Selina Kyle

I'm trailing behind a bit this week in TV -- a likely sign that I'm DVR-ing too many shows. In the competition not to be cut from that list, Gotham is hanging in there. For the moment. The second episode, compared to the first, was in some ways better and in some ways worse.

On the better side, things were generally more focused than they were in the first episode. The parade of Batman universe faces was still in effect, but to a more restrained degree. The girl who would be Poison Ivy, for example, didn't make an appearance. And the quick pop-up appearances from the likes of the future Riddler were much more brief, and didn't interrupt the flow of the action so conspicuously.

Instead, the episode focused on (as always, Jim Gordon, and) young Selina Kyle. Her storyline felt a bit miscast to me -- I've seen guest star Lili Taylor in a wide number of roles, and none of them helped me accept her as a jovial child snatcher. But Kyle herself was fleshed out a bit, proving to be a relatively interesting character to have in the mix. Certainly more so than Bruce Wayne. It seems the answer to my "how are they going to use him every episode?" question from last week is: "he's going to have a rather pointless 'working to become Batman' subplot every week." No surprise, I suppose, but rather unnecessary, narratively speaking, to the adventures of Jim Gordon.

On the not so good side, though the episode focused more on Gordon, his partner, and their detective adventures in a corrupt city... that adventure was a tired cliche from beginning to end. It was a soup of hard-boiled film noir conventions, served ice cold. We get it already, Gordon isn't going to "get with the program," "play by the rules," "blah blah blah." Ultimately, because the show is primarily about him, if the show doesn't snap out of these cliches really quick, my interest in it will probably be over as soon as they're done exploring all the minor side characters they've set up.

So I suppose that means I'm willing to give them another three or four episodes, depending. Truly, overall, this episode wasn't actually "bad," but TV (hell, CBS alone) offers multiple flavors of cliche cop show, if that alone was what I was looking for here. The clock's ticking, Gotham. I give the second episode a B-.