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On a dark and stormy night in Gotham, two hoodlums in scary make-up break into an old man's apartment, while Fish Mooney rides out the storm in some drafty catacombs populated by big angry palookas itching for a fight. I guess her fight at the end of the previous episode didn't end all that well, but she's not intimidated. Not one bit. Let's see how the rest of the cast is faring.

Gordon's Quest

Back in the slightly more palatable above-ground world of Gotham's snowy streets, Gordon and Dr. Thompkins end their date with a kiss ... oh and the news that the good doctor is now going to be working alongside the detective as the GCPD's new Medical Examiner. There will be no celebrating for Gordon, however, as he and Bullock have to respond to the crime scene shown in the episode's opening. This victim's adrenal glands have also been surgically removed. I wonder what they're being used for ...

Cut to a sequence of Gerald Crane mashing up the adrenal gland into a paste that he then injects into his arm. A new kind of high? Not exactly. Crane sees a vision of his dilapidated home's staircase bursting into flames, with a woman walking through the fire and asking why he won't help her.

On Thompkins' first day at work, Bullock is teasing Gordon about his new lady love, warning him that office romances always end in tears. To take their minds off Gordon's love interest, they settle in to do some actual police work. Bullock spots Gerald Crane (a high school biology teacher) in the murder victim's year book. In talking to a school official, they learn that Crane's wife died in a car accident; they also learn that Crane was obsessed with fear, and more specifically, curing his own fear by targeting phobics, scaring them to jack up their adrenaline, and then stealing their glands. (Gordon makes some of the worst leaps of logic ever written, but the jump the school official makes was the most blatant example of lazy writing I've seen in some time. If she had that strong an opinion about Crane's obsession, maybe she should have told someone earlier.)

Back at the lab, Gordon and Bullock check in with Nygma to talk about Crane's experiments. Of course, the nutty scientist is thrilled to be included, and very excited about finding out who Dr. Crane's second test subject is. Viewers know, of course, that it's his son, Jonathan. The elder Crane injects his son with the latest treatment, but he reacts rather poorly to it.

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Image via Fox

Bullock and Gordon discover that Crane's wife actually died in a house fire and not a car crash, also figuring out that Crane's fear (and inaction) led to his wife's death. The pair rush off to Crane's hideout in the shell of the burned down house. While Gerald's fear appears to be under control, Jonathan is trying to run away from it (and toward a creepy scarecrow in the field). Their anti-fear serum protocol is interrupted by the arrival of the cops; though Jonathan protests, Gerald injects him with an overdose. The young man writhes in agony as he watches the scarecrow come to life above him.  Gerald, now the man without fear (no, not that one), now walks directly into a gun battle with Gordon and Bullock. They put him down, but appear to be too late to stop Jonathan's seizure. Though they get him to the hospital, it turns out that Jonathan's every waking hour is filled with visions of the things he fears most: a skeletal, fiery-eyed scarecrow coming to get him.

Bruce Wayne's Coming of Age

Bruce is packing for a solitary hiking trip, but Alfred asks if he'd like him to come along. Apparently Bruce used to take this hike with his father, but the young billionaire is now left alone to carry on the tradition. It's probably not the best idea to send a young, recognizable billionaire into the wild on his own...

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Bruce stops at a pile of rocks partway along his journey. Some bear the initials BW, and a substantially larger pile bears the letters TW. Bruce soon throws a tantrum and destroys both piles, scattering the stones across the mountainside. Karma quickly kicks him in his pants as he trips and falls down into a gully, twisting his ankle severely.

Alfred, ever watchful, keeps an eye on his timepiece as he wonders what kind of trouble young Master Bruce has gotten himself into this time. Bruce manages to fashion a splint of sorts out of a spare bit of stick, but it certainly doesn't help him walk any. By the time he crawls up the hill to the summit, Alfred is there waiting for him with a roaring campfire. Rather than help his ward up the hill, he simply waits for him to do it himself, which is respectable. The two finally show a bit of warmth and good-natured ribbing, a real father-son moment. To cement it, they stay out in the woods long enough to watch the sunrise together, just like Thomas Wayne used to do with Bruce.

Penguin's Rise to Power

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Falcone and Penguin take a tour of Fish's restaurant. The place is in shambles, and is rather offensive to the mob boss' fashion sense. Though Penguin is worried about his own skin now that Maroni wants him dead, Falcone wants his lackey to run the new club under his own name. Falcone will take care of Maroni, or so he says, but a rainy stroll by the mob bosses puts Penguin's life in jeopardy. In exchange for squashing Maroni's beef with Penguin, Falcone offers up Judge Turnbull, who's done a fair amount of damage to Maroni's empire over the years. Now, Falcone has the judge in a glass cage wearing only his underwear and a ball gag, along with a dominatrix and what appears to be a dead young man. That's a little twisted.

Too bad Penguin is preoccupied with opening his new club, "Oswald's." He's very excited about hand delivering one particular invitation, which brings him to the GCPD. (There's a very odd and awkwardly funny meet-cute between Penguin and the pre-Riddler Nygma here. Let's just say that they're not getting off on the right foot...) Penguin's invitation is for Gordon, and it's promptly turned down. However, an uninvited guest crashes the party: Maroni, who lets Penguin know that he's safe with Falcone, as long as the old man is alive. Maroni may have just sealed his own fate by mocking Penguin in his own club.

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Ousted from her own club and dragged into that strange subterranean prison of sorts, Fish relies on another prisoner's intel to figure the place out. It seems that the lead prisoner is a guy named Mace. Let's see how long he stays on top. She soon chats up the boss, and discovers that he's the only one who has a knife in the whole place (and a small one at that). Fish offers up her skills to get closer to him, in exchange for his protection. Too bad Fish doesn't need protection, she just needed to lift Mace's knife and jam it into his throat in order to topple the prison boss. She's also gotten herself a lackey pretty quickly, the boozehound who gave her the necessary intel on the prison. During the first hour of Mooney's new rule, an old prisoner returns ... without her eyes.

While I would have loved to see this raw and ruthless version of Mooney from the start, the real highlight of this episode was, of course, the origin of The Scarecrow. It's a surprisingly short origin story in a season of drawn-out arcs for bigger baddies, and maddeningly illustrative of what the series could do with other Batman villains if they only chose to do so. The plotting is still not as taut or cohesive as it could be; this was a missed opportunity to highlight Bruce Wayne's fear, and his ability to overcome it through will alone, acting as a counterpoint to Crane's attempts at developing a cure through chemical (and criminal) means. We're not to that level of storytelling yet, but this is one of Gotham's more promising hours.

Rating: ★★★ Good — Proceed with cautious optimism.

(An explanation of our ratings system follows here.)

Miscellanea:

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Penguin: "Don Falcone, please! Maroni wants my scalp and you'd have me redecorate!"

Bullock: "I'll tell you one thing, girls didn't look like this when I was back in high school." Gordon: "Easy!" Creepy.

Nygma: "What I want, the poor have, the rich need, and if you eat it, you'll die."

Nygma: "Did you know that male Emperor penguins keep their eggs warm by balancing them on their feet? Isn't that neat?"

Penguin: "Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light."

Falcone (on Penguin): "He's clever enough to know that a freakish little man like him is never going to be the boss."

Fish: "Firecracker goes off once then just lies there. What you're looking at is the Fourth of July."

Fish: "My name is Fish Mooney. I'm in charge now."

Alfred: "Hello, Master Bruce. You certainly took your time. What'd you stop for a pie and a pint on your way up?"

Dr. Thompkins: "Oh hey, how are you? I heard your suspect was killed." Just another Monday.

Dr. Thompkins: "I have tickets to the circus. Care to join me?" Interesting...

Prisoner: "They took my eyes!"

The promo for next week was somehow even more exciting than this entire episode. Will we finally meet the junior version of Batman's most infamous foe?

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Image via Justin Stephens/FOX