There are plenty of comic TV shows nowadays, but Fox's Gotham may have cornered the market on villains. In fact, the first half of Season 2 was touted as "Rise of the Villains," and the second half as "Wrath of the Villains." Season 3 will have even more villains, and we finally got our first look at one of the most peculiar to debut this fall. The Mad Hatter will be played by Walking Dead star Benedict Samuel, and he looks pretty much perfect. Check him out!
The first look hit the web courtesy of EW, and it's hard not to get excited. The Mad Hatter has been in the works for a Gotham appearance for a while now. He was rumored as a bad guy who would show up at some point in Season 2. The Hatter himself never showed up, but Hugo Strange dropped a tantalizing bit of foreshadowing in a late Season 2 episode when he quoted a famous passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The casting of Benedict Samuel was a good sign that we'd be meeting the Mad Hatter sooner rather than later. The picture of Samuel in costume finally makes the Hatter's debut feel real.
The Mad Hatter of DC lore is a villain who uses hats to exert his influence on those around him. Whether he wears a special hat himself or he forces his hats on victims, he can always be counted on for some creative (and thematic) crimes. Gotham's Mad Hatter sounds like he'll be a bit different. The Gotham Hatter - also known as Jarvis Tetch - is a hypnotist who has been driven mad in his quest to recover his missing sister Alice. She was last seen in Gotham City, and the Hatter will use any means necessary to try and get her back.
There's no saying at this point whether the Mad Hatter will arrive in Gotham to search for his sister or if he was one of Hugo Strange's corpses that had been preserved for possible reanimation. Strange's quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland indicates that he could have a role in the Hatter's shenanigans in Season 3, but it's entirely possible that the Hatter has just taken a while to figure out his sister's last whereabouts. She has been missing for many years; perhaps her brother had some trouble in tracking her movements.
Gotham Season 2 ended on a pretty crazy cliffhanger as the show slowly advances Bruce Wayne toward his eventual identity as the Batman. The series returns to Fox for Season 3 on Monday, September 19 at 8 p.m. ET. Check out our fall TV premiere schedule to see what else you can catch on the small screen in the near future.
