Note: There may be spoilers within the review and recap of this episode.
Recap
On this week's episode of Gotham, in the aftermath of last week's episode, Fish is being held captive and a surgeon looking guy named Bob will be taking care of her. Doesn't seem like he'll be very kind to her.
Gordon is working at GCPD again and already on a new case with a new death. A drug dealer is killed and Gordon and Bullock need to find out who did it. Gordon notices something peculiar. The heel of the dead man's shoe has a secret compartment in it and there's some drugs in it. The night janitor has some info for them. He goes to the precinct to work with a sketch artist. A man enters the area he's being held and asks if the janitor saw who did it, he then stabs the janitor to death. Nygma finds that the man who killed the janitor is the same man who killed the drug dealer.
Bob starts his work on Fish and Fish spends her time getting under his skin. Meanwhile, Butch is tied up in the back of a truck. He doesn't know his fate yet. The men driving he truck stop and Butch gets out and subdues the thugs.
Gordon, Essen, and Bullock are chatting about how someone under police custody and in the precinct was killed. Gordon points fingers the rest of the GCPD, since corrupt cops are something pretty ordinary.
Alfred and Bruce drive around town looking for Selina. They bump into Ivy on the street and Bruce passes on a message that he's looking for Selina.
Bob tortures Fish but Fish is one tough cookie and asks for a bit more. Bob grabs a hammer and is about to take out her knees, but Butch comes in and does what Butch does best: he beats down Bob and it's pretty awesome.
Gordon finds an officer who could be behind letting the criminal into the interrogation room. Jim knocks him out and finds a bunch of drugs in his trunk. Another cop says that Delaware (the cop he knocked out) is part of an on-going narcotics investigation. Something doesn't smell right though.
Butch and Fish are out on the lamb and Fish wants to kill Penguin for his betrayal. Meanwhile, Penguin shows his mother the club that he now runs.
Bullock and Gordon go and find Delaware and his men and see boxes full of drugs. Delaware says they have a warrant to search the warehouse they are in, signed by the Judge. Looks like they have their backs covered.
Things get weirder when Bullock and Gordon get back. Apparently, internal affairs ruled his stabbing in the back a suicide. What's going on? This is nutty. Essen wants Bullock and Gordon to move on.
The rest of the cops continue to be awful to Nygma. I kind of want to jump into the show and smack those jerks around myself. Poor Nygma.
Gordon heads to Fish's club to find Penguin and his mother. She's smitten with Gordon because he's a tall drink of water. Gordon wants info on the drug trade and what's happening inside the GCPD. Penguin says he'll look into it and says Gordon owes him nothing because they're friends. Zsasz finds Bob beaten to a bloody pulp and shoots him the head for letting Fish get away.
Penguin gets drunk in his new club during a "getting drunk" montage. Fish and Butch enter and Fish has a baseball bat.
Bruce plays chess by himself at the manor and Selina shows up. Bruce got Selina a present. It's a snowglobe! Bruce wants to know if Selina wants to stay at the Wayne Manor. Selina tells Bruce that she never saw his parent's killer's face, so she can't help him so Bruce needs to stop coming after her.
Penguin enjoys kissing Fish's shoes. Fish enjoys hitting Penguin with a bat. Penguin pleads and begs for his life. Zsasz enters and a shootout begins. Butch takes down one of Zsasz henchwomen. Butch gets Fish to safety and stays behind. Zsasz shoots him once and demands to know where Fish is.
Kringle approaches Nygma and apologizes for the big jerk head earlier. She runs out of there before Edward can make another move on her.
A man comes in, who works for Penguin, and drops a load of evidence on Gordon's lap, including the murder weapon.
A heartbroken Bruce Wayne cries near a smashed snowglobe. Alfred tells him to get his act together.
Gordon approaches the cop who murdered Winkler. He has some corrupt cop buddies as well. Gordon makes a stand and gives a compelling speech and other cops, including the captain get behind him. Essen arrests the man.
Bullock meets with Fish at the port. Fish says she's leaving town for a while and then coming back to kill Penguin. Bollock tells her not to come back. Fish wants Bullock to find Butch.
Thoughts
Butch totally whoops some butt in this episode. It's great to see the spotlight a bit more on him. He's fantastic and more than Fish's second in command.
We get another montage where Jim asks a group of people a bunch of questions about the case, much like before the break while Jim was at Arkham. It's cheesy and the music playing during it is silly and really takes the show out of that moment. Speaking of the music, the scene with Kringle and Nygma has some pretty awful music as well. It's ominous with a hint of mischievousness which would work well in a forgettable Dreamworks animated film, but here, it's cartoonish. It's like the bad music never stops in this episode. Again, we have some silly music going on during the scene where Penguin shows his mother the new club he runs.
It's not all awful. The score was pretty fantastic when the Winkler's widow shows up. It really hit the emotional value of the scene.
Ivy is bad and not in the "villain" sense. The actress playing her is not up to par with the rest of the cast. Could this be on the director or the child actor? Who knows. Her character serves a point but she's just rough to watch on screen.
The Edward Nygma story is building very slowly, but it's working extremely well. I love this character. I feel for him. I hate seeing all of these guys bully him around and I want him to get vengeance. Am I vindictive? Everything felt a bit more at ease by the end of the episode as Kringle apologized for the big jerks earlier. We can still see the tension rising in the character and it will come to a head very soon.
Zsasz and his crew are terrible shots. This is the second time he's been involved in a shootout and they just can't seem to hit their targets. What an awful hitman. Kidding, kind of.
There was a lot going on in this episode, but it all meshed together incredibly well. Stories played out relatively organically. Gordon's first case back at GCPD prove that not all the corruption is gone, but it is a bit frustrating to see Captain Essen pull back, even after backing Gordon in a previous episode. Regardless, it did provide a really interesting first case for Gordon and reestablishes the fact he wants to change Gotham and get rid of crime, everywhere.
By far, the best part of the episode is the Penguin storyline. It's great to see this character grow and evolve, but a part of me is bummed that he doesn't have that fight in him that we saw in those opening episodes, where he stabbed a group of college students that picked him up. Where's the viciousness? Anyway, the change in power in the criminal underworld gives that part of Gotham a fresh feel. Not saying it was getting stale, but they switched things up and just the right point.
There's a lot of little, minor annoyances throughout this episode, but "Welcome back, Jim Gordon" offers a more of a "return to normalcy" episode of the show. The show gets back on its tracks and delivers a really cool episode.