Spoilers for last night’s episode of Gotham below.
In an episode that featured the arrival of the Red Hood Gang and saw a major character getting stabbed (though non-fatally), it was the actions of one Fish Mooney that completely stole the show. She’s the one character who never loses sight of what’s important, and one with her eye always on the prize. Okay, enough terrible puns. Fish Mooney gouged out her own eye with a spoon, and it was fabulous!
Gotham is a show known for straddling the line between dark weirdness and comic book corniness, and Fish’s stand-out scene incorporated both so very beautifully. Her storyline has been the most unpredictable one in the show, given she doesn’t have a comic origin to follow, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of her descent from crime boss to basement-dwelling prisoner of the organ-harvesting Dollmaker. But she certainly upped my interest here.
The Dollmaker's ultimatum for her, as a form of punishment for her unruly behavior, is to either give up both of her prized penny-fetching eyeballs, or all of the other basement prisoners will die. She chooses Option 3, which OBVIOUSLY involves her shoving a coffee spoon into her eye socket and scooping her eyeball out, where it falls to the ground. It’s the most gloriously gruesome thing we’ve seen on Gotham yet, and though the minimal gore gives away that this is happening on network TV, it’s still a disgustingly gasp-worthy moment.
And it’s not even just that the eyeball plops onto the ground, but she then stomps on it, ruining its value to the Dollmaker. This scene could have easily ended with Fish getting shot and killed for this act, but of course she wasn’t, as Gotham was definitely due for a major character with an eyepatch.
So what will actually become of Fish now? Here’s how Jada Pinkett-Smith describes the character’s mindset at this point, in an interview with People.
Fish is all about control, but at the end of the day, she's still very vulnerable and she's still trying to figure out how to have absolutely everything that she needs and wants, which is basically to get out of there and to get back to Gotham and get her club back – if that's even possible. She is desperately trying to gain control, and you see the desperation within that act of taking her eye out
She also cryptically says that Fish might not even make it to Season 2, or even the end of Season 1, but I can’t see this show getting rid of its wackiest non-arch villain, when so many others like The Riddler and Penguin are still being crafted into their comic book identities. This world needs a one-eyed Fish Mooney.
Now we’re just waiting on the Joker to come back, for Alfred to heal from his stab wound, for Bruce to get thwarted by Wayne Enterprises, and for Barbara to go the hell away. Just another day in Gotham.
