Let’s set aside, for just a moment, that any mention of the “Red Hood” invokes The Joker, and having it play out as a single-episode notion was a total cheat.  As much as I would love for the writers to do something subtle and introduce The Joker without waving it under our noses, they are just plain incapable of playing things straight with the audience.  I was prepared for that to be the most inexplicable moment of the episode. And then Fish Mooney scooped out her own eyeball and stomped on it with smug satisfaction.

Now, this is supposed to have been a tactical triumph for Mooney.  She was told she had two options: let them extract her eyes before killing her, or get sent back to the basement where she and everyone else would be killed.  Somehow, seeing that she could get to a conveniently placed spoon before anyone could react, she doesn’t consider taking said spoon and stabbing the handle into the throat of her enemy.  No, her “Option 3” is self-mutilation, as if that changes anything at all, since they could simply knock her silly and take the remaining eye without batting one of their own!



Equally mind-numbing was the subplot with Barbara, Selina, and Ivy.  Sure, there’s a certain amount of irony in Barbara giving lessons in how to use one’s beauty and sexuality as a weapon, since that’s ostensibly what Catwoman and Poison Ivy do constantly in the future.  But as Selina points out: how exactly has that worked in Barbara’s favor?  Barbara is literally the most useless character on the show right now!

Surprisingly, the one plot thread that actually worked was the one involving Bruce, Alfred, and Alfred’s fellow veteran friend.  Not only did we start to see a level of training that is actually Batman-esque (Bruce calls it “effective”, which is what it is), but we saw something on the level of an actual conspiracy arc playing out.  I’ll be disappointed if this is tied in some way to the Wayne murders; Bruce cannot know that and still have the kind of gut-wrenching hole of mystery that drives him to become Batman.  The resolution has to come well in the future.  Whether or not the audience learns that the Board of Directors hired someone to kill the Waynes is perhaps another story.  Still, at the end of the day, this is an arc that can only go so far; sooner or later, to keep Bruce’s survival intact, the threat has to go away.