Gotham's series finale felt more like a season premiere

The A.V. Club

Following a penultimate episode last week that felt like a series finale, Gotham said goodbye Thursday after five seasons with an episode titled "The Beginning..." that felt more like a season premiere. "It always had to end this way. There was no way around it," Kyle Fowle says of Gotham's ending, adding: "After the events of the penultimate episode, which saw the villains and heroes come together to save Gotham—that’s the series finale that would have been most in line with what Gotham has been doing for four seasons, by the way—the show didn’t have many options for moving forward," says Fowle. "Bruce left Gotham to save it from his presence, and to train to protect the city in the future, so naturally Gotham had to flash forward. After years of watching Bruce Wayne take small steps towards becoming Batman, the last thing the series finale needs is scenes of him training to become Batman." He says the flash-forwards were the series finale's biggest problem. "'The Beginning...”'is basically a paint-by-numbers procedural, a case-of-the-week episode that feels out of place as a series finale," he says. Fowle adds: "This is a show that’s explicitly designed to tease the appearance of Batman without ever delivering the payoff, and that doesn’t make for the best TV. Or, to be more specific, Batman looms so large over this series that it’s pretty much impossible for the show to be about anything else, but the show needs to be about something else because this isn’t the story of Batman, it’s the story of what created Batman."

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