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The mayor’s plans for controlling Gotham’s underworld have been revealed to the detectives, but how do they fight back when the GCPD is hunting them?
Well now. At the end of part one, our heroes were running for their lives. They wind up at Eli’s house in the suburbs to find out what to do next. The master plan of the mayor goes something like this: with the power vacuum brought about by the untimely death of Big Georgie, he’s moving in, using part of the SWAT team as his enforcers. He’s probably using the teeth thing to take out the competition’s enforcers--Deadshot at the underground fight club probably could have been using the fight club as a way to remove the other gang’s heavies from the picture. Meanwhile, if he can get the golden boy, Merch, brought down on corruption charges, that would deal a serious blow to the MCU, as would exposing Kit Ryan’s drinking problem and releasing dozens of criminals on the streets. The Major Crimes Unit would be replaced with the mayor’s men--he’ll control the law in the town, he’ll control the crime in the town. Only thing is Merch is buddies with the SWAT team, so if he puts things together, he’ll know that the mayor is using the SWAT team. As it turns out, the list of SWAT members that are supposed to be out of state undergoing accelerated training are the goons the mayor is using. Mayor Cobblepot is completely taking over Gotham.
We want a scene with Cobblepot and Dan O’Shea, the mayor’s conflicted liaison with MCU. Normally, I’d pass the role of one or both to our players, but we see Jason, who played Dan O’Shea last season nearby. We play the game at an open gaming event and as luck would have it, the game Jason was in was on a five minute break. He comes over SPECIAL GUEST STAR and does the scene. "It’s Connolly that’s betraying you," he tells the mayor. The mayor says he’ll take care of it. O’Shea walks out. Connolly, the head of the mayor’s SWAT enforcers, comes in from the next room. The mayor tells him to take out O’Shea. Jason hands me his character sheet and points to his connection: Jessica at the Gotham Tribune. Oh yeah.
Back in suburbia, Charisma gets a text message from O’Shea. "OC cleaning house. Check with Jessica at Trib." She tries to text him back, but there’s no response. On the television there’s breaking news: car explosion just outside city hall. Eli drops the glass. "We’ve got to warn Gordon," someone says. Eli picks up a dark cellphone and sends a quick message. The response: Rooftop. One hour.
(Conflict-wise, the scenes in the house had one about Kit finding out if Charisma/Woodard was behind the assassination of Big Georgie, which sparked this whole thing (she won), and a conflict about uh... something else. The O’Shea one was if he could stall the mayor by diverting his attention to a patsy. Obviously it failed.)
There was a tender hand-holding moment that was totally cockblocked by Merchant. Oh, well.
A couple of nearly individual scenes: Charisma off to confront Jessica at the Gotham Tribune, who is distraught over the death of her ex-fiance(? Ex-boyfriend?) Charisma gets the goods from Jessica but completely turns her away as a potential future contact. Kit goes somewhere. Dangit. I’ll probably remember later. Merch and Woodard head to GCPD’s SWAT division to talk to one of Merch’s friends.
Merch, Woodard, and SWAT guy head to the armory, so there’s all these views of guns and rifles and killing things surrounding our heroes as the buddy tells them that the two are "persons of interest" in the O’Shea killing. Our big conflict here is about the buddy. Does he follow his sense of duty and turn in the detectives or does he follow his sense of loyalty and agree to help? Holy cow, does he agree to help out. This is where we find that every member of SWAT on the list was supposed to be out of state, undergoing training in explosives. The guys totally get the non-corrupted SWAT team on their side. But how are we going to get you two out of here, he asks. Woodard gets a message on his phone and grabs a pair of night vision goggles. "We’ll need these," he says, moments before the power goes out inside the GCPD.
Our protagonists are heading up different stairwells to the rooftop of a completely different building where Jim Gordon is waiting for them. The shadow behind him stands up. It’s the Batman. Holy hell. He needs their help in taking down the mayor. Kit thinks Bats is a freak and we go into a Tinkerbell: Does Kit believe in the Batman? We have a growing audience of three at this point and everyone has had a turn doing gravelly-voice-The-Dark-Knight-give-that-man-a-throat-lozenge Batman. Everyone is throwing cards down. At least ten cards down that Kit believes in Batman. Maybe twelve. Kit has four or five. Turn them over, and... holy probabilities, Batman, it’s one to four. She doesn’t believe! Oh no, Tinkerbell!
Actually, it’s more she thinks he’s crazy and should be locked up in Arkham with the other freaks. The conflict was really about Eli, because he’s vouching for this rubber-suited spooky guy and this means that Kit thinks he’s a little nuts.
We have a plot contrivance that gives us a need to get Kit to her coroner’s office; Bats is gone, Gordon, Charisma, and Merchant start heading down to get ready for the big guns a’blazing scene we’ve been showing in the commercials for this episode. (Jim is calling Harvey Bullock for backup, the two protagonists are having a really good conversation about what’s going on.) Woodard is still up on the rooftop talking to Kit about his feelings when Kit just lunges and tackles him with her tongue.
So here’s what’s going on.
The mayor is at a public function, the bad guy SWAT team has taken over the GCPD (all of our protagonists are now wanted in O’Shea’s killing). However, the last crucial bit of evidence is in Kit’s office in the basement of One Police Plaza. So we’ve got to get her in there. Split up into two groups: Kit and Woodard going through the sewers while everyone else (including the good guy SWAT team) assaults police headquarters as a diversion. We’ve got Charisma in a Kit wig to help confuse the baddies.
We split the diversion up into an extended conflict, so I’m getting three cards to start off with. The first phase is going to look at the start of the diversion, the second will look at it from Woodard’s perspective, and we’ll go back to the diversion to see how that’s going. The stakes have to do with how successful the infiltration into the office will go. Lots of cards and chips and connections and edges are being used. This is the sequence where we’re blowing what’s left of our budget. Probably all the shots used in the commercial advertisements for this episode came out of the next few minutes.
As they drop off Kit, Merch tells her he loves her. Her response was straight out of True Blood: "You never even got in line." They part.
I deliver the awesome Jim Gordon line ("They may still be wearing the badge, but they stopped being cops a long time ago.") and the assault on One Police Plaza begins. Gordon gets them past the anti-SWAT team at the doors (they were being manipulated by Connolly and thought they were doing good). Gordon and Bullock take one team off camera so we can focus on our protagonist team of Charisma and Merch for the assault.
Dark hallways with shotgun blasts, good guys marching through One Police Plaza. Lots of screaming, lots of explosions. It’s wicked cool.
There was a scene in a stairwell when Merch was about to get killed by a Bad Guy. Suddenly there’s this black blur swooping down from above and the SWAT guy was just gone, man. A lot of screaming from below. Screams that make you want to go the other way. Charisma, disguised as Kit Ryan, is spotted upstairs, so that refocuses the Bad Guys away from the morgue. We also drop in a scene of our good-guy SWAT team advancing down a hall, with screams of NO! NO! and gunfire, just like the last episode. (We lead off the conflict with the Protagonists winning, but just barely. I can still pull this off.)
Down to the basement where Woodard and Kit sneak in. Big explosion off camera and we hear radio chatter as the bad SWAT rushes away. They get into our morgue/coroner’s office set and there’s two bad guys trying to break the encryption (or reverse the polarity) on Kit’s files. Connolly is there, in the morgue. Big fight breaks out, and Connolly is now forcing Kit to get the files for him. Woodard has a gun to his head. (The protagonists are still winning, but they wanted this element in there. The overall conflict isn’t over yet, so things could still turn out well for team Good Guys. They’re actually beating my side rather well at this point. There’s a slim chance the fail the conflict side can win. I also may be moving the gun to the head thing in from a later conflict. We’ll see.)
Back upstairs where Charisma rounds a corner and is shot in the head. "Your services are no longer required, Doctor Ryan," the killer says before pulling the trigger. Huh. I guess the disguise part of the plan worked a bit too well.
However, the bad guy realizes that it’s just a wig. He calls it down over the radio frequencies only to get laid out by Gordon or our Man In Black. (Can’t remember who.) But it is Gordon that picks her up and helps to stabilize her: it was one of those grazing head wounds that you always see on television shows. Lots of blood, but nothing serious. He picks her up and carries her, which I think is totally symbolic of something really cool. (And the protagonists win the big conflict! Whoo! So it’s relatively easy for the stuff in the morgue, which I’m pretty certain that it happens now, following this rather than just before. But let’s just go on, shall we?)
Kit is at the computer with two goons with guns. Eli Woodard is standing there with Connolly’s gun to his head. Kit wants to send the data files to Woodard’s phone instead of to Connolly’s goons. We all know there’s a conflict brewing here, but it takes us about five or ten minutes to pin down what it should be. Considering that it’s Eli’s episode and we’re all wanting this to be Kit’s death scene, it’s got to be something that affects Eli. So she’s going to get the information to Eli. No doubt about that. She’s going to get caught doing it and killed. No doubt about that. So we focus on what Eli is going to do: will he hulk out? Will he get to Kit before she dies so she can tell him one last touching line or will he not be able to say goodbye in time? Will he kill Connolly in a rage? Will Merchant, who is on the way down, get there in time to save Eli? There was a lot going on here, and quite honestly, I don’t recall exactly what the final stakes were.
Eli watches Kit’s murder.
He’s over there, over her body trying to talk to her, but she can’t speak. The table was divided: is she about to go, is it too late, can she speak? She’s still awake, but can’t talk. He watches the last few seconds of her life.
Merch comes in and pulls him away. She’s dead. And they’re coming.
Cut to a fundraiser for widows of police officers, where the Mayor is talking with Gotham’s elite. He’s in the middle of the crowd talking to one mister Bruce Wayne. The band stops and the crowd hushes as a bloodied Eli Merchant, John "Merch" Merchant, and Charisma Robbins enter, followed by cops, cops, and more cops. Eli goes up to the Mayor, marandaizes and tenderizes him, using the stock of his shotgun as punctuation. (He just succeeded in the conflict: does he kill the Mayor?) Nobody in the crowd moves to stop him.
The camera pulls up and the scene transforms into Kit’s funeral. Rain falls, and we see our protagonists. Time elapse photography as the crowd melts away, person by person, group by group, until only Eli and Merch remain. Merch turns to Eli, who hasn’t moved this entire shot, and says, "Let’s go, Lieutenant." The camera pans out through the cemetery, past Dan O’Shea’s new grave, past Merchant’s father’s grave, past Woodard’s father grave, and out and out and out and out and there just before we cut to black, there right by the Wayne mausoleum, a shadow moves.
End of Season Two.
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