and capture this criminal.

They eventually find the company in town who manufactured the balloons but there’s some bad news. First there were four balloons taken, which means there are still at least two more crimes waiting to be executed. Second, the guy who worked at the company that stole the balloons already sold them to somebody else on the black market. So now Gordon and Bullock are back to square one — at least until answers start falling from the sky.

The Cat’s Out of the Hat

Gordon is getting pulled in a lot of directions this episode because another mission he has during this hour is to question Selina Kyle and find out if she actually witnessed Thomas and Martha Wayne being murdered, not to mention fingering their killer in the crim. Gordon takes custody of Selina from a local social worker and off he goes to try and prove if she’s lying or telling the truth.

When they arrive at the crime scene, Selina describes everything perfectly, even the spot where she perched and watched the entire ordeal unfold. Gordon still isn’t convinced. She tells him about the wallet she stole and sure enough there was a guy nearby who reported his wallet stolen around the time of the Wayne’s murder. Gordon still isn’t convinced.

Selina finally reveals that the wallet she took that night didn’t get rummaged through, but instead was lost down a sewer down on the street when she made her getaway. Gordon handcuff’s Selina to the fire escape because he doesn’t trust her to run off, and he dives down into the sewer to find the wallet.

While trudging through six inches of slop and mud, he eventually finds the wallet amidst the muck and now knows he can believe the wayward teen runaway. Unfortunately while he was digging in the sewers, Selina was picking the lock on the handcuffs. She tosses them down to Jim, knowing that he’ll need those back and she makes a quick escape.

Selina 2, Gordon 0

On the Take

The third Jim Gordon story this episode is the information mounting against him that he murdered Oswald Cobblepot at the behest of Carmine Falcone. Fish Mooney goes as far as to whisper that little piece of information into the ears of the Major Crimes Unit officers who visit her club. Her agenda is to take down Falcone. It’s clear Montoya’s agenda is to take down Gordon while getting back into the good graces of her ex-girlfriend Barbara.

Stop me if you heard this before (because it already happened in the pilot) — Montoya shows up unexpectedly and warns Barbara that Jim isn’t the man she thinks he is and he’s also murderer. She accuses him of killing Oswald and Barbara defends him. The only major difference between this scene and the one in the opening episode is the fact that Barbara’s relationship with Montoya is more out in the open now, not as much innuendo and we also find out Barbara likes to smoke a little weed from time to time to mellow out but that concerns Montoya because apparently her ex-lady liked to taste drugs a little too much in her previous life.

A couple of issues I have with this scene.

First, it’s been done already. Unless there’s going to be some real tension between Barbara and Montoya that leads to a relapse in their relationship or Jim finding out that before he came in the picture and went all Chasing Amy, his girlfriend was a lesbian. Second, it’s clear that Barbara is going to be a tertiary character at least in the first half of this season. But does she need to be shown as nothing more than a prop to hold up her man’s spirits and believe in him when no one else does? She’s a dust mop and a rag away from being 1950’s mom. Give this lady something to do outside of that damn apartment or at least find a more interesting story to give her in the wake of her fiancé apparently only coming home to sleep in her apartment at night.

Eventually, Montaya and Allen confront Gordon and accuse him of killing Oswald, which he flat out denies. He tells Bullock, but his partner is unconcerned. If the Major Crimes Unit detectives had proof they wouln’t be asking — they’d be telling and Jim would be handcuffs. It’s nothing to worry about, for now anyways.

Guess Who’s Back

So Oswald trots back into town this week to being working his way back into the Gotham underworld. He kills an old colleague for his money when he’s threatened and about to be handed back over to Fish Mooney, who would undoubtedly finish the job Gordon couldn’t a few days earlier.

“Gotham is my home! It’s my destiny! You don’t see what’s coming, I do! Gotham needs me — I am its future!”
~Oswald Cobblepot

Call it a God complex or call it sheer lunacy, but Oswald seems to believe Gotham will fall without him around. Whatever path he’s following, Oswald’s next stop is a restaurant owned by Salvatore Maroni (played by Dexter’s David Zayas). He picks up a job as a busboy in the restaurant to do one of two things — he’s either trying to cozy up to Falcone’s main opposition or he’s trying to find the right kind of information to sell him up the river to curry favor with his old bosses. Either way, his foot is in the door and Oswald is moving on up.

His next stop — Jim Gordon’s apartment, where he shows up unannounced and says hello to his old friend James. Well at least Barbara knows now that Oswald isn’t dead and Jim certainly didn’t kill him.

The Arkham Project

One other note about this episode, both Maroni and Falcone are talking about a mysterious Arkham project that they are working on, but very few details are given. We learned a week ago that Arkham Asylum was closed more than a decade ago, but it seems that there’s something leftover at least with the name that has all the criminals in town chomping at the bit to get involved. What’s the deal with Arkham? Time will only tell.

A Crime of Passion

When the bodies who were tied to balloons start falling from the sky, it allows Gordon and Bullock to investigate a little further on who these guys were and what they were doing at the moment when the Balloonman sentenced them to death. To make matters worse, a third victim was claimed as the Balloonman tied one of his hot air balloons to a local priest, who was accused of molesting several kids during his tenure church.
The other problem the cops are dealing with is the growing popularity of this vigilante ‘hero’. He’s not going after innocent people or robbing somebody of their hard earned pay. Instead, he’s rooting out the criminals, who slipped through the system and eliminating them one by one.

Finally, Gordon gets a clue that helps him solve the mystery of Balloonman before the fourth person in town gets sent skyward. It turns out that the cop who was killed managed to get in a few shots on the vigilante before he was launched into the air, and in the process he took a slip from the man’s pocket. The slip had Jim’s name on it — because it was the paperwork he filed when he got custody of Selina Kyle for the day. The Balloonman was the social worker who dropped off Selina earlier in the day. It was a rather heavy handed resolution to the mystery of Balloonman, but then again, I think the writers used all their creativity in this script coming up with an idea to launch criminals into the air using hot air balloons. By the time it came around to figuring out who it would be, it wasn’t a question of why him — it was more of a question of why not?

Gordon and Bullock apprehend Balloonman after a brief scuffle and when he’s asked to explain himself, he ticks all the boxes that a vigilante should when talking to the cops. He wanted to do the job himself because the court system had clearly betrayed the people of Gotham and somebody had to make them pay. Somebody indeed…

And So It Begins

While Balloonman was tossing criminals in the air and waving like he just didn’t care, Bruce Wayne was still trapped in Melancholy City with a brief stop over in Depressionland. He’s not really eating much these days and spends most of his time combing through newspaper articles and television stories about the crimes and criminals inhabiting Gotham. Alfred eventually gets the boy up from his seat to engage in a little sword play training, but before you know it he’s planted right back in his chair, watching wide eyed as Jim Gordon captures the Balloonman and brings him to justice.

A great many people in Gotham cheered on the Balloonman because he put fear into the hearts of criminals after the courts failed them and them walk free on the streets. One guy stole people’s entire life savings. Another was a dirty cop, who took money to look the other way. The other stole children’s innocence in the most foul way possible. How could anyone disagree with a little vigilante justice?

Well by carefully observing Jim Gordon’s behavior through the papers and TV, young Bruce Wayne sees that to stop the criminals this particular vigilante had to become a criminal. Bruce Wayne wants to stop criminals like the ones who murdered his parents, but he already knows, even inside his vengeful young mind, that taking a life for a life isn’t justice. It’s just wrong.

Come back for the next episode of Gotham Monday night at 8pm ET and then follow up with our recap after the episode airs!