Nightmare Fuel / Gotham Season Four

Season 4

4x 01 Pax Penguina

• The Crane fear-gas hallucinations, natch.
• Jonathan's Through the Eyes of Madness views of his "bogeyman", when the thugs harass him with an actual scarecrow. The more so in the final scene, which reveals that having been left locked up alone with his personal terror, an actual scarecrow, the young man has effectively been possessed by his own embodied Nightmare Fuel.
• Even discounting the Through the Eyes of Madness, Jonathan's situation in this episode contains a nasty dose of horror. Viewers who have mentally ill loved ones in mental hospitals or nursing homes probably won't like watching the warden literally sell the kid to his kidnappers for a roll of bills.
  • And that's on top of just how disturbing the asylum itself is. It seems more like a prison than anywhere to improve mental health.
  • Not to mention the warden's casual mention to Merton that he'd been using Jonathan's terror of scarecrows to intimidate the fear-hounded teen into complying with the Arkham staff's orders. For years. Damn, this nascent villain's Start of Darkness is on par with Firefly's, it's so ugly.

4x 02 The Fear Reaper

• While without the fear gas Scarecrow looks anything but scary, looking more like a muppet than a monster, the narm of it fades pretty much immediately when he gasses Arkham's warden and Reed hallucinates an IT-like monster clown with a gaping fang-filled gesticulating mouth. Try sleeping after THAT scene.

4x 04 The Demon's Head

• Anubis, the terrifying dog man that Ra's al Ghul recruits to hunt down Bruce and Alex. Everything about is him is just freaky, from his lanky, feral appearance to his unsettling, inhuman screeches. Even the first shot of him is something of a Jump Scare!
• Ra's al Ghul slitting Alex's throat at the end. That's right, a teenage boy no older than Bruce is killed at the hands of the Demon's Head. This scene alone shows us just how cold-blooded and unpredictable this version of Ra's really is.

4 X 05 The Blade's Path

• When he's explaining to Bruce why he wants to die, Ra's shows a special pool that reveals his true reflection: A centuries old...thing that barely looks human anymore, the skin grey and cracked, eyes hollow and glazed and barely holding together. This is what Ra's truly is as he says that every moment is nothing but sheer agony and that he longs to finally be released to death. It's stunning as it shows that while the Lazarus Pit is good at healing the physical wounds, the price it inflicts on a spirit is terrible.

4 X 06 Hog Day Afternoon

• Everything about Professor Pyg. From the Uncanny Valley effect of his mask, to the entire scene with Jim ending in Harvey getting his throat slit, Pyg definitely sets himself up as Gotham's deadliest villain yet.

4 X 07 A Day in the Narrows

• Pyg's slaughter of half of the GCPD.
• The Paranoia Fuel of Pyg's Master of Disguise ability.
• Headhunter's brutal method of interrogation. Dragging an ill man out of his home and taking out his oxygen tank until his daughter tells them where Pyg is.

4x 08 Stop Hitting Yourself

• Grundy's killing of the other wrestlers. Holy shit.

4x 09 Let Them Eat Pie

• Pyg killing the homeless people and baking them into pies for the orphanage fundraiser. Song and dance rendition of the "Meat Pie Tango" notwithstanding.

4x 10 Things That Go Boom

• Pyg killing the inmate with a vinyl record.

4 X 11 Queen Takes Knight

• Welcome back, Jerome.

4 X 13 A Beautiful Darkness

• Ivy shows she's let go of her childlike persona big time. She uses her perfume to make a man, wife and their kids love her. She orders them all to freeze in place and then uses her toxin on the man. Selina is horrified to see his skin go green and vines burst from within his body. Even as she's frozen in place, it's clear the wife also can't stand the sight she's forced to endure.
• Jerome tells Oswald that another Arkham dweller annoyed him so much that Jerome jacked up the juice on his shock therapy, leaving him a drooling mess other inmates "play" with.
• Bruce's nightmare:
  • Ra's slices off his face, leaving a massive gaping hole that moves when Bruce talks.
  • Bruce brought to the alley his parents died and finds himself with a terrifying sight: A caped figure that is his own future self.
  Bruce: This is where my parents died!
  Batman: No. This is where I was born.
• Ivy using her new pollen, blowing some at the couple whose house she broke into. Within seconds, they're dead with more of the plants tearing out of their bodies.

4 X 14 Reunion

• Penguin rather easily manipulates Ed into having a breakdown which lets Riddler take over again. The most effective Villain Team-Up in Gotham is now posed to strike again.
• Sofia absolutely shattering one of Lee's hands with a hammer.

4 X 15 The Sinking Ship, the Grand Applause

• The sheer amount of blood seeping out of Riddler's mouth as the Dentist works on him. Yeech.
• Sofia attempting to manipulate Gordon one last time, putting on a softer voice and saying she still cares for him and might spare his life if only he begs her for it. When Gordon responds by telling her to go to Hell, she immediately snaps back to a stone-cold sociopathic demeanor.
• Lee getting her revenge on Samson for his part in her disfigurement in the previous episode by returning the favor.
  • Along with that just seeing how much she’s enjoying it. Sofia and Sampson have definitely awakened something new in Lee and it’s something dark.

4x 16 One of My Three Soups

• Jerome's childhood. You steal a cookie, so your uncle sticks your hand in a pot of boiling chicken broth. Yikes! Makes you glad when the son of a bitch uncle gets his comeuppance.
• Just to really sell his abusiveness, Jerome's uncle heats up a bowl of soup to the point that it's literally boiling and the microwave is shorting out. Then he dumps the soup down Jerome's throat, scalding him across the mouth. Which already looks terrible.
• What Jervis does to that poor married couple. No one deserves to die that way.
  • Keep in mind that, throughout most of this, Jervis, normally calm and soft-spoken is actually yelling, something he's only done on rare, separate occasions. It just proves how far off the deep end he's fallen, and how serious he's being.
• The fate of the poor guard at the beginning of the episode: "Tortuga... Where the hell are your headphones?" *SHINK!*
• Jervis hypnotizing hundreds of Gotham citizens into jumping off the roofs of buildings across the city.

4x 17 Mandatory Brunch Meeting

• With a commission between Jerome and Scarecrow, the infamous Joker Toxin is created in its deadly Laughing Mad horror.
• Just consider the extreme lengths Jeremiah has gone to, making sure Jerome can't ever find him. Poor guy has been living like a hermit, locked away in a bunker/fortress, for years, even before Jerome's original arrest. Yet it only took minutes for Tetch and Crane to bypass all those defenses and free the psychopathic twin Jeremiah has known would come after him for revenge, all this time.
• Fridge Horror: Remember back in Season One when we first met Jerome, and he seemed meek and soft-spoken? He could well have been channeling his brother back then, meaning he likely watched Jeremiah when they were kids and learned how to fake his normalcy from observing him.

4x 18 That's Entertainment

• THE JOKER HAS ARRIVED ON GOTHAM!
• Jerome puts exploding collars on his hostages. He manages to kill two of them before the end of the episode.
• The laughing toxin continues to be horrifying. We see two victims of it this episode: Mother of the Year, and Jeremiah. The latter gets a special variant, and thus, the Joker is born.
  • To add to it, prior to his painful transformation, we haven't seen Jeremiah smile even once. Now he can't stop smiling!
• Jeremiah looks absolutely terrified when the snipers are killed and he is forced to be a hostage for his brother.

4x 19 To Our Deaths and Beyond

• Zombie Ra's looking more like the Mouth of Sauron.

4x 20 That Old Corpse

• Everything about Jeremiah.
  • The creepy posthumous messages that Jerome leaves for Jim to discover and lure him away from the GCPD? It was Jeremiah in disguise the whole time. It's horrifying to see "Jerome's" demeanor subtly melt away as he peels off his fake damaged skin, revealing the pale white face and red lips of Jim's true enemy, now in a much calmer but somehow even freakier persona. Then he has Ecco set off the energy generator and escape, revealing it to be a bomb, and it destroys the place, sending Jim to an Uncertain Doom.
  Jeremiah:Jerome is dead. Long live me. Long live me.
  • As they are working on the energy generators, Jeremiah reveals to Bruce that he was infected by the laughing gas and now he can't stop seeing his brother everywhere. When Bruce tries to show him that Jerome is still dead, the grave is empty, and Jeremiah loses his mind at this, eventually believing Bruce to be Jerome wearing a mask (Bruce's face in particular). Then he holds Bruce at gunpoint, threatening to put "his brother" back in his grave and attacking him with both a gun and pocket knife he found on Jerome's body. As it turns out, this is all an act. Jeremiah knows exactly what he's doing, and is making fools of everyone in the entire city - Bruce, the GCPD, the other villains, Jerome's followers, even Jerome himself in a way (who's still dead) by planning to tear down and rebuild Gotham in his own way.
  • So Jeremiah seems pretty normal, right? His face has already returned to its natural color after the gas incident. Except... NOT! After calmly and emotionlessly shooting a Jerome follower claiming that Jerome was victorious, he pulls out a cloth and wipes the blood off his face and out of his eye - except his normal skin color (revealed to just be makeup) comes off with it, revealing the white underneath. This happens at the same time as The Reveal to Jim that "Jerome" on the videos was Jeremiah the whole time.
  • Jeremiah goes from cackling maniacally like his brother to dead silent in a heartbeat when the aforementioned follower claims that Jerome is victorious before shooting him. The way he can shift his personality on a dime is beyond unnerving.
  • Possibly the most terrifying reveal of all, and made arguably scarier in its ambiguity: Jeremiah claims that the toxin did nothing to him apart from some "mild cosmetic effects". Bruce doesn't believe him, saying that it did affect him because now he wants to tear down Gotham like his brother but in a "sane" way, but if Bruce is wrong, and Jeremiah is being genuinely truthful... then it means that he was Evil All Along before we ever met him and the Greater-Scope Villain to his brother, Playing Both Sides from his very introduction. And now he plans to surpass every single goal that Jerome ever had for Gotham with flying colors.
  Jeremiah:He might as well have sprayed me with water.
  • The Reveal that Bruce unknowingly helped Jeremiah create some of the most dangerous bombs in existence out of energy generators, one of which destroys his own shelter which Jim was lured into.
  Jeremiah:Jim Gordon is dead.
  • The video of Jerome being strangled is uncomfortably long, until it reveals that he was... strangling... himself? Turns out he was just using another set of hands to play tricks on Jim's mind. Oh, and it was Jeremiah all along on both screens, so the video is even scarier now that it symbolically represents the idea that he has removed his brother from power and become the new face of terror in the city. Jerome's dead. Long live the Joker.
  • Jeremiah and Ecco (the latter in a Harley Quinn-esque jester outfit) breaking into Wayne enterprises, shooting two guards and planning to plant all the energy generators stored within all over the city to bring the whole thing down. Jerome who???
• One of Jerome's followers attacks Alfred, and all we get to see and hear are gunshots and screaming from behind a closed door. As it turns out, this was all on Jeremiah's orders, and even the follower didn't know that.

4x 21 One Bad Day

• When it's revealed that Jim Gordon survived the bunker blowing up and the bombs fail to go off, Jerome's followers turn on Jeremiah. Jeremiah anticipated that they would betray him so he traps them in the shelter they're hiding out in and activates the purge system, burning them alive.
  • Just the way the flames reflect off of his face while his former followers are screaming in the background brings to mind imagery of hell, and make his eyes look like they're glowing. On top of that, as he's watching his traitorous followers burn alive, he barely reacts to the spectacle at all, except to say, in a completely unaffected creepy monotone, "Well, that's disappointing." Somehow, that reaction is even more horrifying than what his brother probably would have done in the same situation, which is laugh hysterically at them.
• Even though it's ultimately revealed to be a hallucination created by the Scarecrow's fear gas, the torture Alfred is subject to is horrific to watch. When Bruce finally finds him, he's just sitting there, laughing... and then he grabs a razor and starts slitting his mouth into something very familiar.

4x 22 No Man's Land

• Jeremiah Valeska's chilling slasher smile when he watches Gotham's bridges blow up, and realizes his plans of cutting Gotham off from the mainland have succeeded.
• The Riddler's attempted murder of Gordon via Cold-Blooded Torture.
• A thug who stumbles upon Jonathan Crane's laboratory equipment gets fear-gassed and decapitated by a scythe. This Scarecrow may be young and inexperienced, but he's brutal when he's annoyed.
• Our first glimpse of Man-Bat, when he's doing a Ceiling Cling in an abandoned church, is accompanied by some soft, but very creepy noises that are as much insectile as bat-like.