Quoting @countessrivers tags from a gifset (please tell me if you want me to take this down)

Yes!  It was so much nonsense.  If there’s something that’s actually done well, it’s all the little clues dropped from the outset that Lee has her own hidden depths and darker tastes.  

She’s working at Arkham when we meet her, for a start.  She says that Jerome’s confession of murder was ‘thrilling’

Lee: It was ugly, but it was also kind of thrilling. 

Jim: Thrilling? 

Lee: Thrilling and scary. Like… like looking down a deep, dark tunnel.

She switches from Arkham to GCPD.  Part of it is to follow Jim - which is a whole thing on its own, but it’s another noticeably ‘dark’ choice of job.  She seems to get on with Ed from the outset (we learn that she’s told him he’s free to use the lab). 

She slaps a comatose Barbara with real anger.  She’s content to sweep the murders of Ogden Barker and Theo under the carpet.  She’s not remotely put off by Mario’s mafia family - in fact, she seems a little thrilled, and enjoys wielding it as a threat against Ed.

You could argue that injecting herself with the Tetch virus maybe has to do with a suppressed desire to let her own shadow self out as much as it does guilt over Mario’s death.  Equally, she goes off to live in the Narrows out of an instinct for penance, but it’s also a rough, lawless, dark place - the kind of thing that thrills her.

Then there’s her whole relationship with Ed, which actually really worked for me, and has arguably been very slowly built from season one.  There’a lot of chemistry there - and a lot of similarity.  They have their sweet, slightly geeky science side, and they both have a genuine desire to care for people (GoodEd was outraged by Kristin’s bruises, and impulsively hugs the fired Jim) - bu they both equally share a fascination with darkness and power and murder.  That ‘I see you’ in their kiss/kill scene was hugely meaningful.

So - yes - this notion that Jim was Lee’s darkness, or that he somehow ‘made’ her dark, was nonsense, and forgetful of what come before.  Lee’s always had her own dark and morbid interests - which is good, and what makes her an interesting character.

I remember reading somewhere that INFPs - idealistic, altruistic, ‘good’ can often have/develop a fascination with darkness and morbid things.  It’s a characterisation that suits Lee well, for me.

reblog for great meta (& a bit of show nostalgia)  pushy investigative Lee was fun to watch (I mean it lead to following a snake .. )  but the way Lee “handled” unconscious Barbara  (2x13) and called her “Bitch” was seriously scary. (I mean after what Barbara did I can´t fault her as a person but as someone that chose a medic profession I do judge her, and it kind of made me glad that her changing and getting into the GCPD doesn´t mean she has patients under her care) 

Gotham does vintage

Images 2 and 6 found on Pinterest, but originally from @wehadfacesthen

I love that post!

Gotham 5x11: Barbara and Leslie

Quick Gotham 5x07 thoughts

First off, no Gobblepot this week again. Second, the ep with the exceptions of Bruce scenes was atrocious and I’m gonna be even more bitter in this little review. 

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I couldn´t relate more to the comments about chemistry, I remember being so surprised reading that the actors were in a relationship because I could see nothing in between Lee and Jim when they started on screen (I mean I did enjoy when they went out investigating and ended up at the circus but that´s not romantic relationship specific, some of the Mario Falcone mess was emotional, the farewell scene after the Narrows episodes kind of too but .. chemistry .. nah?!)

For a tiny moment after Lee´s slap I had a hint of hope that they for once would go with the “not everything is about Jim Gordon” credo and have Lee leave, break out of the “helpful supportive girlfriend” role and just subvert the whole thing with them not reuniting, have Lee be her own person but .. I guess even in that moment I should have known better ^^ 

Gotham – s5e07 – Ace Chemicals

As I watched it, and some random observations here and there.

Previously on Gotham:

In some of the slashiest moments ever slashed until some of the stuff we’ll see later, Jeremiah helped to build a dark island for Bruce and then told him they would rise together. Jim had sex with Barbara. We then hear him tell Lee there’s so many things he’s done that he wishes he could change.  Oh, fuck you, Jim. Lee says they’re here now and need to try to put the pieces back together again. Barbara’s pregnant. Jim looks at her like he’s only just learned that humans can reproduce. Selina reminds us all that Bruce’s parents were murdered.  Selina stabbed Jeremiah. Oswald is apparently leaving Gotham for reasons that are pretty wildly inconsistent with everything we know about him. Jeremiah loves a family reunion..

As always, long post will be long.  There are likely to be rambling digressions. Gobblepot might appear (although I welcome all shippers and non-shippers alike :)).  There will be naked favouritism and naked not-favouritism.  Broader comments at the end on plotlines and parallels and general direction.

A group of people run frantically down the street, their shirts open and chests bloody – a ‘z’ carved into them. Dramatic music plays.  Behind them, someone – framed in the doorway of a warehouse, someone lights rockets which promptly launch into the sky.  They release green gas, and we see the men start to foam at the mouth, clawing at their throats as they fall to the ground.

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What a great read!! 

Thank you for saying this ;D

I´ve been neglecting this side of the “supportive girlfriend that helps” VS “tactless bitch that doesn´t help, not usually, not her” trainwreck they keep piling up. You´re so right, they just swipe all the dark in Lee under the rug, on top of ignoring all the good that Barbara did do or tried to do for this odd contrast, that just doesn´t work or add up at all.  Your 3 points about Jim´s role and his icky judgement in this mess are spot on! That and the paragraph at the bottom.

Tbh reading this was such a line because the same scenario crossed my mind, just because I love inversive unexpected switches of the narrative and just because it indeed would fit .. just that I recently came across so much post about how any notion of anything non platonic between these two is just gross and nasty, and while there´s plenty to argue against this, stuff like that sometimes grinds me down ^^ but that built me back up

Wayne Manor: Wiki claims: “ ancestral home of the Wayne family since 1914. “

Oh, Good Point!

And kind of the only thing they could have done after the moralizing no killing thing with Selina, and the now fully revealed fact that she “didn´t” actually kill (well Jeremiah at least .. ) But it felt so odd for me, their dialogue had gone no where, no peak in the fight choreography, and usually I´m a big fan of “shit happens” but this just was bafflingly anticlimactic .. 

Haha, good scenario. In the end Oswald just evacuates everyone, and saves Gotham. Roll credits. 

That issue is one of the few I can just shrug off. Jeremiah chose his words in a way that made clear there was a difference in emotional connection, they at least addressed it. And just the fact that it wasn´t part of the plan and just the odd opportunity he took advantage of (which was a nice spicy idea ^^ ) makes it okay for me that the emotional connections don´t “add up”. I guess Jeremiah was all tangled up in making his plan as authentic as possible, changing that up when some other opportunity is served on a silver plate isn´t that

‘Why are you here? - I don’t know.  What were you going to say to me back there?  I don’t know.  What does this mean for us?  I don’t know’

Sparkling dialogue, this.

yes but .. consider this .. for this situation .. it WAS the most fitting dialogue ;D

Jim: You son of a bitch you actually did it?!

Aww, not even Jim believed Eddie was capable <3

Ed: You know me, Jim. The people that I’ve… [significant pause] I’ve hurt, they hurt me first. I didn’t know a single person in Haven!

I love how explicit all this is making Eddie’s constant need to avoid facing up to and owning responsibility for his murders. Feels like so much character analysis is being validated here :)

He can’t handle voicing out loud that he murdered people, so he only hurt them.

Not true that all people you ‘hurt’ hurt you first either Eddie - what did dear Mr Leonard ever do to you, huh? :p Or the various goons you’ve casually killed. Or the cop who’s death you framed Jim for?

But… the spirit of what you’re saying holds, I think, to be fair - your crimes may include the ODD ‘collateral damage’ murder necessary for the completion of your goal, but your focus is typically on individuals you have personal reason to want to hurt/kill.

Basically - Haven was emphatically NOT your MO is what you’re saying. And Jim knows that.

Cool cool.

Oh his tendency to turn his head from his crimes is a good point! With that hurt line I swayed off from the character and got on a character relationships track .. because I kept thinking about his different lines with Barbara and Jim: *  “Barbara! Am I dumb? In all the years of plotting and the betrayals between us, have you ever ever known me to do something as idiotically brutal as shoot a rocket into a building full of innocent people?”  5x5 With BARBARA KEAN Edward´s focus is less on the (personal / emotional) motive, it´s more about intellect and being reasonable   * “You know me, Jim. The people that I have hurt, they hurt me first.”  With JIM GORDON his words focus on emotion and I wonder if Ed appealing to the emotional side of things is meant to echo Jim´s “what happened to you” approach in 2x17. Granted Jim certainly corrected his picture of Edward in the meantime but I really wondered how much thought went into the phrasing. Aaaaand reading your post I gotta say a lot because it´s a hell lot in there when you take this side of Edward into consideration.

gonna comment on this right here too, I just had to bookmark that right away because the word unified came into my mind as well with that episode: 

You know I din´t quite get if Hugo Strange was actually meant to be clueless about his condition? This and that I´m partly wondering if they really needed Edward to destroy Haven (like they got military in, they sure could have sneaked someone with a rocketlauncher in there or just paid someone, I mean it would make sense if they wanted a Gothamite scapegoat and public trial/execution but it didn´t seem that that was important to them ? also on a side note Edward surely wasn´t the only “patient” they could have chipped someone else) unless they couldn´t and the chip doesn´t work on everybody, like there maybe needs to be some preexisting condition and they found it in Edward .. and this all isn´t really a theory just some convoluted thoughts but what if the interference of the chip is going to bring up the other persona more clearly again (like curse you what have let them do with us I´m gonna take over) and since his different sides have a common enemy and goal to work on this task might bring them together and unify them (for good)!  It´s like Edward and his sides give me a headache and the use of his names in that episode didn´t really clear things up but I´m curious where we are headed ^^ 

Finally responding to this! Sorry it’s taken a while.

I def got the sense Hugo was genuine in his bemusement over Ed talking about himself in third person. 

But the idea that Ed had/has some kind of condition specific to him that made him particularly susceptible to the chip is a fun one :) 

When it comes to using Ed to destroy Haven though, my understanding is that it was a combination of needing a Gothamite scapegoat and Ed being convenient. Because Hugo already HAD him (and Lee) you know? So might as well use what you’ve got as opposed to having Hugo, or whoever, track down someone new and chip them.

As to the Gothamite scapegoat element itself… having stopped to think about it, turns out I’ve just been taking that as a given? It just seemed to make sense to me that the Haven attacker would NEED to be proven as a Gotham Rogue in order to fully justify the Uber Military nature of the Taskforce - like in the reports afterwards it would help show just how horrific the criminals in Gotham were and how they absolutely needed excessive force to put them down. BUT, they don’t really point that out in the show do they? (or did it come up in Bane’s exposition speech to Jim which, I’ll confess, I glossed over a little because Ed and Foxy weren’t onscreen :P) So could be that I’ve just been rolling with my own theory there without really taking in what the show itself was portraying!

For the chip making Ed’s multiple selves WORSE - OH.MY.GOD.I.HOPE.NOT.I.WILL.CRY.

Based on the way he was behaving in 13 Stitches after the chip was removed though, I’m… 89-95% confident that’s probably not gonna happen? Because he seemed the same as we’ve seen him all season when not chip controlled - which is, to my understanding, a genuine blend of all of his various parts, whether he sees that yet or not? So my working theory is still that he woke up from surgery on his stab wound just no longer mentally/psychologically split at all, he just  hasn’t realised/accepted that yet.

But honestly. At this point I am behind ANY way of unifying him. He’s not Harvey Dent, show, c’mon.

edit: oh whoops meant to add - love your idea about Ed appealing to Jim via being emotional and to Babs via emphasising his intellect based on the different types of relationships he had with each of them, smart thinking! that makes a lot of sense to me :)

after last episode I´m extra salty that the chip situation wasn´t an Ed special, like I don´t fully want to complain at that point, maybe more will happen, but probably not because they already showed how easy the chip is to remove .. but what use had it to have Lee chiped? That scene in the office obviously wasn´t a threat to Jim, it just made a scared, helpless (*) Lee into a mindless tool for someone else totally unnecessarily [Although I´m not fully buying this, maybe just because I do not want to, I mean Lee went places, Lee did things and a lot of good things and now she´s just reduced to being part of “let´s to the Ogre plotline again” I´d be much more comfortable if she´d just been acting, Lee shooting the army guy might be a tiny hint though .. ]

That theory would certainly be great for Ed! Cure by getting stabbed probably is not the most comfortable thing but hey that´s in the past now ^^

Okay, it’s time for me to have a little rant about the whole clusterfuck surrounding Barbara’s pregnancy announcement, the context for why she announced it the way that she did, and what I’m afraid the future holds for her and her sprog. This is probably not going to be particularly well-organized, but I hope that it will at least be coherent.

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@ncfan-1 considering the clusterfuck dimensions this actually is a ~little~ rant and a great one ;) 

Point1 I only touched briefly upon this because I was more occupied with the comparison of Barbara & Lee but it was incredibly uncomfortable to see Lee trying to piece her memory back together [[what I didn´t quite get, was she meant to regain some pieces in that moment? Which would be kind of suspicious, but that´s probably just because I don´t want her to have been this scared, helpless person, (*) she went places, she did thing, and a lot of good things, I´d hate to see her reduced to the distressed self she appeared to be even for a moment, moreover making her the mindless chip controlled person was just so unnecessary..]]  while Jim just more or less ignores this. Jim told Lee straight away how he feels, and how heavy the situation is on him and the next second claims she certainly knows this because she knows him although she only just got a tiny speed run through the whole situation and I do hope that she didn´t really waste a thought on “oh wow how does this all make Jim feel” since, well all those much more pressing issues she must have on mind with her supposed memory loss and vulnerability, This scene was so odd to watch after the one with Barbara, where she unprompted told Jim that she recognizes how heavy this is on him. Granted, it was not in the most caring, “nice”, supportive tone but she showed she indeed “knows him” enough to see and acknowledge this. Yet Lee gets chained to the caring, understanding, supportive girlfriend role while Barbara gets painted a tactless bitch?! [[And what also baffled me was that her pregnancy reveal scene was read by quite some people like her being “haha! I slept with Jim” but I got more of a “okay, if he can´t even set aside a second to talk we gotta do it this way” vibe, like am I wrong about this but I understood it that way that she´d very much have preferred a private conversation?]]

Point 2 You now I thought, ahhh, if someone expected more than a hookup it should have been voiced, I can´t blame him on that .. but .. buuuut your words are rather convincing, Valerie Vale might be a thing to consider in this context though but tbh I don´t recall their interactions well enough to gauge Jim´s emotional involvement

Point 2A  I always read Renee as a worried person, with a legit worry considering with what she knew about Jim, which makes her not a home wrecker but someone rescuing someone, that feelings rekindle in such a situation but a relationship they had ended previously still won´t work out the second time around is likely and understandable but .. she does fit all those tropes, I still find it hard to see Renee as this unkind person but wow on another level this whole thing is even a layer ickier than I previously perceived it  

The only thing I do kind of get is why it was Lee and not someone like Harvey that Jim opened up to. You´re right it would make more sense due to their relationship but in this situation I do get that it would be easier to confide in a “outsider”? Letting Harvey or anyone else Jim has to work with so closely see his weakness this obviously could feel quite wrong to him when he made such an effort to be the shining example of hopeTM. Sure they showed Harvey scratching on this hope varnish and not really buying it but I could see why this would make it for Jim even more necessary that he´s not “breaking” in front of his colleague. That he however dismissed the aid that Barbara (who´s an “outsider” as well) did offer is a shame .. I´d even say I got to a point where I say, well, people ~are~ stupid like that, it´s not like no one has acted like that before but that all of this just so closely mirrors and fits into such problematic clichés and tropes makes it a bit of a bigger issue than just personal shortcomings

(*) But I guess it would make even sense for Lee to not regain her full memory, this would just be perfectly in line of “purging” her from her villainous side and getting her ready for the new role in Jim´s life ugg

EDIT: I´m out of the loop and behind with all meta so sorry if this has already made all rounds but @slimeybee up there in the OP are plenty of precise reasons that feed into this ickyness  

I’m probably wrong, but I think Lee is gonna be Ankh!

I don’t know much about Ankh, but what I’m almost positive about is she was a Queen and is one of Batman’s villians. Lee is referred to, and refers to herself, as the Queen of the Narrows. She is not a villian yet per say, but I wouldn’t necessarily call her a hero either. She’s robbed banks, shot firefly, broke a guys hand for revenge, poisoned someone and didnt care if he caught the antidote or not, shot Sofia in the head, stabbed Ed, etc. So I would either call her an anti-hero, or anti-villian. Anyway besides these reasons, these are a couple other reasons I think she will be Ankh.

When Bruce had a vision of his future, we were all wondering why Lee was the only one dressed up, and as Cleopatra at that. Turns out I don’t think she was dressed up at all.. I think this was Gotham hinting that she would become Ankh.

Another reason I think she may be her, is because Ankh is associated with the Riddler, and now so is Lee.

There aren’t much clues that point to this theory, other than those two things.. I could be completely wrong so don’t take my word for it. Also there’s the fact that she died and is now in the hands of strange. Who knows what he’s planning on doing to Ed and Lee.

And another part of me still thinks Lee has the potential to be Harley.. But only if Ecco isn’t her of course. I love both of them with all my heart, and it would be a dream come true if either one of them was able to officially be Harley. ♥🖤

Anyway I got off track. My point is I think they’re planning on bringing her back as someone.. And my guess is either Ankh or Harley. Mostly Ankh though.