Gotham recap: The last good man standing

• Jessica Miglio/Fox

This is not the Jim Gordon we know — but isn’t he fun? The seventh episode of “Gotham” last night ended with Gordon busting into the halls of power, guns blazing, out of justice...and then his harebrained scheme was shortly thwarted by his fiancée’s harebrained scheme. A whole lot of nothing. Except! Oswald Cobblepot took another serious step toward supervillainy. Or, rather, revealed that he has been taking a series of calculated, smaller steps all along. So much something, going on beneath the nothing. Let’s break it down.

Previously: Beware masked men who think they are goats

First thing is first: Gordon is on the phone with Barbara’s voice mail, telling her to get out of town right now. Before people try to kill her. Like what is happening right now to Gordon, as Bullock busts in with a gun drawn and — sorry, guy — says he has to shoot him for Falcone. (Why are both Gordon and Bullock, like, loose in a GCPD basement after having just been arrested? Corruption!) “Help me, we don’t have to go out like this,” Gordon says to Bullock, but he isn’t buying.

Cut to: Fish’s goons are at Barbara’s place, literally being some of the creepiest people to her ever. When Fish heard that Oswald was still alive, she was fur-i-ous; and this is the result — that Gordon brought in to be made an example of, not just killed out right. So Gordon shows up, but he is not having any of it, and dispatches the goons with only one bullet (and some mano-a-mano) before putting Barbara on a bus and urging her to stay away. It’s all very superhero, that our main character needs to know his one weakness (his true love) is off somewhere safely away from the madness. That’s fitting: As soon as Barbara is out of town, Gordon storms back into GCPD and...begins filling out arrest warrants. Before he gets taken out, he is going to take down Falcone and the mayor with him (even if the plan is utter nonsense; his captain warns him that not a single other legal force in the city will support him). But Gordon feels differently: The city will rise with him, just as soon as they see it’s possible to fight back.

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The Falcone family circles up. Fish says they all have to die — Gordon, Bullock, Oswald, all of them. Falcone counsels patience and tells Fish that she should just go ask Maroni for Oswald back, as a sign of respect. Which is kind of...weird, just as a general course of action between two mobsters who hate each other. Fish agrees, and later warns her co-conspirator and fellow lieutenant that something seems off about their boss, like he knows something no one else does. (Spoiler: He does.)

As a gesture of his patience, Falcone dispatches an assassin, Victor Zsasz, to GCPD to claim Gordon. What follows is the purest demonstration of the city’s corruption, as Zsasz walks right into a room full of dozens of cops, gets them all politely to stand down, and then goes after Gordon, hitting him once in the abdomen. All for the mob. That the hit doesn’t go through hardly seems to matter — Gordon escapes at the last minute, with the help of MCU detectives Allen and Montoya, but Zsasz is hardly off his scent.

But Gordon isn’t thrown off his quest, either. A useful Gotham University lab researcher cum doctor heals him up quick and then he’s back on his feet and headed to Wayne Manor. He tells Bruce this: The mayor and the mob are all in it together, and it is all connected to the Wayne murders, and Gordon is going to solve it or die trying. And if he dies, Bruce is to trust the MCU detectives. The touching conclusion is that they hug, which would be really touching if their relationship took place at all anywhere outside of the manor’s study.

So Gordon and Bullock load up their guns — all of their guns, lots of guns — and arrest the mayor, and then Falcone, in his home. It’s all very brave, and it’s clear that Gordon is really ready to die in a blaze of glory if it means he can take two of the city’s corrupt power centers with him. Except: What if Falcone has a knife to Barbara’s throat? What if she came back to the city to plead for Gordon’s life? But what if this a bluff? What if?

The tension doesn’t hold: We learn in the next scene that Zsasz does have Barbara, because I guess she is an idiot. Gordon and Bullock stand down — but Falcone lets them live. He admires their honesty, their principles, and he only wishes that they could see: The system isn’t the problem. The problem is anarchy.

Speaking of: All this mobster business is getting seriously tangled. Fish’s request to Maroni to have Oswald turned over flatlines immediately. For which she rejoices, in the episode’s single best moment. “Bloodshed then. I’m glad. Jolly fat men are so tiresome.” Falcone’s guys kidnap some nuns and use them as human roadblocks to hijack one of Maroni’s very expensive gun shipments. Maroni, in turn, uses Oswald to take out one of Falcone’s money houses — and, in the process, Fish’s secret lover and fellow flackey, Nikolai. It’s during this operation that Oswald takes out Maroni’s other lieutenant, the one who hates him, by flipping his own men against him. The kill (Oswald flicks out his little blade) is ghoulish and intimate, two of the things that make Oswald such a compelling character to start with.

The episode seems to end with Barbara and Gordon embracing, worn down but alive.

But it really ends with this revelation: Falcone meeting with Oswald out on the edge of his property, Oswald now looking more and more particular Penguin-ish with his limp and his umbrella, where we learn that the snitch has been a double-snitch all along, and one who has manipulated Gordon’s involvement from the start. But that also means Oswald is the one who just saved Gordon from Falcone. Hmmmmm...

One day, Penguin says, Gordon will see “the light.” In the meantime, it looks like Fish might be cooked.