Awesome / Gotham Season Five

Season 5

5x 01 Year Zero

• After 3 long years, Oswald finally avenges his mother by stabbing Tabitha in the heart.
• The future prologue that opens the episode. All our surviving main characters go through a dramatic Lock-and-Load Montage, gearing up for a climactic, all-out war... then it's revealed that they're all marching out together, to face a common enemy. This becomes more Awesome in hindsight after seeing the events of the episode, and realizing that somehow, over the course of the year to come, Jim Gordon will get all of these mortal enemies to put aside their differences and join forces to face an even greater foe.
  Gordon: For Gotham.
• When Scarecrow's minions break into the hospital, Bruce dons night-vision goggles and plunges into the darkened basement. It's a Mook Horror Show right out of one of the Arkham games as Bruce stalks them one by one and takes them out. At the end of it the last minion standing calls out to his fallen comrades, sounding like he's about to piss himself in terror. That's right, Bruce managed to utterly terrify someone who works for the Scarecrow. He's one step closer to his destiny.
• It's a minor point, but Bruce also demonstrates he can be heroic without the costume: he's given Gordon free access to Wayne Enterprises resources, and he defies the lockdown of Gotham by flying in supplies at his own expense.

5x 02 Trespassers

• The GCPD saving the kidnapped children.
• Gordon and Bullock's fight with Mother, holding her off despite being disoriented by strobe lights. Then Harvey smashes a window to let some real light in and blinding Mother, allowing them to overpower her.
• Barbara showing up to save Gordon's group from two gangs after the bounty on his head. With a BFG-equipped Weaponized Car.
• Bruce talking down Ivy into not only not killing him, but providing the medicine Selina needs.
  • The results of that. Not only does Selina regain use of her legs, but a shot of her eyes shows them becoming slit. Catwoman is truly born.

5x 03 Penguin, Our Hero

• Bruce and Selena enter the Dark Zone alone, and face a gang of crazies. Selena takes on the leader, who is much taller and easily outweighs her, the biggest meanest guy on the block, while Bruce takes on everyone else. And they win.
• Selina stopping the hammer of the gun pointed at her head with just her hand. From the look on her face, it seems that she didn't do it consciously or was surprised that she was able to stop it at all.
  • Her fight with Ecco, with both taking advantage of their environment to try and get an edge on the other.
• Gordon and Penguin teaming up to wipe out the Street Demons and other gangs that have taken over Haven. Afterwards, the civilians start singing Penguin's praises again, this time willingly.

5x 04 Ruin

• Bruce beating up several of Jeremiah's goons while handcuffed to a gate.
• Selina, once again, subverts Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: no fancy words, no boasts, she just walks right up to Jeremiah and stabs him in the chest, very similarly to how she dealt with Jerome during their one meeting in the diner (though unsuccessfully).

5x 05 Pena Dura

• The Dynamic Entry of Eduardo Dorrance and his Strike Force to help Gordon at the beginning of the episode. It gets horribly subverted later on, but it's nice to see something finally go right for Jim, and it's nice to know he still has powerful friends who will help.
  • Dorrance's men storming City Hall, wiping out all of Penguin's men in about ten seconds.
• Riddler is being tortured by a group of hillbillies, by means of using a car to power a makeshift electric chair he's been tied to. So, what does he do? Use some very simple reverse psychology to get them to open up their fuel line, thereby spilling the fuel onto the live wires being used to conduct the electricity. As such, this causes the car to burst into flames, distracting the hillbillies long enough for Riddler to escape.
• Jeremiah surviving Selina's attack on him, giving him the opportunity to continue his plans without interruption since everyone believes him to be dead.

5x 06 13 Stitches

• Gordon overpowering the brainwashed Nygma with a defibrillator.
• Nygma tricking Eduardo into thinking he's still brainwashed, then throwing a cleaver into the forehead of one of his Mooks.
• Bruce and Alfred easily fighting free of a couple of Eduardo's Mooks and escaping.
• The plan to expose Walker and Eduardo's crimes to the world — Nygma gets the attention of all the Mooks in the GCPD by bringing in a "bomb" in a case and giving them a riddle to deactivate it, all while Lucius, Alfred, and Barbara are preparing to use knockout gas on the building, and Bruce is on the roof transmitting recordings proving that Walker ordered the destruction of Haven.
  • Bruce also has to fight off one of the Mooks on the roof in the middle of this.
  • And credit to Bullock, despite it almost unknowingly ruining the plan, but for once he actually successfully solves one of Nygma's riddles. And using information from an essay he wrote in high school, to boot.
• Gordon and Eduardo's fight during the above. The only reason Gordon starts losing is because one of Eduardo's Mooks steps in to intervene, and even then Gordon still manages to grab a gun, kill that guy, and then throw Eduardo onto a piece of rebar, fatally wounding him until Walker arrives later to save him.

5x 07 Ace Chemicals

• Bruce's long-awaited showdown with Jeremiah, which takes place in the titular chemical plant.
  • One key moment in this — as Bruce gets the upper hand and starts delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Jeremiah is gleeful, as he believes this means that Bruce is acknowledging their status as archenemies. Then Bruce says the one thing that gets under his skin and destroys his smug cool:
  Bruce: You mean nothing to me.
• Selina gets the chance to atone for doing nothing the night the Waynes were killed. Upon learning of Jeremiah's plans, she rushes to where he's attempting to recreate that scene, arriving just in time to save Gordon and Lee's lives and giving Bruce the opening he needs.
• Unable to stop Jeremiah's chemical bomb fireworks from launching, Gordon instead drives the truck carrying them into the river, just before they can launch.

5x 08 Nothing's Shocking

• Bruce and Alfred saving a man who's been abducted by someone driven utterly insane by Jeremiah's chemicals. A key point of the resulting fight is Bruce throwing shards of metal at the madman like batarangs.
• Penguin fighting Mr. Penn, finally getting ahold of his gun and shooting Scarface, freeing Penn from the dummy's control.

5x 09 The Trial of James Gordon

• Ivy brainwashes the crazy gang leader from episode 3 and sends him after Selina again. While he has the initial upper hand, she quickly overpowers him with ease.
  • Selina then tracks down the brainwashed Bruce, fighting him until she manages to snap him out of Ivy's control.
• When Ivy sends Zsasz to attack the GCPD, Alfred comes up behind him and knocks him out.
  • After Ivy helps Zsasz escape and has him launch another attack as a distraction, Harvey eventually manages to counter his arsenal by grabbing the bomb suit Riddler used several episodes earlier.
• Lee managing to fight off Ivy when she comes for Gordon, culminating in grabbing a gun and just shooting her, forcing her to flee.

5x 10 I Am Bane

• Barbara, in labor, is being carted down a hallway on a wheelchair by Lee...and still manages to gun down attackers, including having Lee spin the chair around to nail a few guys while running backwards.

5x 11 They Did What?

• Also a Heartwarming moment, there's Penguin's speech to Gordon about why he refuses to abandon Gotham.
• The sequence from the opening of the season premiere is revisited, with Penguin, Riddler, and the GCPD all standing together against Bane's forces.
  • Penguin saving Riddler from a grenade, at the cost of damage to an eye.
• Bruce and Selina blowing up Wayne Enterprises to drop the building in such a way that it blocks the army's advance, buying the city's defenders time.
• Gordon and Barbara's fight with Nyssa. First, Gordon lets Nyssa kick his ass until he can grab a pair of dropped handcuffs, which he then uses to cuff the two of them together, giving him an edge over her. Then, while they're fighting more evenly, Barbara breaks free and fights off Nyssa's Mooks, killing them all. And then, when Nyssa gets the upper hand again and goes into another round of Evil Gloating, this happens:
  Gordon: Do you ever stop talking?
  Gordon spins Nyssa around into position so that Barbara can stab her.
  Barbara: You two [Nyssa and her father] do have one thing in common— you both like getting stabbed with this knife!
  • To Nyssa's credit, she not only survives the stab wound but manages to flee, successfully stealing Penguin and Riddler's submarine (which is supposed to require a two-person crew) to escape the city.
• Bruce and Selina taking on Bane. They hold their own fairly well, until he grabs ahold of Selina and threatens to crush her skull. However, she grabs one of his own knives and stabs him with it, while Bruce plants a sonic device on him which summons a swarm of bats that attack him, letting the two of them escape.
• As Barbara leads the civilians in escaping the GCPD, the remaining defenders (all the other named characters, basically) stand before Bane's forces, defiantly facing the end... and then those civilians emerge and form a human shield around Gordon and the others. Unwilling to massacre unarmed civilians, the army soldiers (and most of Bane's mercenaries, for that matter) turn their guns on him, ending the battle.
• Riddler's epic Motive Rant, as he makes it clear that he only helped save Gotham so that he can take the city for himself. This also serves to snap Penguin out of his Villainous BSoD over Nyssa escaping with all his money and inspires him to join Riddler in this.
• Gordon is finally promoted to Commissioner.

5x 12 The Beginning

• Barbara Lee showing that she really is her parent's kid (all three of them); when she sees her mom being attacked by Ecco and Jeremiah, instead of hiding or running, she grabs a paperweight and chucks it at Ecco before trying to punch Jeremiah. It doesn't work out too well (though it's not a complete loss either, since it leads to Barbara stabbing Ecco and Jeremiah finishing her off), but massive props to her for the effort, and demonstrates that she's well on her way to becoming the badass she's destined to be.
• The sheer presence of the Batman. Throughout the episode, he's either offscreen or shown in shadow, but we still see him pull off some pretty badass moments, like capturing Penguin and Riddler with relative ease or taking down Jeremiah with just two Batarangs (one of which goes right through the clown's hand). But let's not forget the final scene of the show: Gordon, Bullock, and Alfred meet on a rooftop near the future Bat Signal, and look up to see this mysterious new vigilante peering down at them from a taller building. The camera then soars towards the shadowy figure to finally reveal Batman, fully suited up in all his dark and enigmatic glory, the culmination of Bruce's five season journey. This is the final shot of the entire series, and what a kickass note to go out on.
  • Several YouTubers have uploaded re-edits of the final scene (as well as Bruce's reunion with Selina), dubbing in Danny Elfman's iconic score from the original finale.
• Seeing the Penguin and Riddler in their iconic comic book costumes. After witnessing their rise to power throughout the show, it's pretty rewarding to see them fully transformed into the infamous rogues they were destined to become.
• Though he hasn't embraced his supervillain name yet, Jeremiah has now fully transitioned into the Joker. From his grisly sense of humor to his Hamill-esque voice, everything about him is raw, unadulterated Joker at its finest, and it's a delight to see Cameron Monaghan playing the character in full form after all these years of waiting.
  • His manic, delighted laugh when Batman sends a batarang through his hand is the icing on the cake. The way he effortlessly orchestrates the events of the episode is pretty noteworthy too.
    • It's also pretty clear that even after ten years and beneath a mask, Jeremiah recognizes Bruce, making him one of the few versions of the Joker to be certain of Batman's identity.
    • Then there's the sense that there was a mostly offscreen high-stakes chess match going on between Batman and Joker that seems to have started even before the episode began. Jeremiah/Joker probably planned the events of the episode when he heard that Bruce was coming back in order to get his attention, and Bruce was obviously doing a lot of off-screen investigation. Batman/Bruce is really one of the few people on the cast who would think to check whether bodies at a crime scene were rigged with explosives, although it helps that he might have already known who was behind the events of the episode, while the GCPD didn't. Like many times when the protagonists have to match their wits against Jeremiah, the fact that more people don't die comes down to sheer luck, but that Bruce was able to outsmart him and save Jim in that scene is a glimpse of how Batman/Bruce will eventually be the best at keeping up with his plans and preventing them.
• On a similar note to the above, seeing Selina in full Catwoman gear as she steals a diamond from a museum. She uses her impressive acrobatics to slip her way through the security lasers, and cuts through the diamond's glass casing with her cat claws. It's like watching a Catwoman comic book come to brilliant life on the screen.
• Barbara and Selina effortlessly saving the Mayor from Riddler. And in the process, Barbara also takes the time to briefly call him out on not abandoning his villainous ways like she did.
  Riddler: Do you even remember how amazing you used to be?
  Barbara: Oh honey, I'm still amazing. I just made a choice.