Wouldn’t it be crazy if Batman and Joker both had kids and then they kissed?? Gotham Knights asks and answers the hard questions this episode Spoilers follow for Gotham Knights, Season 1, Episode 10, “Poison Pill.”
“Poison Pill”
With one of their own in trouble, the team scrambles to find a solution before it’s too late. Elsewhere, Harvey (Misha Collins) undertakes a risky gambit to get the answers he seeks. Finally, Brody (Rahart Adams) turns to Stephanie (Anna Lore) after he stumbles upon some information involving his father Lincoln (guest star Damon Dayoub).
Turner’s radiation poisoning takes center stage this week, commanding the attention of the young Knights entirely. While that’s going on, Harvey is talking to himself (literally) and Brody has made a life-changing discovery about his family.
Turner’s condition forces all kinds of things to the forefront. By the end of the episode, Turner and Anna know they aren’t interested in each other romantically, while Turner and Duela have an encounter that proves the opposite.
Carrie that Guilt
The biggest shift comes for Carrie Kelley. Carrie has been an integral character to the story since episode 1, but she’s woefully underdeveloped compared to the other Knights. When Turner’s sickness goes from inconvenient to dire, Carrie takes Turner to her mom, asking her to help her with a surreptitious blood transfusion to help cure his poisoning. We’ve met her mother before, but it was in the context of the classic “superhero’s secret identity almost revealed to a loved one” kind of moments.
This time, Carrie is forced to reveal Turner to her as well as her involvement with Batman. She also finds herself forced to talk to Turner about the missing pages from the diary. Carrie reveals that the Court was indeed telling Turner something akin to the truth when they were torturing him. Batman is at least partially responsible for their deaths. They have a tough conversation where Turner calls her out for protecting people from things they may not want protecting from.
Carrie is probably the character I’m most curious about among the Knights. She has the strongest connection to the comics and to this show’s version of Batman, but the show hasn’t given us enough information to really understand how much time she spent with him, what their working dynamic was like, or why she was so motivated to pursue and learn from him. Any story beats thrown her way are appreciated, and this puts her in an uncomfortable position where it seems like more will have to come out soon.
Elsewhere in Gotham
Meanwhile, Harvey intentionally overdoses on drugs at the behest of his more dramatic half and ends up unconscious, where the two personalities are able to interact directly rather than through a recorded video.
This conversation casts Harv in a much better light than I would’ve expected. Harv isn’t just Harvey being a jerk, he’s more like a version of Harvey that acts in Harvey’s own best interests, both selfish and otherwise. He protected Harvey from his abusive father, but he also pursued Rebecca Marsh against Harvey’s best wishes because Harvey was/is in love with her. I still don’t think we’re going to see Two-Face in this season, and I don’t think we’re going to get a second season of the show, but it makes the implied future for this character that much more curious. Harvey doesn’t have Batman to accidentally destroy his life, so what does actually happen that puts Harv in the driver’s seat?
Finally, we also see that despite how powerful the Court of Owls is, there’s about as much infighting as we would’ve guessed. Brody finds his dad’s Owl mask and, after talking to Anna goes to his mother to tell her. She responds by stabbing him in the chest, and he bleeds out on the floor. His father Lincoln is visibly distraught, but when we see Brody being taken away later in that episode, he wakes up in the coffin, suggesting that either his mother used Electrum on him or that there’s more of a ruse going on here than the show is letting on.
In general, this episode is a fun watch that moves a lot of different story elements forward without leaning heavily on any one theme. It’s just lots of long-gestating secrets coming out about characters that I’ve gotten much more invested in than I expected at the outset.
