Television: Gotham, "Damned If You Do . . ."

Do I even still really care about this show?

We start Season 2 with Jim now directing traffic and Bullock having quit the force to become a bartender. But Jim isn't an officer for long; he's fired when he roughs up his idiot partner.

I'm really tired of the whole Jim being down and out thing. It just feels repetitive, and if it's supposed to create any amount of tension, well, it doesn't.

This time Jim makes a last ditch effort to get back onto GCPD by asking Penguin for a favor. Penguin has become the high mucky-muck of Gotham's underworld. He tells Jim he'll get him back on the force if Jim collects a debt for him from a difficult minor crime boss. Jim is, naturally, torn. He doesn't want to be doing any work for the bad guys. But Bruce Wayne basically tells him to do it anyway. Bruce's stellar reasoning is that sometimes to do the right thing, it has to be the hard thing (or, in this case, a bad and illegal thing). This is, of course, the very line of thought that will one day lead Bruce to become Batman, but whatever.

I can't figure out if we're supposed to believe Bruce is "wise beyond his years" or what. He certainly comes across largely as juvenile and something of a brat. He and Alfred play together in making a bomb so they can blow open Bruce's father's secret lair. There Bruce finds a letter from his dad that amounts to "ignorance is bliss."

So then Jim does go ahead and do the job for Penguin, and Penguin in turn gets the commissioner to resign, and we get my favorite person to hate James Frain as the new guy. And he is, as James Frain always is, evil. Actively evil in a way the previous commissioner was not. Like, Peter Scolari was corrupt and all, but James Frain (and I probably won't bother to get to know his character's name) is working with murderously insane inmates from Arkham Asylum, including Barbara and Jerome.

Oh, and Nygma is losing his mind, but what else is new?

I dunno. If they could stop with Jim constantly being beaten down by various circumstances, let him get the upper hand for once . . . And if we could see more of Bullock, who is really a great character . . . But I'm just not feeling it.