Gotham Knights season 1, episode 12 recap: City of Owls

It was a bad previous episode of Gotham Knights for Harvey Dent, as he discovered that his second personality not only sired a daughter, but then that daughter shot him. And then the whole world found out about his secret child, tanking his run for mayor.

As this episode begins, the bad news keeps coming for Harvey as Lincoln March officially wins the race for Mayor, and fires Harvey from the DA’s office, just for good measure.

Gotham Knights season 1, episode 12 recap – A new lead that’s also an old lead

Meanwhile, the Gotham Knights minus Duela (who ran off with her mom at the end of the last episode) have their morning interrupted by an insistent beeping in the hideout. The beeping turns out to be a low battery notification for the lapel camera that Turner wore when sneaking into The Court of Owls meeting.

While the camera had been presumed to have been destroyed, the low battery indicator means that it’s still out there somewhere, hopefully with the footage of Cressida murder as well. Stephanie and Harper break into March tower while Lincoln March is out celebrating his mayor victory.

They manage to find the camera and the footage, but security shows up forcing them to make a run for it. Trapped in the building, they decide to hide on floor N, which turns out to be the thirteenth floor.

For superstition reasons, the building has no thirteenth floor, but Turner reasons that Alan Wayne, who designed the building, built an extra secret floor to suck up all the bad luck. He also deduces that if all of Alan Wayne’s buildings had secret thirteenth floors, then Wayne Tower might have one which is how Bruce Wayne’s killer was able to escape so effectively.

Meanwhile, back on the bad luck floor, Stephanie and Harper discover a coffin that has somebody alive in it. They open the coffin to reveal Brody, not as dead as he was when his Mom stabbed him a few episodes ago.

They help Brody out of the coffin and try to escape the building, but security shows up once again, and this time they end up shooting Brody several times before being subdued. It turns out that the shooting doesn’t matter though, because Brody can’t die.

It would appear that he was given some electrum and is now immortal. However, he’s plenty mad at his parents for the whole thing, so he joins the rest of the Gotham Knights to take down The Court.

Since he knows where they’re meeting that night, the Knights now have a location to crash.

Gotham Knights season 1, episode 12 recap – Showdown with the whole Court

At The Court of Owls’ ceremony where they’re about to celebrate all the electrum they now have, Rebecca March reveals that they’ve already revived a whole bunch of past Talons with the electrum supply. And that’s just one of a bunch of reveals that Rebecca has in store.

She reveals to Lincoln that she’s poisoned him and that even though he has electrum in his system as well and can’t be killed, the poison will take him out long enough for him to be presumed dead and buried, trapping him underground once he regains consciousness. Then when the Gotham Knights show up, they discover that Rebecca has had the resurrected Talons kill every member of the Court’s party.

They’ve arrived just in time for the GCPD to show up and arrest them all. Then when Harvey is exploring the secret thirteenth floor of Wayne Tower, he runs into Rebecca and learns that she is in fact a 200-year-old woman who learned the secret to immortality a long time ago.

She was once engaged to Alan Wayne and has been planning her evil plot from the shadows for centuries. But now she has fallen in love with Harvey and wants him to be with her for the rest of their immortal eternity.

That is a lot of backstory for Rebecca this episode. Duela has been sitting on the sidelines for most of this episode, until she learns that all of her friends have been sent to jail.

She decides that she can’t turn her back on them and tells her mother that she’s off to free her friends. Her mother responds by drugging her daughter, presumably for the reward money of turning in the one last member of the gang that was presumed to have killed Batman.

So, with just one episode to go, we’ve got most of the Gotham Knights in jail, Harvey a prisoner of The Court of Owls, Duela betrayed by her mother and drugged, and Rebecca sending a whole squadron of Talons to the jail to kill off the Gotham Knights as this episode comes to a close.

Gotham Knights season 1, episode 12 recap – But of course it’s canceled

It always seemed like it was going to wind up this way. Since the very beginning of the show, Gotham Knights has been getting ratings that put the show right on the edge.

While a renewal would have been justifiable in certain circumstances, it’s no surprise that the show has been canceled, given what the ratings are and the new direction that the channel seems to be headed in.

And of course, the cancellation announcement had to come around just as the show was starting to get good. Maybe good is too strong a word, but these past two episodes have certainly brought the show to a new level that it hasn’t been at before.

We’ve finally started to get a lot of payoff. Many of the issues of the earlier episodes have either been course corrected or justified with later reveals.

It feels like Gotham Knights is finally starting to find itself, and now the show is done after this season. With the reveals of this episode, it does seem like the show has a direction in mind for the story it’s telling.

Hopefully with one episode left, Gotham Knights will get to go out on something that’s narratively satisfying.

What did you think of Gotham Knights season 1 episode 12? Leave your answers in the comments below!

Stay tuned for a new episode June 27 on The CW.