Gotham brought back some old foes in “A Legion of Horribles.†As was shown throughout various promotional material and strongly assumed to happen this season, we get the return of the character everyone loved to hate, Fish Mooney. Penguin threw her off a cliff, but what is dead doesn’t seem to stay dead in Indian Hills. Hugo Strange has to make his masters happy, and the only way for that to be done is by reanimating a corpse and having that person still has his or her memories intact. So, how does, “ A Legion of Horribles,†unfold for our lovely cast of heroes and villains? It was quite solid as is usual with this show, albeit, it isn’t just one character that steals the show. Each character plays his or her part well which provides us with a solid showing of Gotham.
The pressure on Strange is mounting, and  he has rapidly begun to increase the amount of tests he is doing to his patients; the vast majority of them result in failure. There are two in the episode, however, that set a huge precedent for what is to come. Strange and Peabody’s first experiment in the episode was a guy that has extremely elastic skin. While seeming like the show just wanted us to see what could happen to some of his experiments, this character plays a much larger role moving forward. As for his other experimental, Fish had to come back some way right?
While Fish is indeed back from the dead, she is the first of the reanimated corpses to come back with all of her memories and a soul; the rest were just lifeless clones of their former selves. While she came back just as she was, she also came back with an unintended ability. Apparently through touch, she is able to control people’s minds to some extent. At one point when she is locked in a cell, a guard brings her food. She grabs him and says to bring her a grilled cheese, and of course he does. Who knows how she could use this to her advantage going forward and whether or not it works on everyone. What is even more perplexing is on whom she will even attempt to use it.
As for Strange, his insane intelligence and ego allowed for his enemies to come directly to him. In this episode, Bruce is able to convince Alfred that he needs to go on the inside at Arkham so that Lucius can see if there are trace elements of radiation, which would suggest they do have an underground lab of some sort. He begrudgingly agrees, and Lucius and Bruce also sneak in Jim Gordon. They all got in, but they certainly aren’t going to get back out.
Bruce attempts to verbally spar with Strange, but Strange certainly has the upper hand. He uses his words to poke and prod at Bruce, attempting to find out what he knows and what he is trying to discover. But once Strange starts to delve into how his father died, Bruce can’t hold it together and confronts him about his parents’ murder. It was a mistake on his part, but I don’t believe that Strange was going to let any of them out anyway. He rounds them up and puts them in a cell, but he has something special to show Jim.
They toss a cast-like object onto Jim’s head and pour liquid into it to creating a mold. They then toss it on the elastic guy, and it brutally transforms his head into a carbon copy of Jim Gordon. The more the real Jim talks, the more pho-Jim mimics it. With the entire GCPD ready to assault Arkham and a pho Jim at Strange’s beckon call, who knows what is about to develop?
The final piece of the puzzle is Firefly. Last episode ended with her preparing to torch Selina. Luckily, Selina is able to slyly talk her out of it and convinces her that she should have a servant. The story that Strange crafted for her makes her out to be the Goddess of Fire, and Selina quips, “You’re not a goddess if you don’t have a servant.†It was a nice set of scenes as this plotline develops, and it’ll be neat to see how Selina manages her once dear friend.
