With the merciful end of the USA’s increasingly contentious presidential election just over a month away, it seems fair to say that Americans are currently experiencing a bad case of campaign season fever, whether they really want to be or not. Politics is inescapably everywhere right now, and in 2016, even the fictional world hasn’t been immune to this phenomenon.
House of Cards’ villain protagonist President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) spent much of season 4 battling rival Heather Dunbar for the Democratic nomination. Veep’s Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) set out on an objectively ridiculous campaign to retain an office she probably never should have held in the first place. Even Ash vs Evil Dead’s titular chainsaw-wielding badass (Bruce Campbell) waged a viral campaign for president ahead of the series’ season 2 premiere.
With those examples in mind, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that FOX’s Gotham is getting in on the political act, although not on the national level that most other shows chose to focus on. Instead, Gotham City needs a new mayor, and the best man for the job - at least according to the candidate himself - is noted violent criminal Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot. With Gotham’s citizens currently gripped with fear due to the danger posed by Hugo’s Strange escaped experiments roaming the streets, Cobblepot has characteristically taken it upon himself to use this troubled time for his own gain, embarking on a run for the embattled city’s highest office. FOX has released a new promo and campaign poster for Cobblepot’s mayoral bid, the first of which is above and the latter below.
While the escape of Strange’s monsters from Indian Hill may outwardly be the catalyst for the turmoil in Gotham, as seen in Cobblepot’s campaign ad, the multiple murderer and power-hungry sadist has chosen to cast the blame for the city’s problems on the corrupt government officials that allowed the whole mess to happen in the first place. Proving the old adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day, Cobblepot certainly isn’t wrong in his assessment of Gotham’s awful local politicians, although how that qualifies a former crime boss to take over the job of Mayor is decidedly unclear.
In any even somewhat normal world, a man like The Penguin getting elected to a powerful political office would be highly unlikely, at least one would hope so. However, Gotham City is far from a normal world, and it wouldn’t be entirely unfathomable to one day see Cobblepot being sworn in as the new Mayor. If Jim Gordon thought he had a complex relationship with Cobblepot before, one can only imagine what it would turn into if the latter got elected.
Gotham continues next Monday with ‘Mad City: New Day Rising’ @8pm on FOX.
Source: FOX
