Nightmare Fuel / Gotham Season Three

Season 3

3 X 1 Better To Reign In Hell

• Fish's powered underling who, with a touch, ages a man from his twenties to old age, causing him to drop dead on the spot.
• Despite her being a villain, it is still horrifying when he kills Ethel Peabody. From the look on Selina's face, you can tell she's going to have nightmares in-universe.
  • He does it at the end to Ivy, turning her from a teenager to her 20s.
• Barbara's grin and manical laughter as she beats a would-be gang leader down in her bar would do the Joker proud. She even starts it out by fake-crying before breaking into laughter, much like Jerome did in Season One.

3 X 2 Burn The Witch

• Penguin rallying an angry mob, which beats two of Fish's minions to death. And perhaps what's worse, is that Penguin is now seen as some kind of hero by the people of Gotham.
• Kathryn, the Court of Owls spokeswoman, and her total coldness. She shows no fear of Bruce, removing her mask almost immediately so he can see her face and her hard eyes. The way she effortlessly threatens the lives of Bruce and his loved ones shows just how much power she and the Court has. By the end, she has forced Bruce to give up his quest for the truth, without even breaking a sweat.

3 X 3 Look Into My Eyes

• This show has managed to make The Mad Hatter, perhaps Batman's most ridiculous foe, absolutely terrifying. The way he calmly hypnotizes people and plants subliminal messages for later use... Like making it so that a man will obey his every order instantly, including murdering his wife and committing suicide. He later uses those same abilities on Gordon... and just about convinces him to walk off a roof. And in his case, not even breaking out of the trance cancels the impulse.
  • It doesn't help that his eyes sometime appear to be completely black.
  • Also, the one time it backfires on him: at his show he hypnotizes Barbara into believing she loves him, but then he tells her he doesn't love her back. The only reason Barbara didn't kill him on the spot was Tabitha getting to her just as she was about to slit his throat...
• Alice's strange powers. She's Typhoid Mary, able to kill (or worse) with just a drop of blood. And she apparently had these powers before being dragged to Indian Hill.
• Penguin is running for mayor. He's a great politician, able to turn the people to his side. And convince them to beat people (or at least Indian Hill escapees) to death. Not to mention he's ax crazy and perfectly willing to murder anyone who gets in his way. Seriously, this guy running Gotham, from a legitimate position? That's scary.
  • It gets worse. The guy he wants to have help him run is none other than Edward Nygma, who he gets released from Arkham. Remember, this is the guy who convinced Penguin to take up crime again after Galavan killed his mom. And sent him packing when he was turned into a normal human being. If anyone is worse than Penguin, it's Ed.
• Subject 514A, one of Hugo Strange's experiments: he has no memory of his past before Indian Hill, he somehow knows how to box well enough to surprise Alfred (doing so with quick, unnatural reflexes), can't feel any pain, has multiple scars from Strange's experiments and a burn from putting his arm on the fire out of curiosity, and looks just like Gotham's richest boy, Bruce Wayne. And now he wants to impersonate him.
  • Ultimately subverted, as it's later shown in the next episode that 514A simply wanted to know what it felt like to live without having people who see him as a freak.

3 X 4 New Day Rising

• The shot of Alice's dead and impaled body, suspended in the air. You will never look at a certain scene from Alice in Wonderland the same way again.
  • And before that, it's not-so-subtly implied that Jervis Tetch used to torture his sister by planting his own incestuous thoughts in her head. When he does get his hands on her, he forces her to wear a dress just like the character from Alice in Wonderland and, moments before her death, insists that it can just be the two of them together again, forever... Poor Alice never manages to escape from the nightmare that is her brother, never gets to have a normal life. The tears that begin to fall from her eyes, her utter raw terror towards her brother, makes the scene even more horrifying.
• Tetch very nearly manages to convince Gordon to kill himself, twice this episode. The first time, Gordon has a horrified look on his face as his own hand moves the gun to his own head.
• Barnes being infected by Alice's blood. Even he realizes the horror of what just happened.
• Bruce's clone being recruited by the Court of Owls.

3 X 5 Anything for You

• Tetch's serious sanity slippage at the end of the episode: he's taken a girl, put her in a blonde wig and a blue dress a la Alice in Wonderland, and is talking to her as if she's his dead sister, right before slitting her throat. Oh, and he writes James Gordon's name in the girl's blood.

3 X 6 Follow the White Rabbit

• The vacant smiles on the faces of the hypnotized bride and groom which stay even when they jump off a bridge into traffic on Tetch's ccommand, just to screw with Jim.
• Jervis Tetch forces Sadistic Choice after sadistic choice upon Gordon, ALL of which end up with someone either critically wounded or dead. The final choice involves Jim choosing between Lee and Valerie. Jim tells Tetch to kill Lee. Tetch then shoots Valerie.
  • More so, the way Jim ultimately chooses. No sincerity, nor emotion expressed in the way he says it. Just a quick, cold "Kill Lee".

3 X 7 Red Queen

• Jervis steals his dead sister's body from the morgue to drain out all her blood. When he first reunites with her, he plants a kiss on her cheek. Nightmare Fuel in that he sexually abused her for years.

3 X 8 Blood Rush

• Barnes Drunk on the Dark Side - he's now Batman without his Thou Shalt Not Kill rule, and he now has voices repeating "Guilty", not to mention him seeing hellish faces of assorted "guilty" people.
  • His first murder is horrifying, attacking a criminal and using his bare strength to remove his head clean off his shoulders, before he literally tears him limb from limb. Even Bullock is speechless when he and Jim first see the crime scene.
• Isabella making herself look like Kristen Kringle, as well as putting Ed's hand around her neck to push him past his fears, seems unnervingly intense, especially considering they just met a few days ago. One wonders if Isabella might be a bit of a Death Seeker, or whether she might become a Yandere down the line.
• It's disturbing to contrast Oswald's love for Ed with his love for his mother. While his love for his mother was arguably one of his few redeeming qualities, his love for Nygma is so twisted that he'll murder a woman out of jealousy, thinking it'll bring the two of them together.

3 X 9 The Executioner

• Isabella's face. It's horrifically maimed by the train that took her life. It's very graphic, even by Gotham's standards.

3 X 10 Time Bomb

• The reveal that Mario Calvi is infected by the Tetch Virus. And the trigger? Fearing that Lee might still love Gordon. Which, of course, is true.
• The scene where Ed is torturing Butch and Tabitha. So close to the midseason finale, one wouldn't have been terribly surprised if Ed had really managed to kill one of them off.

3 X 11 Beware the Green-Eyed Monster

• Mario's increasing descent into insanity. By the end of the episode, the Tetch virus has completely taken over, including him Hulking Out, leading him to come within a hair of killing Lee. Good thing Gordon showed up when he did... Or not, considering that at the episode's end, he made Lee a very early widow. Couldn't he have non-fatally shot Mario?
  • Probably not, considering Mario was standing behind Lee, and Gordon needed to shoot Mario without hitting Lee. The majority of Mario's non-fatal areas weren't in Gordon's line of sight (and he's not Deadshot, so he can't bounce his projectiles) and with Mario's increased strength/resilience from hulking out, Mario still could have killed Lee if he were shot non-fatally (like in the shoulder). With only a split-second to react, Gordon's lucky he got there in time at all.
    • Plus, everything in Gordon's training as both a soldier and a cop agrees: shooting "non-fatally" is not a realistic option. If you have to fire to save a life, you absolutely must put the attacker down.
  • Also the scene where Mario crushes a scientist's head open with a sickening pop. It doesn't help that the audience gets to see the gorey aftermath.

3 X 12 Ghost

• Jerome's actions have inspired an entire movement of lunatics, who see him as a Dark Messiah teaching them how to be The Unfettered. And they're working to bring him Back from the Dead.
• Oswald discovering his father's rotting corpse in Tarquin's office. Led to believe that Tarquin was the one that dug up the body, he violently bludgeons the guy to death with a golf trophy, on his birthday.
• A subtler one than the others: Barnes's bloodthirsty smile and declaration that Alice's blood has set him free to act on his true desires. He all but guarantees that when he gets out of Arkham ("and I will get out!" he promises), he'll be Gordon's judge, jury, and executioner.

3x 13 Smile Like You Mean It

• Jerome's Facial Horror. First, Dwight cuts it off and then wears it over his own face like a mask. Then we get a lovely view of Jerome's corpse (and later resurrected self) with a pit of bloody flesh left over for a face. Then finally, Jerome staples his own face back on, leaving him with a horrifying, stitched-together appearance. It is clearly a reference to Death of the Family when Joker went around wearing his own rotting face as a removable mask, but it honestly brings to mind Scarecrow's reconstructed face in Batman: Arkham Knight, or possibly Frankenstein's monster.
• Jerome's cult, as always. Their maniacal zeal and chants of "We are Jerome!" just adds to it, almost giving them a Fight Club vibe (think, "His name is Robert Paulson!"). Their mad hyena laughter makes one wonder if Joker will later get his inspiration for Joker Venom from them.
  • And then there's the reveal that there's more of them in Gotham, hiding under a veneer of badly concealed sanity. Which makes it more terrifying when Jerome broadcasts his resurrection and tells them to 'do what they will' - murder, stealing, worse - before blowing up the power plant (with Dwight tied to the dynamite), and plunging Gotham into literal darkness.
• Lee's total coldness in this episode. While she's understandably still grieving her husband's death, her anger and blame toward Gordon show a darker side, especially since she knew Mario was dangerous to her and yet still treats Gordon's shooting of him as cold-blooded murder rather than his protection of her. Her abrupt injection of a perp with truth serum and total apathy with regards to Jerome threatening her life also hints that Lee is changing, and not in ways for the better.

3x 14 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

• Ed is willing to kill Oswald first by melting him in acid, and then, when that falls through, shooting him (non-fatally) and dumping him in the river to drown. Sweet dreams.
  • The next episode reveals that only Ed and his cronies know Oswald is "dead", so he's even deprived of a proper funeral and the city mourning its mayor.
• The Circus of Fear that Jerome sets up, with his followers turning all the games into means of torturing villains.
  • For that matter, the neo-Maniax terrorizing the city. The GCPD station is quickly overrun with trying to take them all down.
• Bruce beating Jerome so hard that his face sags off, causing him to bleed through the cuts. With how pale and deformed his face becomes, combined with his grotesque, bloody smile, Jerome looks eerily like you-know-who for a brief second.
  • Later, when Jerome attempts to attack Bruce with a mirror shard, Jim intervenes and punches his face clean off!

3x 15 How the Riddler Got His Name

• The fact that, several weeks later, the GCPD is still finding corpses from the night of Jerome's riots.
• Nygma becoming a full on Serial Killer, murdering Gotham's most intelligent elites in the hopes of finding a mind as equally brilliant as his. The episode opens with him taking care of his sixth victim, the chair of the chemistry department; when the professor gets his riddle wrong, Ed proceeds to lock him in the room and blow the place up.
  • Later in the episode, he crashes the GCPD graduation and gasses everyone in the room, officers, graduates, and all. It's later revealed that it was merely knockout gas and that everyone actually survived, but the scene was downright chilling nonetheless.
    • He also ties Harvey to a chair and threatens to drop him down a stairwell. Even when Lucius wins their agreement, the ropes holding him up still snap and Ed only cackles and says "oops" before making his clean escape.
• Ed's hallucination of Oswald can be a bit unsettling to look at, as it's clearly supposed to be Penguin's drowned corpse, with it's waterlogged appearance and blue-tinged lips.
• The ending reveals that Penguin managed to survive getting shot by Ed, and is now under the care of Ivy Pepper. Gone are his strong romantic feelings and buddy-buddy relationship with Ed; now, the Penguin's out for blood, and he wants his revenge...

3x 17 The Primal Riddle

• So clone!Bruce, still nursing a soft spot for Selina, goes to her in her darkened apartment and winds up confiding his secret in her. When she calls him out on knowing about the Court's evil plans and only trying to save her instead of saving everyone (which real!Bruce would have done), he gets noticeably more unhinged, before pushing her out of a window mid-sentence. Worse yet, her wide-open eyes and contorted bodily position make it clear that she did not survive the fall. It honestly brings to mind a domestic abuse situation, combined with Alone with the Psycho.

3x 20 Pretty Hate Machine

• Jim Gordon has been infected with the Alice Tetch Virus. The Badass Normal protector of all that is right and good in Gotham City is now a monster, and there's no known cure. Only Plot Armor can save him now.

3x21/ 22 Destiny Calling/Heavydirtysoul

• Jim Gordon under the effects of the Tetch virus. Throughout the entire episode he tries to keep the virus from infecting him, but begins to succumb, killing Fish, almost killing Jervis when Barbara, Butch and Tabitha corner them in a warehouse, putting the whole of Gotham in danger and attacks Bullock.