Gotham 01×17 – Red Hood (SPOILERS)

I know, I know.  LATE AGAIN.  I’m still not feeling like doing much of anything, but I feel I have a responsibility to continue to do the reviews, even when I don’t feel like doing them.  ESPECIALLY when I don’t feel like doing them.  That’s not to say that this episode wasn’t good – it’s just my brain’s fault.

We see more of Bruce in this episode than we have in a while.  A friend of Alfred’s shows up ‘mysteriously’ on their doorstep.  Says he’s been living under a bridge because his wife died, and then he got too drunk to live in society.  They served in the SAS together, a time in Alfred’s life that he’d much rather leave behind.  Reg (that’s the dude’s name) also teaches Bruce a few things about fighting.  Alfred’s not happy about that, either.  He’s rarely happy.  Bruce is thankful though.  One night they start telling war stories, and parts of Alfred’s past start coming out that he doesn’t really want Bruce to know about, like how many people he’s killed during his service with the SAS.  He wants Reg out – who then ‘robs’ them, and stabs Alfred.  You could kind of see this coming a mile away – some random old friend of Alfred’s shows up conveniently after Bruce shows up at Wayne Enterprises and makes waves.  Turns out that’s exactly what’s happening, and Reg was paid to ‘warn’ Bruce by stabbing Alfred, and spy on what information he has.  He does miss one vital piece of information though – that Bruce is working alone and never had help. So, at least the CEOs of Wayne don’t know about Gordon… yet.  It’s not like Gordon knows how to be low profile.

Elsewhere, Selina and Ivy are still living with Drunk Barbara.  She points out how beautiful Selina is, and that she should be using her beauty as a weapon, because it’s more powerful than any knife or gun.  Selina wonders why it hasn’t worked for Barbara.  It’s a total OH SNAP moment.  (But, it’s a lesson that I’m sure will stick with Selina if we think forward to her career as Catwoman).

We’ve also got Oswald still sucking at managing his club, and now they have no booze.  D’oh.  It’s because Maroni controls the booze in Gotham, and he kind of hates Penguin right now.  Butch is very helpful through all this, with the V branded in his forehead to remind him of his ‘reconditioning’ in Victor Zsasz’s basement.  Oswald wants to rob a liquor shipment, but Butch has some cops in his pocket, so he uses them instead.  They both toast to no longer being sidekicks.

We’ve also got Fish finally going upstairs from the basement into a run-down hospital (which I wondered if it was part of Arkham).  She doesn’t meet the doctor in charge, but she sees a lot of weird shit in the hospital rooms.  They’re not just doing organ stealing here.  The doctor also likes to experiment.  Fish wants to negotiate with the doctor alone, and dismisses the second-in-charge.  He offers her a bath and fresh clothes… so he can steal some of her organs.  He wants her eyes, and then will throw her back down in the basement to see how long a blind girl can last down there.  So, she does the thing that everyone would do in that situation – ganks her own eye out with a spoon and then stomps on it.  Damn, Fish has the biggest balls on this whole show.

Oh yeah, there’s also the Red Hood gang which is the whole title of this episode.  They’re a bunch of bumbling bank robbers, until one of them decides to have a red hood to draw attention during the robbery.  They become kind of Robin Hood figures with the one who made the red hood throws a bunch of money in the middle of the street to secure their escape.  But the red hood suddenly makes them all turn on each other.  The first red hood (I didn’t even bother to remember their names) is killed by Fat Red Hood.  So, the Fat Red Hood gang robs another bank, and everyone at the robbery is like “oh hai, can I haz a money?”.  Fat Red Hood doesn’t have the same showmanship as the original, but he does chuck some money at them.  Gordon and Bullock find a witness who fingers Fat Red Hood, but they decide not to arrest him, so they can tail him instead.  He goes to his crummy apartment, and another member of the gang shows up.  He wants the magical powers of the red cloth because his girlfriend wants to leave him because he’s a loser.  So he shoots Fat Red Hood and becomes Stuttering Red Hood.  Now down to three, they go to rob the last bank, but Gordon and Bullock are ahead of them.  These were all revenge robberies because the banks wouldn’t give Fat Red Hood loans to start a pastry shop, and he had a rejection letter from the last bank.  So there’s a shootout where the Red Hood gang all dies.  Except nobody seems to think to pick up the hood as evidence, so some random kid on the street picks it up to become Street Urchin Red Hood.  Maybe that hood really is magic after all….