'Gotham' Recap 'Harvey Dent': Starting to Come to Heads

Quietly, the past few episodes of Gotham have shown vast improvement over the series’ first few. While improvement throughout the first season is expected for a fledgling show, Gotham seems to have made all the right choices early on. Since “Spirit of the Goat”, Gotham has begun shifting focus from the “criminal of the week” (COW from here on) approach, to the more satisfactory season long story arc format. It has gotten much better at juggling the arcs of individual characters and its actors have started to settle into those characters nicely. There are still problems with Gotham but the changes implemented in the past few episodes have steered the series in the right direction.

“Harvey Dent” did multiple things well. First and foremost, it introduced us to the titular Harvey Dent, a young assistant district attorney in Gotham who is committed to cleaning up the city, much like Jim. It seems as though Gotham’s take on Harvey won’t differ too much from that of The Dark Knight in which we are given a tad overly confident, but genuine, Harvey who seems willing to go the extra mile to put criminals behind bars. Where he is genuine in his desires he isn’t exactly earnest as he seems to have a clear agenda of bringing down Gotham’s corrupt elite, or at least Dick Lovecraft. We are also introduced to Harvey’s trademark loss of temper when he threatens Lovecraft in his office. This seemed to be a bit much as there wasn’t really anything that triggered Harvey and, even, felt as though it was more calculated as opposed to Harvey not being able to control himself. Either way, Gotham’s newly tweaked Harvey feels like a fairly good portrayal and the casting of Nicholas D’Agosto feels like another good choice in a show that has featured some very smart casting.

But Harvey’s introduction was certainly not the only thing happening in the episode as “Harvey Dent” saw some very good plot weaving throughout its entirety. Along with Harvey we get Penguin doing some detective work on Liza (Fish’s plant on Falcone), Jim dropping off Selina Kyle at Wayne Manor to for safety, and this week’s criminal in a mentally ill bomb maker named Ian who was being used by Fish to get back at Falcone. None of these storylines really took precedence over any others and each felt important to exploring the character or their particular arc.

Perhaps the character that has changed the most since the first episode, for the better, has been Penguin. While he still represents a violent threat he has relied upon his brains in more recent episodes to get what he needs. The character also has settled into a nice groove where he is awkward and creepily goofy but still a force to be reckoned with, which was expertly shown with musical accompaniment during his first foray into Liza’s apartment. His visit to Fish just to smell her perfume, which confirmed that Liza was working for Fish, also felt truer to his character. Now that he has a little power he is more himself, which has shown to not necessarily be what society would consider “normal”.

This week’s COW was also smartly utilized as he was being used by Fish in her grand schemes. As interesting as Sionis was last week, there is something more rewarding when the COW directly effects the season long story arcs and hopefully this will happen more often than not in future episodes. Fish had hired some Russian gangsters, who used to work for her now deceased lover and former crime boss, to hit some of Falcone’s interests. All of this culminated in stealing some of Falcone’s reserve cash and then immediately blowing it up to send an anonymous message to Falcone. It probably won’t have huge repercussions but it did continue Fish’s plans of a coup.

Finally we got some nice tween flirtation between Bruce and Selina – though he hasn’t invited her to his luxury seats to the One Direction concert…yet. While their innocent flirtation was fairly forgettable and a huge wink moment for Batman to come, it served a very necessary and needed function in normalizing Bruce. Thus far there hasn’t been anything that has seemed too out of the ordinary for Bruce – he’s hurting, he wants to find out who killed his parents, and his lexicon is immense – but Bruce had been a fairly isolated figure with only Alfred to angst on and Jim to console him. Adding Selina gave Bruce someone to not only interact with but also to show him how weird he actually is. We all know what Bruce ends up becoming so we don’t find it all that odd that he has dipped his toe in the various pools of training required to become Batman but his actions are actually incredibly odd if you didn’t know he becomes Batman. Having Selina to call him out on how weird he is and to lighten the mood in the normally stuffy Wayne Manor was a smart inclusion in the show – regardless of the huge winks.

By the end of “Harvey Dent” Penguin has given Liza a new plan of action, Harvey is excited by his plans to rattle Lovecraft’s cage (my own wink moment right there), and it is revealed that Barbara has returned to Montoya as she “gets her life together” after everything that has happened with Gordon and Falcone. As the penultimate episode of the midseason “Harvey Dent” may have been Gotham’s strongest episode yet.