Gotham Recap ‘The Blind Fortune Teller’: Why So Serious?

In the latest Gotham recap, Jim investigates a murder at a circus and encounters a young boy with a creepy smile and a maniacal laugh who might just be….

The tease has been there since the day ‘Gotham’ was announced as a series.

While everybody involved with the show knew that the long game would be the eventual birth of Batman, the curiosity surrounding the villains who would one day make up his rogues gallery was probably the most intriguing part of the series. The Riddler is currently an ultra nerd working inside the police station as a forensics specialist. Poison Ivy is a disturbed young girl who really likes wearing green. Catwoman is a runaway named Selina Kyle, who can’t help but to tell you to call her ‘Cat’ the moment you meet her. The Penguin, who has been the real star of the show all season long, is a middle man in the mob quickly rising up the ranks after serving as a double agent for much of the season.

But what about the clown prince of crime?

The end all, be all of the Batman universe of bad guys is, was and always will be The Joker. That maniacal laugh. The clown makeup. The purple and green. He’s an agent of chaos and by far the most highly anticipated character on the ‘Gotham’ canvas and chances are we saw his birth on the latest episode titled ‘The Blind Fortune Teller’. The pressure certainly mounted on the show runners to introduce us to a Joker we could all love and accept and I’m happy to report that it was a job well done. Equal parts creepy and needlessly psychopathic, if this truly was the first sign of the man who becomes Joker, I’m thoroughly satisfied.

With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘Gotham’…

The Graysons and the Loyds

This week’s episode picks up with Jim and Leslie on their date at the circus where they are enjoying some high flying acrobatics courtesy of the Flying Graysons (yes, those Flying Graysons). The show is going well until the clown car shows up unexpectedly and a few seconds later the trapeze artists are throwing down with the men in makeup. Jim abandons his date and quickly goes down to the circus floor to make some arrests.

It seems the Graysons (the trapeze artists) and the Loyds (the clowns) are like the Hatfields and the McCoys of the circus world — complete with an age old story about a stolen horse to spur on the feud. Jim is questioning everybody but quickly finds out that circus performers, even the ones who hate each other, are all still like a family and they aren’t going to talk to the cops about their problems. Luckily, Leslie is on hand playing doctor to the wounded performers when she overhears an argument between John Grayson and Mary Loyd about a woman named Lila, she has a clue to feed to her boyfriend for his investigation.

It seems Lila is the local snake dancer and when they arrive at her trailer, she’s gone missing. They do encounter her son Jerome, who is worried about his mom because she left hours ago and didn’t take her coat, purse or any belongings. The circus manager tries to tell Jim that Lila is a notorious woman of the night who enjoys the company of men and so she’s likely just bedding down with someone currently, but he’s not buying it. A little intuition leads Jim to letting Lila’s prize snake loose because her favorite pet also has a keen sense of smell (that’s true) and sure enough the lizard slithers over to a truck with a tarp covering a badly butchered body. It’s Lila and she’s dead.

The problem is the body has been there for hours and Jim finally shakes the circus manager down enough to get the truth. They found her earlier in the day and hid the body while they planned on some carnival justice for whoever killed Lila. Jim’s had enough of this carnie code bullshit and he arrests the lot of them.

The investigation back at the station isn’t going very well either. None of the circus performers want to talk and the patriarchs from the Grayson and Loyd family’s just accuse each other of killing Lila because they were both sleeping with her apparently. Meanwhile, Jim’s time spent with Jerome is unnerving and strange at the same time as the young boy talks openly about his mother’s propensity to sleep with a lot of men to get her sexual pleasure because sex is a natural, zesty part of life and so we should all enjoy it.

Jim is ready to give up the ghost on this investigation at least long enough for him to share a dinner with the lovely Dr. Thompkins, but before he can go a blind fortune teller named Cicero pays him a visit with a message from Lila from beyond the grave. According to Cicero, she said to tell him about Satan in the garden of iron sisters or something akin to that. It all sounds like gibberish to Jim, but Leslie is somewhat intrigued.

Later that night while enjoying a nice home cooked meal, Leslie figures out the riddle (Nygma would be so pissed) and she wants to go investigate. Jim tries to leave her at home because women folk aren’t good at doing man jobs, but she tags along anyways.

It seems the Arkham Bridge had two giant pillars with women’s names and below was a park thus the garden and the iron sisters, but what does Satan have to do with any of this? Well a quick look around the park and Jim finds a hatchet, covered in blood with the initials THFC engraved on the handle. It stands for The Hellfire Club, thus the Satan part of the riddle, but Jim is now more convinced than ever before that the blind fortune teller is full of shit and he’s about to go get his man.

Your Name is Reek

Across town, Penguin’s new club is not doing very well at all. He has his mother performing random show tunes that no one seems to like very much and when one customer decides to heckle her, Oswald offers him bottle service (smashing a champagne bottle over his head counts, right?). Even his solo renditions of ‘Heart and Soul’ aren’t packing in the crowds, but out of nowhere Falcone’s eyebrowless assassin Victor Zsasz shows up with a gift for Oswald.

It appears when he captured Fish Mooney’s right hand man Butch, Victor didn’t do away with him but instead locked him in his basement and did his best Ramsey Snow/Theon Greyjoy to the mob goon. Now Butch will follow every command like a well trained dog. Don Falcone is giving Butch to Oswald as a gift. Since he knows the ins and outs of the club business and knows this crowd intimately, Butch can help Oswald get the place up and running and making some real money for once.

Oswald tests his limits by having Butch dance for him on command and he quickly perks up with a smile because now he has an employee to help him build his business and The Penguin is the puppet master pulling the strings.

Why is Barbara Back?

So Barbara finally resurfaces this week much to the chagrin of anyone who actually enjoys this show. She’s been a completely useless and mindless character all season long so when Barbara tip-toed out of the show a few weeks back to stay with her clinically depressing family, there was some small hope she’d never return. No luck

When Barbara arrives home drunk and looking for Jim, she instead finds Selina and Ivy playing house in her apartment. They tell her that Jim dropped off his keys a week or so ago and he’s gone. Instead of freaking out that she has squatters or the fact that she’s basically hanging out with two way underage kids, Barbara does the logical thing — she tries on dresses for a modeling show so she can go get Jim back.

Barbara finally picks the right one but when she arrives at the police station, Jim and Leslie are involved in a full on makeout session. Barbara stares in shock and awe before turning and walking away, leaving Jim to kiss his new girlfriend.

The problem with re-introducing Barbara right now is that she’s not even half the character that the writers have made Leslie Thompkins thus far and I don’t think anyone really wanted her back in the first place. Force feeding us with the Jim/Barbara relationship after growing to enjoy him with a woman who not only has a purpose on this show other than waiting by the doorstep for him to come home every night, but someone who pushes him to make her an equal just feels cheap and won’t be received well at all. Until Barbara becomes more than half a stalker determined to hop back in bed with Jim, she’s always going to play second fiddle to Leslie Thompkins.

Big Fish

Back at the weird prison basement where Fish Mooney is now in charge, she’s devising a plan to find out who has them captured and who is plucking out inmates eyeballs by bringing everyone together and calling them family. Family sticks up for each other. Family has each other’s backs. And family will help them find a way to escape.

Fish’s plan works to perfection.

When the guards come down to claim the latest inmate for experimentation, Fish demands they give them all some needed supplies like water and blankets or else they will never get their hands on the person they’ve come to take. She concocts a strategy where the prisoners will kill the inmate the guards are there to take, thus stopping them from having any live humans to use in their experiments.

Following a brutal beating where the inmates take down one of their own, the guards know Fish means business. So when the lead guard comes back to the dungeon, he tells Fish that she’s earned a meeting with the manager. Fish’s scene ends with her walking out of the prison and off to meet the Wizard of Oz.

Something tells me this ‘manager’ has an affinity for dolls.

Pint-Sized Chairman

Following weeks of Bruce Wayne poring over dozens of files from his family’s company, he’s finally ready to confront the board of directors about a conspiracy that likely led to the death of his parents. Bruce is convinced it has something to do with the Arkham project and the relative ease with which the mob got their hands on the precious property without much resistance from anyone with ‘Wayne Enterprises’ tattooed on their business card.

When Bruce shows up, the board members placate him like a child, but this kid has done his homework. He wastes no time accusing the board members of engaging in illegal activities and Bruce will get to the bottom of it. The whole investigation starts with the Arkham project and it stops with the weapons the company has been making behind closed doors.

The board members seem somewhat worried for a moment before once again brushing Bruce away like some petulant child who isn’t getting what he wants for supper. Unfortunately none of them know they are going up against the kid who is going to grow up to be the goddamn Batman. He’s going to get answers, one way or the other.

Why So Serious?

Following the midnight search through the garden of good and evil, Jim has figured out who is the killer behind the dead snake dancer from the circus. He calls back in Cicero to quiz him on the mysterious message he received from beyond the grave. Before long he also calls in Jerome to ask him about his mother’s disappearance.

It seems Jim has deduced that Cicero is actually Jerome’s father given his mother’s promiscuity and it was the boy who killed his own mother with the hatchet. After the murder was conducted, Jerome cleaned up in Cicero’s trailer and the blind fortune teller helped him to cover it up as a way to pay him back for being an absentee father his entire life. Jim came to this conclusion after seeing that the carving on the handle of the hatchet was fresh and this fortune teller was no true psychic. He had Jerome etch the Hellfire Club initials on there in a cheap attempt to throw the cops off their trail.

Finally Gordon gets his man, but there’s only one problem — why did Jerome do it?

This is where the Joker mythology takes a more classic turn for the sociopathic macabre as the boy goes from grief to grin in about two seconds flat. You see this boy could put up with a drunk mother. He could even put up with a drunken mother who happens to be a whore. What he won’t put up with is a drunken whore for a mother who also nags him to do the dishes and clean up his room, so he had to take the hatchet out and silence her annoying requests once and for all.

Cameron Monaghan (who plays Jerome) pulls off the switch from concerned son to sick twist with brilliant results. His eyes up, wide smile look is flawless and his cackling laugh is the stuff nightmares are made of. The best part about this entire sequence is for all the talk and all the hints, we still don’t know for sure if this is actually The Joker. The great thing about this character is the Joker has never had an actual origin story. The comics never said exactly where he came from. In the original ‘Batman’ movie from 1989, he was the man who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents before rising up the ranks of the mob. In ‘The Dark Knight’, the Joker was just a man who wanted to watch the world burn. Maybe in ‘Gotham’, the Joker is a troubled boy who killed his mother because she asked him to do his chores. If this really is the kid destined to be Batman’s greatest foe, I’m satisfied with the introduction and execution of the character’s creation and hopefully the producers have the actor tied up for multiple years because if he can continue to pull off the look and the laugh he had in tonight’s episode, Cameron Monaghan will probably do justice to a role perfected once upon a time by Heath Ledger.

In closing with the investigation over, Jim bids farewell to the carnival as well as John Grayson and Mary Loyd, who have reconciled and put an end to their family fued. The young couple are going to have a baby and they are ready to name it Gordon. Well, they’ll give it some thought before landing on that name for certain.

Something tells me Richard would be a better name…

Tune into next week’s ‘Gotham’ at 8pm ET on FOX as the first season starts to wind down and only a few more episodes to go until the finale.