Gotham - Season 3, Episode 15: Mad City: How the Riddler Got His Name
Trailer
Gordon hopes to return the city to the glamorous, purer version he remembers as a child as he chases after an escapee while Bruce's doppelganger roams the streets.
Gotham returned, after its second long break this season, with a fun episode that delivered big on Edward Nygma's long-game transformation into The Riddler.
The irony of it all is that just as [Nygma] begins to ascertain that he doesn't need some grand archnemesis or best friend to become a true villain, he may have just gained an amalgamation of the two anyway.
An episode that continued building the mental madness that Season 3 has so far delivered, tonight's installment also dropped some big twists and badass sequences that seem to be leading fans down a particular Bat-avenue.
Nygma spends the episode transforming into The Riddler. The problem? The whole idea of the transformation is treated like a joke, as if Nygma can never really become a villain because he's going about it the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.
In terms of plot, it was less successful than some of the other Riddler-centric episodes we've gotten in the past, but nothing matched its insight into Ed's motivations as we saw him struggle to come to terms with his identity.
Gotham hit it out of the park this hour not only by giving us The Riddler but also by setting up other exciting storylines to take us through the rest of the season.
"How the Riddler Got His Name" was an occasionally zany, occasionally touching, and completely satisfying baptism of crazy that saw the final transition from tortured killer-nerd Ed Nygma (Cory Michael Smith) to The Riddler
Straight up, this episode as a whole is terribly paced ... But underneath the mess episode writer Megan Mostyn-Brown has a ton of genuinely clever fun with Eddie and Oswald's relationship.
