There’s a key moment in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke where Commissioner Gordon is driven to near-madness by the Joker. His daughter has been shot and stripped naked in front of him, he’s been put through madhouse torture, and a lesser man would have broken hours earlier. But when Gordon is finally rescued, he insists that the Joker has to be brought in alive and honestly. “By the book!” he insists. “We have to show him our way works!” In that moment, Alan Moore firmly established a decent Jim Gordon for the 80s, 90s, and today: an honest cop who will not be broken and who knows that his principles are bigger than him.

Gotham, on the other hand, would have no idea what to do with that scene. Without spoiling tonight’s episode, “Worse Than a Crime,” we’ll just say that Gotham fundamentally misunderstands Jim Gordon as much as it does the rest of the Bat-mythos, and the mid-season finale is pretty much this reviewer’s breaking point from the show.

Which is a shame, because we’re 1.5 seasons into the first live-action show about Batman since, well, the defunct Birds of Prey series, or if we want to get technical, the old Adam West series. The show has a wonderful premise: show what Gotham was like between the death of the Waynes and when Batman first appeared. If this show had been a gritty crime drama with hints of the Bat-mythos to come, working off cop-heavy books like Gotham Central, it could have been fantastic.

To that end, Season 2’s basic premise–the arrival of Theo Galavan and his more upper-crust means of conquering Gotham City (James Frain) through politics and behind-the-scenes murder–wasn’t a bad one. We could have had a trifecta of competing forces fighting for the control of Gotham: the moral-yet-tempted police of the GCPD, symbolized by young Gordon (Ben McKenzie); Galavan’s twisted order of corrupt politics; and the Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor)’s growing mob forces.

That basic premise has been lost this season in the show’s over-reliance on the Bat-mythos. Hence, Season 2 has gone out of its way to introduce either the beginnings of a Bat-villain in almost every episode, or in some cases, a full-blown active version of them. It’s one thing to introduce us to a young version of the Riddler (Cory Michael Smith) who has a penchant for riddles; it’s another to turn him into a split-personality killer this early in the game. The ending of the mid-season break episode gave us a glimpse of another Bat-villain who’s already in full costume and persona–again, this despite Batman only being a prepubescent kid at this point in his history. This villains thing has gone overboard and needs to stop.

Worse, the show’s gotten too campy in many regards, and not in the good “1960s Adam West” way. Take the character of Barbara Kean (Erin Richards), for example. Criticized for being useless and directionless for much of last season, the writers decided to inexplicably turn her into a full-fledged killer in Season 2. It’s unclear if they intended to make her into a Gotham equivalent of Harley Quinn or a fundamentally new character, but she’s been over-the-top silly as a jilted lover who wants to kill Jim Gordon even as much as she wants him back. Barbara is symptomatic of the larger trend: the Riddler and Penguin are both wide-eyed killers–something they’ve never been outside the Tim Burton-era films–and it’s hard to take them seriously when they keep emoting in such an over-the-top manner.

I do like these actors. McKenzie and Taylor and the rest of the cast put in decent performances and they’re, in their own way, believable in the roles that they’ve been given. It’s just what they have been given comes off as an entry to the biggest ham-acting contest in Hollywood. (I suppose Erin Richards won that contest in Season 2 with Barbara.)

Still, Gotham‘s big problem is that it doesn’t know what to do with the rich vault of material they have to work with. They can’t use Batman (other than as a ten year old kid who’s still figuring himself out), but what they can use, they use badly. I am really not aware of it ever being proposed in 75 years of Batman that the Joker is somehow an evil spirit that infects people to commit crime, and that a psychopath from years before Batman would eventually inspire the real thing. But that’s what Gotham did. I am aware that Alfred Pennyworth (Sean Pertwee) has been portrayed as both a bumbling klutz in the 1950s and as a former special operative military man in more recent times–but never have I seen him vacillate between both versions as rapidly as he did in this season. “Military man” Alfred would probably be the best consistent portrayal on this show, but the Season 2 midpoint showed him comically falling into a pit of garbage and being tasered by a cop. It’s just awful.

But none of that compares to how badly this show misinterprets Jim Gordon. As I said, Alan Moore portrayed him as a cop who wouldn’t break. Even Frank Miller’s slightly earlier portrayal in Year One showed him as a man who struggled with the rules and had his weaknesses, but was ultimately good at heart. This season has showed the tension that McKenzie’s Gordon struggles with as he’s frequently tempted to “cross the line” in his mission to keep Gotham safe.

Unbelievably, this week’s episode decided to have Gordon cross the line. Without spoiling too much, Gotham has taken Jim Gordon to an unbelievably dark place that, without a serious “just kidding!” retcon, has fundamentally ruined the show’s portrayal of the character. There is no coming back from what the show did tonight.

And on that note, this reviewer would like to just plain be done with Gotham. My big regret in watching Gotham this season was that it required me to miss Supergirl, a show that stays much closer to both the spirit and letter of its roots. Campiness works there; it’s horribly misplaced on Gotham. I’m sorry that this show couldn’t develop into something better beyond its concept, because Batman really is a good story and it’s all the more disappointing when somebody gets it so very wrong.

Rating: One out of five Batcaves.

 

Starring: Ben McKenzie, Donal Logue, David Mazouz, Robin Lord Taylor, Morena Baccarin, Sean Pertwee, Michael Chiklis