Directed by Rob Bailey
Written by Tze Chun
The GCPD must race the clock to prevent Jeremiah from leveling the city, while he also attempts to drive Bruce mad.
Tropes
- The Big Damn Kiss: Bruce and Selina at the end of the episode.
- Broken Pedestal: When Gordon publicly reveals he's still alive, and Harvey prevents the bombs from going off, Jeremiah's followers decide he's a fraud and turn on him.
- Bullying a Dragon: While Jeremiah was an apparently normal, harmless engineer before being sprayed with Joker venom, and had only spent a few days as a criminal at the start of this episode, during that short period of time, he had held the whole city hostage with high-tech bombs and forced a city-wide evacuation. Oswald, Barbara, Butch and Tabitha really should have known better than to think that trying to force him to extort the city for money on their behalf would end well for them.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The goon Riddler sent to follow Gordon last episode apparently dragged him to safety after Jeremiah's bunker exploded.
- Crazy-Prepared: Jeremiah, this entire episode. He predicts that Jerome's followers will eventually turn on him, so he meets them in a location where he can conveniently turn the room they're standing in into an incinerator, and then burns them alive when they betray him. He predicts that someone will try to destroy the mechanism that connects all his bombs, so he prepares a way for the bombs to go off without that mechanism, and doesn't tell any of his followers about it, so the information can't be tortured out of them. He then destroys his own device when Oswald tries to extort money from him by holding his device for ransom, knowing Oswald doesn't intend to give it back to him no matter what he does. Finally, when Harvey is trying to disarm his bombs with Lucius' help, they find out that he added another piece to the bombs/generators that he didn't include in the blueprints he gave Wayne Enterprises. The piece he added looks exactly like the one that will disarm the bombs, only this one will make them all go off, instead. So that means that even though he thought there was no chance anyone could find his bombs on time because he destroyed his own notes, he still added something extra to make sure anyone trying to disarm them had no more than a fifty/fifty chance of doing so. That Harvey saved all of Gotham instead of hastening its destruction was pure luck.
- Enemy Mine: Riddler helping Jim find Jeremiah's bombs, at Lee's insistence.
- Even Evil Has Standards: While they are using the opportunity to get rich, Tabitha asks Penguin if they'll really give back Jeremiah's core relay for his bombs when they get the money. Penguin reveals that after they get their money, they'll kill Jeremiah and his followers, hand the relay over to the police and be hailed as the heroes of Gotham.
- Subverted with Riddler, who actually compliments Jeremiah's plan but helps Jim foil it anyway for Lee's sake.
- Fingore: Part of the torture that Penguin and Butch put the Jongleur through involved ripping out his fingernails.
- From Bad to Worse: Penguin, Butch, Barbara, and Tabitha's attempt to extort money from Jeremiah by holding the core relay to his bombs hostage ends with Jeremiah deciding to destroy the relay and set off his bombs with a back up plan as soon as he can get somewhere safe to watch the destruction, cutting short the evacuation time he had given to the city.
- Glasgow Grin: Bruce's hallucination of Alfred cuts the corners of his mouth with a straight razor.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Riddler is obviously not happy about the continued connection between Lee and Jim.
- Jump Scare: When Bruce enters the warehouse to find Alfred, the room appears to be dark and quiet... and then a projector turns on to reveal a close up of Alfred's screaming face.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: While Bruce is under the effects of the fear toxin, he is forced to fight what appears to be a Joker-toxin-addled Alfred. However, when Selina turns off the fear gas from another room, she can see through the monitor that the "Alfred" he's fighting is actually one of Jeremiah's followers, and that the real Alfred is trapped in the closet, where she rescues him.
- Mythology Gag: Plenty to The Killing Joke — the title is of course a reference to the Joker's "Break Them by Talking" lecture to Gordon, a similar one of which Jeremiah gives to Bruce in this episode while similarly trying to drive him insane (he even says the line, "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy", which is taken straight from the comic). Jeremiah's gaslighting of Bruce with video of a tortured Alfred is comparable to how Joker tormented Commissioner Gordon with photos of his bleeding daughter. And, just as the Joker shot Barbara Gordon in the graphic novel, causing her to collapse onto a glass table in the process, Jeremiah does the same to Selina here.
- Rebuilt Pedestal: The GCPD still has a negative view of Harvey following his disastrous tenure as Captain. By the end of the episode, after he risks his life to disable Jeremiah's bombs, they're applauding him.
- Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: After Jeremiah's bomb plot is foiled and Bruce manages to rescue Alfred and return to the mansion, he has a quiet moment with Selina... right before Jeremiah suddenly walks in and shoots her.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: After Selina matches him in their fight, Scarecrow flees.
- Villain Team-Up:
- Penguin and Butch ally with Barbara and Tabitha to extort a fortune out of Jeremiah (and then kill him).
- Near the end of the episode, Ra's offers an alliance to Jeremiah.
- Wham Shot: Literally in the last moments of the episode, as Jeremiah suddenly appears in Wayne Manor and shoots Selina.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: When Gordon manages to turn Jeremiah's followers against him, Jeremiah locks them in a bunker and incinerates them.
