Who Took a Hit Out on Selina Kyle?

It's a good thing that the old saying goes that cats have nine lives — because Selina Kyle is going to need them. In Monday's episode of Gotham, the winter finale, Bruce and Selina find themselves on the run through Gotham City after professional assassins turn up at Wayne Manor in pursuit of the future Catwoman. Harvey Bullock points out that Selina escaped the Child Snatchers earlier in the season, and it's implied that the professional assassins and the Snatchers that tried to pick her up for the Dollmaker have something to do with one another. After all, Selina is not only the one that got away, but she got away right into the hands of the GCPD with some pretty intimate knowledge of the Dollmaker's operation. So who hired the assassins after Selina Kyle?

The episode leaves this plot point dangling after Selina (and Bruce) manage to evade the assassins. Or, rather, Bruce distracts the female assassin with the world's strongest ponytail game so that Selina can slip out the window out of sight. She later returns to Wayne Manor to return the valuables they had tried to hock for cash and to show Bruce that she is alive and well and poised to escape into the streets of Gotham — you know, since that's what she's best at. Neither of them seem very concerned with who exactly took a hit out on a little girl, but I have some theories.

The first and most obvious answer is that it was the Dollmaker. Bullock had to have brought that up for a reason, but this throwaway line was given little to no attention in the rest of the episode. We don't know exactly how far the Dollmaker's operation stretches nor do we know what exactly they needed all those children for. Maybe the reason they were gathering those children was because they were looking for Selina — and now that she's slipped through their fingers, they just need her dead.

The second answer would be Mayor James. Hear me out. The mayor was sketchy as all hell, telling the public that Lovecraft committed suicide with Jim Gordon's gun when Jim told him about the hired assassins and the murder. Could it be that the mayor was so insistent that this was a "suicide" because he sanctioned that hit? Could Mayor James be the Dollmaker, rather than just a pawn in Gotham's massive organized crime problem? It might seem unlikely after how quickly and eagerly he got out of the way when Falcone confronted a guns a'blazin' Harvey and Jim a few episodes back, but let's take a moment to remember that The Penguin seemed pretty pathetic at first and is now at the ear of the two biggest mobsters in town.

We're going to have to wait until Gotham returns in order to get our answers to this very important question, but for now we can rest assured that Selina is safe and she and the future Batman are getting their future romance on the road. The episode ended with Selina giving Bruce his first kiss — he was too awkward about it for that not to have been his first — and then slipping away into the night with a mysterious box. I guess even if she's not a real cat, then Selina still gets to have nine lives to enjoy during the hiatus.

Image: Jessica Miglio/FOX