Gotham Season 5 Episode 11 “They Did What?” Recap & Review

The End Of An Era

With this week’s finale looming on the horizon, the penultimate episode to Gotham’s fifth episode is action packed and explosive, resolving most of the plot points in the season whilst setting things up nicely for the finale to follow.

Before we get there though, the season itself begins with Gordon, Harvey and the others trying to come up with a plan to tackle Nyssa Al Ghul. While Wayne talks to Lucius about tracking down a specific signal to stop her reign of terror, Penguin arrives and vows to fight alongside the GCPD for the sake of his own legacy. He’s not alone either, and The Riddler shows up to take arms alongside them. As the remnants of fighters rally at the battlements and prepare to engage the enemy, the army, led by Bane, show up and chaos ensues.

As bullets fly all around, this leads us back to the first episode of the series as the fight for Gotham continues. Jim discovers the origin of the signal thanks to Bruce and hurries off to bring back his baby from Nyssa whose tied up Barbara and taken her baby away for good measure. After arriving and freeing Barbara, Nyssa executes the fail-safe, which sees the General shooting himself in the head. While Nys scurries away, Bane ambushes Selina and Bruce out in the streets which sees them engaging in a dangerous fight for survival

As fighting continues across the city, all of this culminates in a final showdown between the fragments of Jim’s fighting force and the army. All seems lost until the residents of Gotham band together and stand united with Gordon and the others. Bane sneers, ordering his troops to fire at will but they refuse. Instead, they point their guns at him and arrest Bane. Unbeknownst to them, Nyssa has slipped away in the submarine heading for destination unknown.

As peace finally washes over Gotham, Barbara tells Jim she’s calling her child Barbara Lee Gordon so she knows which people she can trust in Gotham while Nyssa escapes once and for all. Meanwhile, Riddler and Penguin stew over their lack of recognition for what they’ve done for the city. They both vow to rise to the top of their respective criminal empires, promising some fun to be had in the meantime.

We then leave the episode with Alfred saying goodbye to Bruce as he flies off in a private jet, leaving him to rebuild Wayne Manor. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say anything to Selina whose stuck in Gotham alone and left to think about Bruce’s hasty escape.

Given the cliffhanger ending we had last week, Gotham’s plot feel a little too neatly wrapped up and resolved at the end of this one. While there is some good material here and the fighting scenes in particular help make this episode more epic than usual, the slightly haphazard nature to the overarching plot this season is difficult to ignore. Given the farewells we receive in this episode, this could easily have passed for a finale itself but for now, we’ll have to wait and see how Gotham fares with its final episode which looks set to skip forward in time and finally give us a glimpse of our dark knight in action.