I expected to be annoyed by a six-minute collection of all the riddles that Edward Nygma has posed so far on Gotham, mainly because they were all lifted from a 1955 Child’s Treasury of Riddles book. But I’m happy to report this video is delightfully entertaining, because it’s also a supercut of people getting really goddamned annoyed with him.
It’s actually a perfect encapsulation of what makes Gotham so insane. The show is ostensibly trying to tell us how Edward Nygma developed into the genius supervillain the Riddler that would prove such a difficult, deadly foe for Batman. And yet this supercut reveals the following:
1) The Riddler’s riddles are neither clever nor difficult
2) A shocking amount of them have the answer “nothing”
3) Some of them aren’t even riddles
And that’s not even pointing out that literally everyone in the GCPD knows that ol’ Ed Nygma is obsessed with riddles, which is going to make his career as a riddle-themed supervillain just a mite difficult to kick off. Case in point! Here’s part of the summary for tonight’s episode of Gotham:
Gordon and Bullock investigate a trail of clues left in a museum robbery, which, unbeknownst to them, were left by Nygma in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse.
Um, if one of those clues is a riddle, it shouldn’t take Gordon more than a minute or two to realize who’s responsible. Of course, Gotham, being Gotham, might decide that Nygma’s inaugural crime outing won’t actually include a riddle, which would be completely insane, but insane in a way that Gotham quite enjoys being.
The other alternative is that the show might decide that Gordon is actually too stupid to realize the riddles and the creepy riddle-loving forensic scientist might be connected. Why? No idea. Same reason it thought having its hero Gordon murdering an unarmed man was a good idea.
Gotham is its own riddle, and no one’s going to solve it.
