Spoilers ahead for Episode 2 of Gotham Season 5, called "Trespassers."
Selina Kyle has been a cat burglar more than comfortable on the rooftops of Gotham City ever since Gotham premiered, but the show hadn't given her the twist that transforms her into the devious Catwoman that many viewers have been expecting. She was too closely aligned with Bruce and too altruistic, and something was just missing for her to be Catwoman. Well, "Trespassers" revealed how Gotham is transforming Selina into Catwoman, and it's not a way that any of us could have seen coming.
It was all thanks to Poison Ivy. After Selina attempted to kill herself in the previous episode due to her despair at losing the use of her legs, Bruce decided he would consult a "witch" who purportedly could fix his friend. When he arrived at the witch's supposed location, he discovered that Ivy is the witch. Bruce helped her escape the clutches of some men who wanted to kill her; unsurprisingly to everybody except for Bruce, Ivy just went ahead and killed all the men.
Nevertheless, Ivy still felt enough of a connection to Selina that she agreed to help Bruce try and fix her. Because this is Gotham we're talking about, the potential cure wasn't just a serum or pill or anything else that might be relatively normal. The cure was a seed that Ivy drew from underneath a tree, and it was leaking something that looked an awful lot like human blood. Ivy told Bruce that Selina needed to "ingest" it.
Ivy claimed that the seed would find her wound, and the roots would wrap around her spine and fuse the nerves and cartilage together, but it would change her forever. The amount of change depended on the strength of the person who ate the seed. When Bruce asked what kind of changes Selina might undergo, Ivy said this:
Some day the darker angels of our nature are unlocked and set free.
This did not convince Bruce that Ivy should be trusted with Selina's health... or presumably of her mental health. She told him that the seed would die unless Selina ate it ASAP. When he took it back to the hospital, he and Alfred were unconvinced about giving Selina the mysterious seed, but Selina wanted it. She figured that she wanted to end her own life anyway; why not give the seed a shot?
The seed seemingly backfired, as Selina quickly began violently seizing. All signs pointed toward Selina getting worse, and she ultimately needed to be sedated... until Bruce glanced in her room and saw her bed empty and the window open. Fortunately, the open window was a misdirect, and Selina was still in the room, standing and walking on her own. She told Bruce that she felt no pain anymore, and she felt better even than she was before she was injured in Jeremiah's twisted Killing Joke-esque attack.
Bruce was overjoyed that his friend had regained the use of her legs and presumably wasn't going to try and kill herself anymore, and he pulled her in for a big hug, which was both adorable and prevented Bruce from seeing Selina's eyes change from perfectly normal and human into cat eyes. It was a super creepy twist but sets the stage for a surprisingly literal transformation from young woman into Catwoman for Selina Kyle.
We didn't get to see Selina in action with her "darker angels" unlocked, but the trailer for the next episode proves that she'll continue her transformation into a character who definitely isn't entirely on the same page as Bruce. Take a look!
Thanks to "Trespassers," we have Selina no longer suffering from the horrible twist that left her paralyzed from the waist down, Gotham taking her down the path she was destined for to become Catwoman, and what looks like some epic action in the next episode. Tune in to Fox on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET for new episodes of Gotham's fifth and final season. If Gotham isn't all you want to watch nowadays, check out our midseason TV premiere schedule for some additional options.
