Photo Credit: Gotham's Facebook
While we wait patiently for the releases and follow-ups from our favourite DC-superhero movies on the big screen, Warner TV’s ‘Gotham’ is back for the third season to supply us with all the Batman goodness.
In the new season, the stakes are higher than ever. Gotham City falls deeper into chaos, super villains more ambitious and depraved are introduced, and new alliances shake up the fight for power. Gotham will continue to follow the evolving stories of the city's most malevolent villains: The Penguin; Edward Nygma/The Riddler; Selina Kyle/the future Catwoman; and Barbara Kean. Gotham also will dive into the origin stories of The Mad Hatter and the Tweed Brothers, and will peel back the curtain on the Court of Owls.
John Stephens and Ken Woodruff, producers of the Gotham series, share with us the season's villians, Suicide Squad character additions, and the future of the show.
Interview Transcript courtesy of Warner TV
Gotham S3 premieres Tuesday, 20 September at 9pm (Same day as the U.S.) on Warner TV (StarHub TV Channel 515 & Singtel TV Channel 306)
Photo Credit: Gotham's Facebook
Qn: Last season we saw the “rise of the villains” branding really become a huge part of the show's public persona. What is the role of the villains moving forward?
John Stephens: In Season 3, you are really going to see how the villains have taken up residence inside the city. They have become more and more just part of the fabric of Gotham, and it's become less and less of the police show that it was in Season 1, and now a city that's really populated by the villains, because we wanted to create that sense that you get on the Batman comics from the canon where the villains basically live all throughout the city. So it's really much a kind of natural continuation of that in Season 3. Jessica and Barbara have a sirens club that basically is a new villain outpost in the middle of the city.
Qn: Do you think you could have started the show at this stage? Because obviously going back, it became a very clear procedural or seemed almost a mandate of trying to be 22-episode kind of procedural structure. Do you think you had to build to this point, or looking back, do you wish you could have started at a point like this?
John Stephens: We really had to build to this point. I mean, the place we reached by the end of Season 2 - where people were coming back to life as medieval monks - I don't think we could have gone into that in the first episode of the season. I think it's a case of the old adage of if you want to cook a frog, you gotta put it in cold water and turn up the heat very slowly.
Photo Credit: Gotham's Facebook
Qn: Can we expect any of the "Suicide Squad" characters this coming season or in the near future?
John Stephens: A lot of those characters, because they're in the "Suicide Squad" film, we're probably not going to be seeing them this season. We will be seeing proto-versions of some of those characters. We see them as sort of a proto-Killer Croc version, and we'll be seeing a character, perhaps not this season, but in times to come, who can be a forerunner for Harley Quinn, which I think will be really exciting as well. And we have Will Smith's wife on the show, which is something!
Ken Woodruff: Also, the spirit of "Suicide Squad," teaming up villains, these sort of super villains, putting them together, having them be a more powerful force by combining them is something that we are definitely doing in Season 3 of Gotham. Like John was saying, we have a club that's run by two of them, two of these villains, and we're looking forward to sort of doing that more and more, and we have plans for that.
Qn: Going back to sort of the idea of these proto-villains, last season you guys introduced kind of the proto-Joker, and sort of the consensus was this was not the Joker but he kind of represented an anarchic spirit that evolved into the Joker. I'm curious if you're going to continue that evolution towards an eventual joker.
John Stephens: Yes. Absolutely. When you think of the Joker in “bad man” canon, there's obviously nobody else who looms as large, so we really imagined developing the myth of the Joker at the same time we're developing the myth of Batman, and we really wanted to stretch over multiple seasons. So in the course of this year, we're going to see how the cult of the Joker, which we started at the beginning of last year and we touched on in the middle of the year, is going to extend and deepen and change a little bit this year where you have these sort of underground movements that have started to talk about Jerome and what he represented and how he's going to come back on the day, sort of like John the Baptist, et cetera. Setting the stage for, perhaps - if there's a Season 4 - hopefully we'll bring that back in a much bigger way, and you will see these different versions of the Joker myth that develop next year with Jerome and with other characters so that we can put those pieces together and go, "Oh," eventually that's where the Joker himself came from.
Qn: It seems that if Bruce has a double now, that would lend itself to maybe Harvey Dent having a scene since duality is his whole thing. Will we see Harvey and Bruce in a double kind of cross paths at all?
John Stephens: The first part of the question, we don't have plans right now for the double to be crossing with Harvey Dent. The vision of the world that we tried to create was to populate the world of Gotham, and so then not everyone is always a series regular, you see them every episode. But you want to believe that they live inside the world of the show. Like, Jada was on all of Season 1 and came back at the end of Season 2 and now she's back again in Season 3. All these characters who come up, they can vanish for a while, then return. Harvey Dent lives inside the world of Gotham. He works in that world, so we can cross with him at any time that we can imagine.
Photo Credit: Gotham's Facebook
Gotham S3 premieres tonight, 20 September at 9pm (Same day as the U.S.) on Warner TV (StarHub TV Channel 515 & Singtel TV Channel 306)!