Gotham Season 2: The Villains
Gotham Season 2 premieres Monday September 21 with new threats for Jim Gordon and young Bruce Wayne. A huge part of the show’s successful first season was the memorable and charismatic villains: The Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor) and Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith) propelled the show to strong ratings and an overwhelmingly positive critical response. Gotham Season 2 seeks to up the ante. Fox gives a brief synopsis:
“The stakes are higher than ever as GOTHAM explores the origin stories of some of the most ambitious and depraved Super Villains, including The Riddler, The Joker and Mr. Freeze, and Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) uncovers more secrets from his father’s past, in the Season Two debut on Monday, Sept. 21 (8:00-9:00 PM ET/PT).”
The Riddler: Throughout season 1, we saw Edward Nygma’s (Cory Michael Smith) decent into insanity. In an interview with DCTV, Smith says “everything changes.” Â The new synopsis suggests Nygma will go full Riddler,
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3kuuu_mcw8]
The Joker: Earlier this year Comicbook.com quoted executive producer Bruno Heller: “the beginning of Season Two is a big Joker-oriented, or ‘how the Joker came to be’ kind of story.” In season 1, we saw Cameron Monaghan’s portrayal of a character named Jerome, a young carnival worker who killed his mother. All signs point to Jerome being DC’s most popular villain. Cameron Monaghan is confirmed to return in season 2.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7_8EwGCKsE]
Mr. Freeze: We knew about The Riddler and saw The Joker hinted at, but Mr. Freeze is the new reveal. You may be unfortunate enough to remember Arnold Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of the character in 1997’s critically maligned Batman & Robin. Perhaps in Gotham season 2, the shows writers can do for Mr. Freeze what they did for Robin Lord Taylor’s Penguin. Taylor’s portrayal of Penguin far outshines the earlier live action attempts by Danny Devito and Burgess Meredith.
Mr. Freeze has been in Gotham’s plan for some time. In an interview with Digital Spy, executive producer Danny Cannon, former CSI executive, expressed his desire to bring the character to life on the show and his grounded approach:
Without giving too much away – because I’m not allowed to – the great thing about working on a CSI procedural show for so long was we worked with so many experts – specialists in each field. There’s a lot of things I picked up along the way. My first conversation with [showrunner] Bruno Heller about the villains in this show is always that they need to be very credible and relatable and the science behind them needs to be real. So I had a couple of stories that I’d held onto – real, true stories – and one of them just related to Mr Freeze. I know a real way to create an origin story.
Season 2 debuts on Monday, Sept. 21 (8:00-9:00 PM ET/PT).
