Why, in a series about teen fugitives fighting for their very freedom, is there a subplot about a character skipping class and getting in trouble with their mother? Worse, nearly every episode is saddled with more mundane forms of teen drama that could have been recycled from any number of other CW shows. Particularly if you’ve read DC’s New 52-era Batman comics, there’s not much in the way of shocking plot twists to be found here. The Court of Owls-focused conspiracy is predictable and unexciting. Even Navia Robinson’s Carrie Kelley - the Robin of this particular universe - sometimes feels like a refugee from a completely different Gotham City teen drama.Ī smaller, more focused cast would certainly have helped, but there’s still the fact that Gotham Knights has neither a compelling central mystery nor memorable action scenes to counteract the poor characterization.
Fallon Smythe’s Harper Row and Anna Lore’s Stephanie Brown wind up competing with one another for the role of this show’s designated Felicity Smoak-style tech genius. There are too many teen heroes and not enough conflict to go around. But she’s also almost entirely superfluous as a character, in part because the cast of Gotham Knights is far larger than it has any right to be. Olivia Rose Keegan at least has some fun with her performance as the Joker’s daughter, Duela, injecting ample amounts of Joker-y, manic energy into her scenes.
The wooden, generic dialogue does no one any favors. The same is true for the rest of the show’s ensemble cast, to one degree or another.
It’s hard to even say whether Morgan’s performance is at fault here, because the series so rarely gives him anything to do beyond brood handsomely or deliver another round of junior detective exposition. There’s no source material for us to fall back on with Turner, and a combination of bland dialogue and paper-thin characterization make for a thoroughly uninteresting protagonist. The series tells us very little about his personality and his relationship with Bruce before Turner and his allies are framed for his father’s murder and the plot gets underway. It’s hard to know what to make of Oscar Morgan’s character Turner Hayes, who comes across as a half-baked fusion of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne. The decision to anchor the series around an original character rather than one of the many Robins from the comics is certainly odd, and it’s one that immediately works against Gotham Knights.
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