Ben McKenzie Directing ‘Gotham’ Season 5 Episode

Production is underway for the final season of DC Comics’ Batman prequel series Gotham, set to premiere on FOX sometime in 2019.

After starring as Detective James Gordon since the series’ inception, actor Ben McKenzie has tried his hand at directing, and will return behind the camera for the upcoming season. Alfred actor Sean Pertwee revealed McKenzie would be pulling double duty for the sixth episode of the season.

This marks McKenzie’s return to the director’s chair. He made his first stint helming an episode in the third season of Gotham, with “Heroes Rise: These Delicate and Dark Obsessions.”

“At first you’re trying to figure out what the show isn’t,” McKenzie previously said to the New York Times about his directing debut. “We wanted to be, very specifically, not a show with true ‘superheroes’ dressed in white tights, running faster than the speed of light. There’s so many of them out there. Now that we know what the show is, we break our own rules a bit.”

It remains to be seen how that approach will change for the final season, though the rule book seems to be tossed out the window. Gotham will adapt the classic Batman comic storyline No Man’s Land, and Mr. Penn actor Andrew Sellon teased that “no one’s safe” in the new season.

“If you thought Gotham was a tough town before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Sellon told Bam Smack Pow. “No Man’s Land is literally a war zone, and absolutely no one is safe. There’s danger – and potentially death – around every corner. But somehow out of all the anarchy and violence, a couple of heroes are rising.”

Penguin actor Robin Lord Taylor is looking to the end of the series a bit wistfully, looking at the progression of the series as it wraps up.

“After season one, we started making it more of a serialized story so that stories blended into each other so that things that happened in episode two carried into episode three, four,” Taylor said at Toronto’s Fan Expo. “Once that happened, it all has melded into one story. I will say that there’s something special about these ten episodes, because we’re coming to an end and we’re launching these characters into the place that you all know them from — that you think of when you think of these people. I will say, too, that we’re just on episode four, but the amount of emotion that’s real…there’s so much heart in all of these episodes, because we’ve carried this story with us for five years and so now to give it the justice it needs, we’re all putting all of our strength into every moment.”

Gotham‘s final season premieres sometime in 2019.