My read on the ending: They're trying to suggest that the Joker's madness is catching — that he activated a part in these people that had been waiting to wake up. He actually says as much in his speech into the camera in the previous episode. He wanted Gotham to radicalise into insanity.

Mark Margolis's character, repeating his last words before he died. No Strange, no Galavan.

I'll bite.

Last season, mostly. He's barely been in this season, though it'll doubtless continue. There are some stereotypical markers of pathological queerness, such as his attachment to an overbearing mother, a tendency towards object fetishism, his fawning, preening qualities, and that sequence where he holds attractive men…

It's a Buzzfeed-ism.

They've implied that TV Penguin is gay, for what it's worth.

Ah yes, the fiendishly named Dinosaurs.

The weird small town aesthetic, basically, with a thin veneer of traditional Americana covering something that seems to be like actual Evil-with-a-capital-E. You've got apple pie and kindly neighbours, weird eccentrics and fucked up violence. Cosmic mythology playing out in an idealised version of America's backyard.

World's smallest mouth on that man.

Yeah, I liked this. I think, fundamentally, I'm always going to have time for a show that provides Clare Danes with the opportunity to react to things. Always fun.

I'm pretty sure he was just foisting a maybe poisoned pie on his neighbours.

That's fair enough, and I'd hoped as much.

Oh fuck. That's terrifying.

Ah, so the argument is that Art exists prior to political position, and that anything else is projection?

Something I've not seen talked about anywhere, was how much the Murphy's are clearly the anti-Garvey's. Mother, father, son, daughter. Daughter's got rebellious friends. Son's heavy into religion. Dad's a blue-collar worker, though he sets fires rather than rescues people from them. One mother can't hear, the other…

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/…

I'm no expert, but it reads along the lines of "keep your politics out of my entertainment". (i.e. Artists have no right to guide and manipulate the thoughts of others, and a free society should reject such propaganda.)

Yeah, they seem to be an unofficial enforcement squad of some kind, who are attempting to maintain order in the town by being gigantic arseholes.

Is anyone here actually criticizing the show for not explaining where the departed people went?

I really hate it. It's super cheesy, with its twee spiral galaxy silhouettes and its post-cards. Deliberate, probably, but really overegging the pudding.