If you say a show is “firing on all cylinders,” you conjure an image of a vehicle moving at maximum speed, all its component parts working together for optimum effect. Gotham, on the other hand, may be more like the Wonkamobile. But its tonally disconnected bangs and clangs and explosions are, at this point, no less formidable than the proverbial well-oiled machine. The past few weeks have shown that if the show jerry-rigs enough weird, wild, occasionally emotional parts together, the whole can be a real whiz-bang contraption. And tonight’s episode — “Red Hood” — had plenty of pop to go around.

For starters, Jada Pinkett Smith carved her own eyeball out with a spoon.

I reviewed last week’s Gotham for Rolling Stone.

Lord Sinderby, Atticus’s father, is an antagonist from the Magneto school, a commanding figure with the silhouette of a bullet and the hard-earned pride of a man who knows his accomplishments stand surrounded by an ocean of opposition. Actor James Faulkner gives him a glare that could melt steel; there’s honestly no better way for the show to finally sell Lily James’s Lady Rose as the rightful youthful-idealist heir to the departed Lady Sybil than by showing her failing to wither in its face. And his voice joins Downton’s dulcet pantheon of greats, a sepulchural croak that’s the stuff of Disney villains. (Don’t underestimate the aural dimension of good TV: many of the New Golden Age’s best shows, fromDownton to Deadwood to The Wire to Boardwalk Empire, are as much fun to listen to as they are to look at.)

I reviewed last week’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer.

Just four episodes out of the gate, Better Call Saul is proving to be one of the most visually striking and well-acted shows currently on television. When Saul and his patsy drunkenly discuss wolf howls outside their town’s shut-down bars, or when Jimmy stands inside the Day Nail & Spa salon at night, the shots are like something out of an Edward Hopper painting. Michael McKean continues to impress as Jimmy’s mentally ill older brother Chuck, selling both the man’s pride in his baby bro’s supposed accomplishments and his crushing disappointment after risking (he thinks) his life to find out whether they’re true. As Kim, actor Rhea Seehorn has an easy rapport with Bob Odenkirk, playfully slapping his hands away from the controls of her massage chair when she comes to visit him. (She wants to go see The Thing on the big screen? She’s a keeper.) And there’s Odenkirk himself, playing an orange shirt/magenta tie man in a Haml-indigo Blue world. It’s going be a thrill to watch him suit up for real.

I reviewed last week’s Better Call Saul for Rolling Stone.