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hugo strange in fox’s gotham.
i knew of hugo thanks to the hubbub about arkhamverse hugo in 2011 (…we’ll get to that), but gotham was my first proper introduction. watching him introduce himself for the first time in the midst of early pandemic brain fog was like some kind of bizarre sleeper agent activation… or maybe thats just what i want to think.
the first thing hugo does in gotham is condition penguin to be a very good boy through prolonged torture and brainwashing. the sequence is so blatantly based on a clockwork orange, an extremely formative movie/book for me. reader, i was doomed.
hugo in gothamverse is an old friend of thomas wayne and starts the series as the head psychiatrist at arkham. it is revealed that he is responsible for most of the supernatural bullshit happening in gotham, as a result of his medical experiments which he’s conducting beneath arkham. he resurrects some characters, genetically modifies some others. my sense is that this kind of plot would be basically impossible to do in comic form without people getting annoyed about how he is OP and just thrown in to make extra plot, but here it works out because gotham is just the most tv show ever. there is no logic to what is happening in this show; it is just vibes and ridiculous drama. if you have something weird and inexplicable happening, you can blame it on hugo. or you can have a bunch of characters transform into something else (or abruptly shift in personalities) because of hugo. a wizard did it and the wizard is hugo. it’s all silly and campy. he is a plot device, especially towards the end of the show, but i can’t bring myself to care because he is just so fun. i love him.
like a majority of the gotham cast, his wardrobe is eccentric and he spills off late 2000s goth vibes in a super appealing way. he is so smoothly dressed at all times and i am thrilled that we even got him in his infamous lab coat.
bd wong is a hugofucker ally:
he instinctively knew this character’s potential to be hot as fuck and executed it with precision. he purrs so many of his lines, he is perpetually flirting with his ‘projects’, he has a charisma and likeability that a lot of the other hugos don’t. he’s a bastard but he’s such a fun one. if prey!hugo is all of hugo’s absolute worst and most repulsive impulses, gothamverse hugo is a softer iteration, sort of halfway between a hammer horror frankenstein and mads mikkelsen’s hannibal. alternately funny and disturbing in a way that just makes me wanna give him a smooch and also let him vivisect me.
let’s talk about a couple of the plot points that made me especially feral about this hugo.
the truth serum interrogation.
at the culmination of season 2, hugo drugs a restrained jim gordon on truth serum. it is SO fucking hot. i ship hugo/jim mainly because i want jim’s morals to be bent more. he’s a little insufferable, especially the way he has hurt and killed so many people but is really sorry about it. hugo would help him deal with all that guilt by reshaping him to his will and pointing him like a gun in a more ‘productive’ direction.
there is nothing more pleasurable than watching hugo work his magic on a vulnerable mind. i love that his way towards an interrogation is not the hard way, but it’s actually more like therapy, even with the added sodium pentothal. even his god complex is explicable as a therapeutic pretense. what gets me is that he did actually help jim deal with some trauma in this scene. he admits in an earlier scene to being fascinated with the root of jim’s anger and wanting to help him with it and he does follow through! i think that’s rather sexy of him. he also knows that jim will be killed before the night is up, which also adds some fun twists of the blade. he is delivering both the hard truths you need to hear and preventing you from acting upon them because he has already decided your place for you.
that’s another thing that i think a lot of interpretations of hugo miss out on showing: hugo is a fucked up psychiatrist, but in comics we seldom get to see him actually helping a patient or displaying anything that demonstrates his efficacy as a therapist. and that seems weird to me because we never get any sense of like, why you would establish trust and rapport with this otherwise creepy and unpleasant man. i like that gothamverse hugo does in fact break down the walls of the people he has been tasked with ‘helping’, and i could be genuinely convinced that he cared about me.
the season 5 brain chip arc.
ah, season 5. so reviled for its ridiculousness. hugo, like everyone, has become heavily flanderised. his place in season 5 is giving lots of people brain chips, including ed nygma, and dosing bane and jim with venom. it’s hot, though. every scene of his is like a medical fetish porn. we get to see him doing open brain surgery on ed with a drug that shuts down your muscular functions but keeps you alive and awake and able to feel pain during the surgery. and during, hugo talks about how much he is enjoying the process and knowing the unpleasantness for the patient. he’s so fucked up for real. ❤
what could have been
i wish this hugo had more juicy character development. in season 2 he is the main villain for the second half, and they did a pretty okay job because they played up his need to create connections to people by authoring their excruciating transformations by his hand… he just can’t be intimate in any context where there isn’t a power dynamic, where he isn’t half looking at them like they’re bacteria in a petri dish. which is of course a very sexy character aspect in and of itself, but i wish that had been retained and developed more as he twists around the cast and makes them worse. we get a little bit of this in season 3, but by season 4 there isn’t much to him at all beyond hehe fucked up doctor deus ex machina who is firmly in the ‘find out’ stage after fucking around.
i think the gotham writers strike a pretty good balance between fucked up surgeon hugo and fucked up psychiatrist hugo. but i am bereft of actual scenes of hypnosis, just drugs that induce hypnotic states. i guess they knew they wanted to add jervis tetch to their canon and didn’t want to repeat themselves too much, but i’ll always be a little disappointed about that.