Almost everybody has a secret in "Gotham," and a mask to hide that secret.
Jim Gordon, on the other hand, hides behind no mask. He has his morals and he sticks to them, even at the cost of alienating himself at work.
"You gotta go along to get along," Harvey Bullock advises Jim. But Jim, still bitter that no one stood up for him at the Zsasz smackdown, insists on locking up the black market doctor. It's not like he has any chance of winning over his colleagues, anyway.
Sure, he lost the support of all his corrupt colleagues after they found out he didn't kill Penguin, but there's an upside to Jim staying true to his beliefs. The loyal (read: Harvey) and respectable (read: Sarah Essen) coworkers are now his biggest and most vocal allies.
You can't survive any toxic work environment without at least one friend. Who else will come to your rescue when you're standing up to management or fighting sociopaths?
Jim goes solo to investigate an abandoned office building. There, he finds three caged job applicants vying for a position at a financial firm.
The challenge: Last man standing wins the job. It's a cutthroat industry, made obvious by the first victim's gash on the neck. Before Jim can release them, the Mask tazes him and makes killing him the new challenge.
Even more disturbing, the application process has morphed into a dark, twisted reality TV show where the entire staff watches the fight on a TV in a bar. And you thought your office's team-building exercises were hell.
After taking out the three applicants with his fists and whatever office supplies he can weaponize, Jim and the Mask duke it out.
Jim wrestles the machete from the sadistic businessman. As he's ready to plunge the knife into him, he stops himself. He's a fighter, not a killer.
He's also somewhat boring. I get that cops are supposed to be the tough guys, devoid of any emotions. Anger and stubbornness don't count — those are just the default feelings for male leads, according to TV dramas.
But Jim is too repressed and clean cut. Relating to a character like that takes patience. Patience I'm slowly starting to lose. The high-octane action scenes make the show so addicting, but "The Masked" dragged at times because of his lack of charisma.
He needs a secret. Not that he needs to go off the rails and kill someone — "Gotham" needs a character with stability. Just a storyline where he dips his toes into relatively minor wrongdoings without diving into the deep end of typical Gotham corruption.