Gotham is still waiting to find out if it’s coming back for another season, but if it gets the green light, the show will look much different when it returns for Season 5.
Executive producer Danny Cannon told Comicbook.com that what goes down in the upcoming Season 4 finale will completely alter the direction of the show and turn it into a “reboot” of the Batman prequel we’ve come to love.
“The catastrophic event, the cataclysmic event that happens in the last three episodes not only will change Gotham, it not only combines so many characters that you don’t think will cooperate with each other, but it changes the face of Gotham forever,” Cannon said, “so that Season 5, it’s almost a reboot and a different show.”
The finale is supposedly going to pull from the Batman: No Man’s Land storyline that appears in the comics, which finds Gotham City totally destroyed by a powerful earthquake. As the government steps in to help fix things after the destruction, our favorite villains take over different parts of the city for their own use.
The city getting a devastating makeover would certainly serve as a reboot in terms of the look of the series, but Cannon explained that it is more of a reboot of stories being told, rather than it becoming a different kind of show altogether.
He added that the characters have become so fleshed out at this point that it’s time to switch up people’s perceptions of them. But more than just a writing technique, the characters in the series seem ready to enter the next stage of their transformation into the heroes and villains we know they were born to be.
Bruce Wayne has donned a childhood version of the iconic Batman costume for the first time and has perched on top of buildings looking to fight the city’s criminals, making him closer to becoming the Caped Crusader than ever before. Similarly, Selina Kyle now has picked up skills using a whip, so it’s only a matter of time before she’s stealing jewelry in a full leather bodysuit.
Ivy Pepper was recast this year for the third time since the series began, but the third iteration of Poison Ivy hasn’t had a ton of screen time since being introduced. But she, along with more established villains like Penguin and Riddler, are basically in their final form and ready to start wreaking havoc on the city the way they do in the comics.
The final step came when the Joker was finally revealed to be Jeremiah Valeska, Jerome’s twin brother. With the most iconic villain of the franchise officially in place, the series has never been closer to becoming the Gotham City that desperately needs to be saved by Batman nightly.
But before Batman can save the city, Fox has to save the series. Luckily for fans, Cannon says the Season 4 cliffhanger is so huge, he has faith that the network will bring the series back. For now, we’ll just be hoping to see that big bat signal in the sky.
Gotham airs Thursdays at 8PM on FOX.
