Gotham The Official Jada Pinkett Smith is Fish Mooney Thread

If Fish Mooney worked out of an Aquarium, this is all valid. As is... it's like a guy named William Tockman becoming Condiment King. ("But you see, at the end of the season, his time will be up!")

Quirky naming aside, Jada pwns. She brings a lot of gravity to the whole production, and in my opinion, she should last the whole series. Fish should die as Bruce becomes Batman or something. The show needs her.

 

I think she's being portrayed as a bit over the top for a reason.

She represents the "bridge" between the old mob and the new blood. We're seeing the rise of the freaks and their role in Gotham's power structure, Penguin being the best example of this.

 

Her performance in the second episode was... odd. I found her very effective and threatening in the first one. But in episode 2, she seemed like she was doing her best Cruella DeVille. The episode overall seemed really hammy in comparison to the first one; like it was dipping its toe in Schumacher territory. I'm hoping that won't be the norm.

 

I didn't think the whole episode felt more camp, but her performance was definitely much more in that realm. She struck a good balance in the pilot, but this time around it felt like she just went completely one way on the camp-serious scale.

 

Yeah. It was almost like she was speaking with a faux British accent at times.

As for the rest of the episode... there were other parts that stuck out as cheesy to me; the two kidnappers seemed like something from the Burton or Schumacher days, and the Nygma scene was pretty bad. All the stuff with Gordon, Bruce, Penguin and Selina was good though.

 

I think the creators are still on a learning curve with these first two episodes. They clearly want the seriousness and the street cred of the Nolan films but they also want more of the classic vainy feel of the classic rogues from the Burton and Schumacer era. My hope is that the return Fish to her cold, calculating, and calm, persona of the pilot and less the melodramatic version of the second episode.

 

Though, I must say, I did enjoy...

 

I need to save this gif for later use whenever I'm in the BvS forums and a certain group of trolls show up.

 

Also a suitable gif when something dramatic happens in a thread lol.

 

Yes, she definetly has that function in the show. I completely agree with you. But for me the problem is that she comes across like a hammy annoying caricature. She is like Eartha Kitts glue sniffing granddaughter.

 

The problem with Fish is her mundane feats don't warrant the amount of screen time she gets.

Average episode:She talks to Gordon/Bullock,Talks to Falcone,Tells somebody she has "Big Plans"/hates Penguin,Orders someone to run over Falcone's dog = 25 minutes screen time.5 would be more than generous.

 

Three episodes in - okay, four, but I can only watch the Friday reruns so I'm one behind - I still can't figure out how Jada is trying to play this role. There's something "off" about Fish Mooney I can't quite put my finger on and I don't think it has anything to do with the character as she's written. Others have mentioned the hammyness, which I certainly don't disagree with, but it seems to go back and forth between about five various degrees of seriousness and it's confusing to the point I have to wonder how much of it is intentional.

 

It's clearly a character choice.

The woman's a bubbling sociopath.

 

I feel like in the pilot they got her sooo right. She was calculating, sexy, strong. Since then ,she's been kinda all over the place from episode to episode. I don't know what changed or why they felt they needed to change her , but I wish they would take her back to the character of the pilot. She seemed like someone who could charm you just as easily as take you out. Now she does go from kinda melodramatic to bordering on campy.

 

I don't like the characer of Fish Mooney one bit. What annoys me is that the whole show seems to focus around her even more then around Gordon sometimes and all the while we have these great characters like Falcone and Moroni taking a backseat. This show should focus around established existing characters that already have a huge weight behind them.

 

Well guess I'm the only one that actually loves her.

 

Well I wouldn't say "clearly" but I suppose it's one theory to give her the benefit of the doubt. Honestly I still think it comes down to Pinkett having not yet figured out her own character and just rolling with it blindly. That probably sounds harsher than intended but I also think chalking the unevenness of her performance up to the fact she's a sociopath and that it's entirely intentional on the actress's part is giving her too much credit. Who knows. I still enjoy the show, though, so I'll try not to ruin it by overanalyzing.

 

I'm not seeing the "uneven". She's been pretty consistently "over the top". Just with different levels of emotion.

 

I felt she was very reserved in the pilot, and even when she was beating Penguin it was more about beating the crap out of him because he was a rat. I think alot of the flack Mooney gets is in the second episode where at times she was reminiscent of Eartha Kitt and the moment she was upset about what happened to her boy toy. For someone so calculating and someone who would never let you see her sweat , it was quite a jarring change from the pilot. Now , if they had made the point that she may be tough but she did have a weakness that Falcone was able to get to I could have gone along with it. However in the next episode she returns to being calculating and tells her thug to just get rid of boy toy. I mean, I get that her original anger was more about Falcone attempting to humiliate and show his dominance over her, and that there was nothing she could do about it , but that shift in the third episode seemed more like the writers may have felt she was a bit too over the top in her reaction in the previous episode. In Balloon man and Arkham ,she seemed more consistent to me with the pilot than the second episode.

They're still clearly working out the kinks. She's a brand new creation so they don't really have any frame of reference with how to write her character. I do think that they are trying to determine whether she's sort of the Betty Davis calculating vamp or whether she's a more larger than life Eartha Kitt precursor to the eccentric baddies gotham will face. I think its what happens with most shows starting out. They're still trying to find the character I think.

 

While I enjoyed seeing Mooney flirt with the nightclub singers, having the two of them beat the crap out of each other for a job just felt so stupid to me. When that happened, I was like, "Come on, really?" Still, I thought Jada was fine. The writing on this show is pretty bad though, at least for her character.

 

That bothered me too. She seemed so upset when Falcone beat the crap out of Laszlo but one episode later wanted her goon to dispose of him. That didn't make any sense.

 

I think that had to do with how Lazlo handled his beating. She wasn't impressed, and lost interest.

 

Tonight's episode showed Fish's more business like side, and I enjoyed how it teased that her theatrical persona is just that; a persona to smokescreen her more subtle capabilities. JPS went quiet and believable when instructing her "weapon" and it nicely contrasted with her usual methods. And the Falcone scene at the end was an obvious "fruits of her labors" moment. That fight scene between the two candidate might work as her covering up her lose ends now.

Still predicting that Fish's plans are going to implode in her face and lead to Falcone roaring back to defend his Roman Empire.

 

Everything you need to know about Jada's portrayal of Fish and why she's acting the way she is can be summed up by this:
Jada brought man on leash to audition