Aw C’mon Gotham: Season 4, Episode 4 “The Demon’s Head”

Fox’s “Batman-without-Batman” soap opera is the most amazingly weird show on television. For every episode this season, Deadshirt’s own Sarah RegisterKayleigh Hearn and Max Robinson discuss the good, the bad…the beginning? of little Bruce Wayne, skinny Oswald Cobblepot, and Jim Gordon sans ‘stache as they try to find their way in the misery-soaked, work-a-day world of…GOTHAM.

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This week Ra’s is working on his knife moves, Bruce is back to being a total dweeb and The Riddler stays fucking up. All this, hip hop telegrams and oh yeah our very own Sarah Register’s back!

AH THE CLASSIC BATMAN CHARACTER “ALEX”

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Max: So Bruce and Alfred are having some old academic look at his $2,000,000 Ra’s Al Ghul knife when breakout Gotham character “literally some teenage boy” appears.

Sarah: Gotham writers developed a very pleasant museum curator who has a healthy and supportive relationship with his grandson as a kind of funhouse mirror version of Alfred and Bruce. *writers pick up large axe* Anywhooo…

Kayleigh: Let me guess, Alex’s last name is “Hufflepuff.”

NYGMA’S TRYIN’ TO GET HIS FASTBALL BACK

Max: Fun fact for the readers at home: Sarah, Kayleigh and I devise each week’s column by angrily scribbling and tossing jokes to the ground in front of a big yarn conspiracy board.

Kayleigh: Luckily Ed found an abandoned Gotham City warehouse with green lighting. All about that murder wall #aesthetic, baby.

RA’S AL GHUL, IMMORTAL HIPSTER

Max: There’s a lot to love about Alexander Siddig’s Ra’s but I especially love his Kramer hair. I’m also a sucker for super old/immortal characters casually shitting on priceless antiques.

Sarah: Honestly all the characterization I needed for this version of Ra’s is that he’s boning Barbara. And wears eyeliner. I can fill in the blanks from there.

Kayleigh: Once, just once, I’d like to meet a murderous immortal dandy who collects, like, Garbage Pail Kids cards instead of priceless antiquities.

Max: Gotham Ra’s Al Ghul has been outwitted by two different teenage boys this season.

HEY SOMEONE MURDERED THIS OLD NERD

Max: Apparently Detective Harper is from the comics and boy is she ever from the comics. Here’s hoping she isn’t killed for cheap pathos!

Sarah: lol oh Max. (No one tell him!)

Kayleigh: We’re four seasons in, can GCPD finally have a woman of color who isn’t stabbed, dropped down a plot hole, or desanguinated by a cannibal?

Max: Meanwhile Bruce is explaining to Gordon that a man is dead over some thousand-year-old knife like this is very normal.

ANUBIS THE DOG BOY

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Max: Folks I laughed so hard at this. Ra’s Al Ghul having a dog boy assassin on retainer is such a perfect dumb Gotham thing.

Kayleigh: Good to see the Gimp from Pulp Fiction working again.

Sarah: Only Gotham could turn the Egyptian god of the dead into an extra from that objectively bad Buffy episode where some teens get possessed by hyenas and eat the principal.

PENGUIN’S STILL THE BEST PART OF THIS SHOW Y’ALL

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Max: Oswald’s not buying Sophia Falcone’s whole “I’m not here to be a mobster and usurp your control of all crime” schtick. Really glad Zsasz has gotten at least one really funny line every episode this season.

Sarah: You know you’re running the gayest mob in Gotham when you have to specify which one of your Victors is going to kill someone.

TONIGHT ON “ADULT COP AND TEEN COP”

Max: Barbara, who loves drama, is just cold playing solitaire and listening to Jefferson Airplane in her new gun store/social club she bought with Ra’s Al Ghul’s money and ignoring a teenager’s angry knife questions.

Kayleigh: Love this gritty Cop and a Half reboot.

Sarah: Ra’s and Barbara are using the same hair pomade I see.

Max: Gordon’s pretty rightfully pissed off at Bruce for not mentioning this whole Ra’s Al Ghul thing until Season 4 Episode 4.

RAPPING TELEGRAM

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Max: The Riddler sent The Penguin a rapping telegram, complete with a second guy beatboxing. Anyone who tells you this show sucks is a liar.

Sarah: This bit is so extremely Bruckheimer I had to check the credits.

Kayleigh: Oswald is one of those “I like every genre except rap and country” dudes.

Max: Ah man Oswald loves Hamilton though.

GORDON’S FIGHTING SOME GAME OF THRONES REJECTS IN THE LIBRARY

Max: Ra’s Al Ghul’s henchmen, a dog boy and Dollar Store Sandor Clegane.

Sarah: This show makes me believe a dark live-action Scooby-Doo would really work in Two Thousand Seventeen.

Kayleigh: I hope this spurs the secret origin story of Gotham’s version of Bookworm.

RA’S AL GHUL CLARK KENTING HARD

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Max: Ra’s Al Ghul’s an immortal warlord who thinks the best way to disguise himself is as a nerd with his own name. Why not “Raymond Allgood”???

Sarah: It’s fine, guys. He’s wearing a tweed jacket. Clearly harmless.

Max: Alfred gets one look at his Fisher Stevens cosplay and is immediately ready to kick his ass. 

Kayleigh: “No one who wears elbow patches could be an evil man!”

BRUCE WAYNE: IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED, I’M WEIRD

Max:

ALEX: People at school say you’re weird. That you live alone in a mansion and don’t go to school.

BRUCE: HA well.

Sarah: Alex is a pretty sweet kid who represents the grit people get from Growing Up Gotham. Surely he’ll stick around for a while as a nice foil to Bruce’s gloom, yeah?

Kayleigh: Bruce trying to relate to another teenage boy is like watching an alien trying to talk to a dog; they just ain’t speaking the same language.

SOPHIA IS MEETING WITH AN ARMY OF STEVEN VAN ZANDTS

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Max: Portly Italian guys are to Gotham what wild haired old white guys are to Game of Thrones. Big week for the Penguin, two different rapping telegrams and he had to kill three fat mobsters.

Sarah: Donna Falcone is just going to end up recruiting all the dead mobsters’ hot daughters bent on vengeance.

Kayleigh: Italian restaurants across the country flew their framed photographs of Danny Aiello at half-mast today.

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: DOG BOY RISING

Max: Where were you when America watched James Gordon throw a big bone out a window so a guy who thinks he’s a dog would jump to his death?

Kayleigh: Do you think James Gordon, like…hates his life?

Max: 100%

Sarah: This is why he goes to his local bar at 8am every morning.

Max: Hey you know the Gotham Natural History Museum spent years and resources restoring that sabertooth tiger skeleton only for Gordon and some Medieval Times castoffs to wreck it. I do take some comfort in the fact that this beautiful specimen was destroyed so Gordon could murder a guy in a super badass way.

FAN FAVORITE ALEX IS DEAD

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Max: Remember how that terrible Harry Potter play introduced a new character named “Craig” and his sole purpose was to die to show how badass Voldemort’s daughter is or whatever? This is that exact thing. Pour one out for Alex, requiescat in pace.

Sarah: Hi, I hate this.

Kayleigh: TONIGHT ON GOTHAM: “I can’t believe I just stood there when my parents got murdered and did nothing.”

NEXT WEEK ON GOTHAM: “I can’t believe I just stood there when Alex got murdered and did nothing.”

Max: What do you think Gordon’s phone call to Alex’s parents was like? “Hey listen…Your son got his throat slit during a very tense standoff with an immortal ninja.”

Sarah: It’s pretty irresponsible of Jim to tell Bruce this isn’t his fault when it abso-fuckin-lutely is. Like literally all of it.

THE RIDDLES ARE BAD, ED

Max: The dramatic reunion of Oswald and Nygma, now bickering over the quality of the rapping telegrams. Gotham is definitely a TV show where people get riddle-centric PTSD from being frozen in big blocks of ice. I imagine Fries was very pissed that Penguin dragged him out to NOT freeze a guy.

Kayleigh: As long he’s still paid in Flintstones push-pops.

Sarah: Victor doesn’t mind. He’s a pretty chill guy aaayyyyyyyyyyy.

GORDON AND SOPHIA ARE MAKING OUT LIKE TEENAGERS ON AN ANTIQUE SOFA

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Max: Ah Gordon’s still making terrible, horny decisions.

Sarah: This is what happens when your moral compass is Harvey Bullock and he leaves you for a cold pizza.

Kayleigh: Nothing’s hotter than getting it on next to a puddle of gambino blood.

BIG HOUSE AL GHUL

Kayleigh: Well, that was a surprisingly tidy resolution to the Ra’s Al Ghul plotline, I’m sure we’ll never see him again.

Max: Ra’s Al Ghul is in Blackgate. Amazed they stopped short of having Alexander Siddig exclaim “…ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN”.

Sarah: Blackgate should turn away any inmate that excited to be there.

Gotham airs Thursdays at 8 PM on Fox.

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