Although it may have originally been pitched as a police procedural set in Gotham City years before Batman arrives, Gotham has since embraced its comic book origins. Batman staples like Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, and Hugo Strange have all made appearances, with characters like Mad Hatter and a new, older Poison Ivy debuting in Season 3, subtitled "Mad City." With all these villains running around, it only makes sense that the road to Batman himself gets a little bit shorter. Executive producer Ken Woodruff revealed that in Season 3, Bruce Wayne will be picking up some more bat-like abilities.
We're not quite getting to the point of Batman, but we're really focusing on trying to get to see different sides of Bruce Wayne and to lay the foundation for all those Batman things. He's going to be much more active. Near the end of last season, he spent time on the streets with Selina Kyle. We didn't show a lot of that, but this year we're going to show what the gains from that experience were --- learning how to pick locks, break into things, be silent like a bat. We definitely wanted to show that progression for Bruce.
During Entertainment Weekly's Spoiler Room, a question was posed if Bruce Wayne would become Batman in Season 3 of Gotham. David Mazouz (the actor who plays Bruce on the show) is 16 years old, so he's got a few years left before he's ready to hit the rooftops, but Season 3 will be laying more groundwork for his future transformation. As Ken Woodruff points out, Bruce will be more physically active this season, picking up skills that will one day be pretty useful to him. Picking locks and being silent are vigilante "need-to-knows," and it'll be interesting to see why Bruce needs to learn these skills at all.
Seeing Bruce slowly evolve into Batman is definitely tantalising, but Gotham most likely won't ever show a fully suited up Batman - except maybe in a flash forward or series finale. You can't really learn to be Batman by the time you're 18, but Gotham is, if nothing else, an ambitious show and it's proven to be unpredictable in how it handles the Batman mythos. If it's willing to tease Joker, have a Bruce Wayne doppelganger, and turn a 13-year old girl into a 20-something plant woman overnight, then who's to say it can't have its bat shaped cake and eat it too?
You'll be able to see Bruce Wayne embrace his inner vigilante when Gotham returns for Season 3 next week on Monday, September 19, at 8 PM on Fox. To learn about when more of your favorite TV shows are returning, check out CinemaBlend's fall TV premiere schedule.
