Wild Predictions: Gotham Season 2
It's that time of year again -- when we start to talk about what's coming up in the coming weeks [...]
It's that time of year again -- when we start to talk about what's coming up in the coming weeks and months as all our favorite television shows are ready to debut again.
This year, we wanted to have a little fun and take ourselves a little less seriously...but still give a little insight and throw some predictions the way of the more spoiler-happy among our readership.
So they asked me to take a look at Gotham.
Wait'll you get a load of these...
More deaths than last year
This one wouldn't be too hard. Other than [SPOILER] Bruce Wayne's parents and then a few bad guys down the stretch, there weren't a lot of real, impactful deaths to strike Gotham in Season One.
Having seen the first three episodes of the second season? Not so much. You get much more of a The Walking Dead vibe. It's not that no one is safe...but you can count the people who are on a nine-panel grid.
So this one's more an acknowledgment than a guess...unless of course they decide that they're going to frontload all of the mortal danger into the beginning and Gotham becomes less deadly as the season goes on.
Flashpoint?
Could we see a version of the mythology where Thomas Wayne was much more Batman-like than in the past?
Don't be totally shocked. We already know that he had a super-secret entrance set up to the Batcave, that he was covertly investigating his company's financial irregularities.
We also have a world where following the popularity of Thomas Wayne in Flashpoint, the "Bat-Dad" idea was carried over into DC's Earth-2.
Just...what was Thomas Wayne up to in that cave? We'll have to wait to find out...
Embrace the Melodrama
While Gotham has rarely descended into Batman '66-style camp, they've often gone for the kind of larger-than-life, melodramatic narrative that informed Tim Burton's take on the characters.
During the first season, those moments could sometimes feel out of place because they were being juxtaposed with some truly campy bits (especially when Fish Mooney was involved) and the gritty, real-world aesthetic of projects like Gotham Central, which inspired the series in the first place.
We're expecting that in a second season, the Gotham showrunners will have worked out the kinks, found a voice and will start to build a world. The most likely scenario seems to be that they'll go for a Burton-esque feel, so that they can still occasionally dabble in the deep ends of realism and camp, but do so in a way that seems a little less directionless than it could sometimes be in its freshman year.
A new commissioner
We already know that eventually, James Gordon will be the Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Department.
Will it happen right away? Probably not. But this season, I expect we can bid a fond farewell to Commissioner Loeb.
Loeb is corrupt, petty and more than anything else, brutish and stupid. Gordon has so many other problems that it would probably take him a while to get around to Loeb if the guy just left well enough alone, but in previews for the episode we've seen the commissioner targeting Gordon for abuse. Seems like a pretty terrible plan to us...!
Lee's Secret!
This one, of course, is a stone-cold lock.
We'll find out that Leslie Thompkins is secretly Harbinger, keeping an eye on various realities on behalf of The Monitor in response to some larger-than-life threat.
It explains why Gordon's girlfriend looks just like Wade Wilson's wife and has the same voice as Eobard Thawne's 25th Century computer.
