Gotham Review: The Anvil And The Hammer

Well folks, here it is my last episode review for Gotham until the fall. Since we are going to do a round table about the whole season after next week’s episode the Caped Crusades team decided to cover a review for the season finale in our round table article.

Last week I changed up my writing style a little and wrote a summary of the events of the episode before giving my thoughts, and I will be doing the same thing here.

In The Anvil And The Hammer Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock are desperately searching for the serial killer known as the Ogre because Jim fears that he will target Barbara Keane, Jim’s ex-fiancee, in order to punish Jim for investigating the Ogre. As a matter of fact the Ogre does have Barbara, but far from wanting to kill her to punish Jim, the Ogre believes that he is in love with her. The Ogre’s victims were all women, more than a dozen of them, that he had hoped would be his great love. When he decided it wasn’t working out with his latest captive he killed them. There is something different about Barbara however and he is working to breakdown her emotions and convince her that he loves her and they belong together. The Ogre forces Barbara to choose someone for him to kill as proof that he loves her, and she chooses her own parents. Gordon and Bullock arrive after the Ogre has slaughtered Barbara’s parents and broken her spirit enough that when she sees Jim she asks what he’s doing there and asks him to just leave them alone.

At the same time Bruce Wayne is being given a tour of Wayne Enterprises, during which time he slips away from his tour guide to sneak into the office of Sid Bunderslaw, the man who hired Reggy Paine to find out how far Bruce’s investigations of his company had gone. Bunderslaw was aware that Bruce had Selina steal the key to his office safe and was waiting for Bruce when he slipped into Sid’s office. Bunderslaw admits to Bruce that Wayne Enterprises in into some criminal activity and explains that this is the way the world works and the both Bruce’s grandfather and father eventually came to realize that business is business and to jut look the other way. Bruce refuses to believe that his father was not the good man he thought he was and we meet Lucious Fox for the first time. Fox manages to get Bruce away from Bunderslaw to have a private word with the young boy, where he insinuates that yes Thomas Wayne knew about the company’s shadier dealings but that he was working to do something about it. At least that was the impression I got when he said that Bruce’s father was not the man that his company believed him to be, and the company believed him to be someone who was okay with the crimes Wayne Ent. are involved in.

Meanwhile, Edward Nygma has killed a man, a police officer in fact who was dating Ms. Kringle and apparently abusing her. In The Anvil And The Hammer Nygma sneaks the body into the police department and into his lab in order to dispose of the body because as he says, “no body no crime”. Our beloved friend Penguin has hired men to kill Don Maroni, or at least that is what we are supposed to think he’s doing. He has actually insured that the hit will fail, so that he can start a shooting war between Maroni and Falcone.

I am extremely excited for the season finale of Gotham as it promises to be quite epic. With a shooting war between the two crime bosses, and Fish Mooney coming back to get her revenge, and what looks like the discovery of the Batcave next week’s episode could be the best of the season. I’m really enjoying the relationship development between Alfred and Bruce, as well as the development between Bruce and Selina. So far though I think that the villain that is really well done and very exciting to me is Edward Nygma, his turn to the Riddler is coming along and is really awesome.

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