Gotham Recap with Spoilers: A Dead Man Feels No Cold

Part 2 of Mr. Freeze’s origin story on Gotham picks up with Victor Fries having the right formula to freeze and unfreeze a person. The police are led in a chase to none other than Ace Chemicals – a pretty important place in Batman lore, and in Gotham the location that makes the liquid helium Fries uses for his freeze gun. Several frozen cops and security guards are on the premises – oh and Ace? It’s a division of Wayne Enterprises in this world.

Gordon, Bullock, and a squad of the GCPD move through Ace, seeing more and more frozen individuals, and even bullets frozen in mid-air. “Free My Wife” is etched out on one of the guard-sicles.

Bruce Wayne sits down with Lee in Wayne Manor for a little head-shrinking. “It’s normal to feel trauma, it’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. He tells her he wasn’t scared, he “felt alive, intensely alive.” Yowza. “My plans remain unchanged, find the man who killed my parents.” He also says he believes people can be two people at once, and he’s starting to display some real creepy, nearly split-personality behaviors.

At GCPD, Barnes is fired up about Mr. Freeze. He decides to take Nora Fries to Arkham’s medical facility, as it’s easier to secure than the hospital. Bullock of all people is the one who protests. Lee isn’t happy about it, either, “using a dying woman as a tethered goat to catch her husband.” She’s going with.

At Indian Hill, Hugo Strange is trying to get Fries’s formula from his victims, and it’s not working out. He hears that Nora will be transferred and thinks of it as an opportunity. “Here I am desperately in need of his cryonic expertise, and he’s going to make a house call.” A four-fingered creature slams its hand against a windowed cell in the facility.

Fries knows that Arkham is a track. He has developed a new freeze bomb, he throws one into the lake, and it freezes the whole thing over in an instant. Uh-oh.

Penguin is being “rehabilitated” at Arkham by Peabody. “No one has failed to regret vexing the Penguin, and you are vexing me!” She has him strapped down and appears to be putting him into some audio visual therapy – until he screams out in pain, of course.

After the treatment, he’s in a circle with other inmates playing “duck, duck, goose.” This is very creepy, old-school take on asylum/crazy behavior.

Nora arrives, with Lee, Bullock, and Gordon in tow. They see Penguin looking drugged and deranged, and they’re not happy about it. Lee wheels Nora in with Miss Peabody, and the hospital wing has another resident, a comatose Barbara Kean. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lee says.

They lockdown Arkham tight, and Penguin is being taken off – he yells out to Jim and tells him he’s being tortured, but Jim has no mercy for him. Penguin starts screaming that Jim killed Galavan as he’s being dragged away, something that Strange takes notice of.

Boxing Bruce is pissed at Alfred, who lays down the law a bit, and asks if they’re in it together or not. Alfred found a GCPD file on Patrick “Matches” Malone, and asks Bruce what he plans to do. “Kill him.” “No,” Alfred says. “You’re too young to have a death on your conscience. When we find Mr. Malone, I will kill him, not you.” Bruce agrees to this. Yipe.

Lee, in the Arkham medical ward, leans into “sleeping beauty” Barbara and tells her “You have no idea what you’re missing, bitch.” Nora wakes up, and tells Lee that Victor’s not an evil man, and he’s been doing this because of her. “I could’ve saved him. I saw him going down this path, becoming more and more obsessed” – OH THAT’S A PARALLEL BETWEEN HER AND LEE.

Gordon and Bullock are on their stakeout outside, and hear a van coming charging to the gates. They open fire but fail to stop it as it careens through. It’s the janitor Fries abducted, with his hands frozen to the wheel.

Meanwhile, Mr. Freeze is blasting his way into Arkham through the wall in his new and improved gear. He’s got Freeze grenades now, that give an instant burst of cold – and kill anyone around when they go off. As Gordon, Bullock, and their team enter the hallway to get to the infirmary, Hugo Strange remotely closes the doors behind them, cutting Gordon off from his team. He starts opening locks for Freeze, guiding him along – to the same room they had been torturing Penguin in.

Strange talks to Victor over the intercom, offering help. “You get your wife and your freedom – I can keep the police at bay as you escape. In exchange, you leave me one cartridge of your cryonic formula.” Victor agrees, placing a cartridge down and taking the keys Strange provided.

Victor arrives as Gordon and Lee are trying to get Nora out, and blasts the gun out of Gordon’s hand. “Victor, listen to me, we’re trying to help her.” Victor locks Jim in a closet, and Lee, Nora, and Victor leave together. Peabody recovers the cryonic vial for a very happy Strange.

Jim busts out and comes charging after – but is too late. Victor, Nora, and Lee leave in the vehicle Hugo Strange provided. Jim and Harvey realize he has to go home in order to freeze Nora and keep her frozen in one of his cryo chambers.

Victor has no problem being locked up, as soon as he’s frozen Nora to keep her alive until she can be cured. “So I can wake up one day with you in prison or dead?” She begs of him. She agrees, and asks for her necklace. He goes to get it, and she tells Lee to leave; she won’t, so she asks for some water. She changes the canister on the freeze gun for one of the old, flawed formulas. Uh-oh. Victor comes back down and puts the necklace on her. Nora tells him she loves him, and not to blame himself. He blasts her toe-to-head with the freeze gun, not yet realizing that she has changed the formula out. This is heartbreaking.

Bruce gets a visitor at the manor, from Selina. Bruce tells her about Malone, and asks her for a gun. “You couldn’t even push that guy out the window, so how do you expect to do this?” She doesn’t want to help him. “Doing this, you won’t ever be the same.”

The cops arrive at the Fries house, finding a frozen dead cop there.

Downstairs, Victor looks upon Nora – and she starts to crack up, literally – he sees that she switched cartridges, effectively killing herself. He asks Lee if she knew, and she says no. He tells Lee he’ll give himself up to the police. She leaves, and he pulls open his containment suit, and it starts to ice him, freezing him seemingly to death.

Jim Gordon comes down the stairs and sees him sitting there frozen, next to his frozen and broken wife.

Jim and Lee are at home, and hear that Victor Fries “died in Arkham infirmary” according to Hugo Strange. The two of them are not doing well. She calls him out on Theo Galavan, “You lied to me,” she’s figured it out.

At Arkham, Penguin continues to undergo conditioning, and Hugo says they need to be more aggressive. Victor Fries, meanwhile, wakes up in a frozen room in Indian Hill, skin, hair and eyes white now. He’s living in -20 degrees “you can only survive in severe hypothermic conditions.” Hugo Strange is working on modifications to his suit to let him walk freely. “Take this opportunity, Victor. Pretend you did die. Death is not an ending, death is a new beginning.”

With that, Hugo Strange looks at a room that has bodies in containment, including Theo Galavan, Jerome, and Fish!