Spoilers below for the latest episode of Gotham.
It's been a rough season of Gotham for Bruce Wayne, as came face to face with the Court of Owls and his mysterious clone, he suffered the wrath of Jerome, he split ties with Selina, and he was taken against his wishes as a hostage/student of the mysterious Shaman -- or whoever he might be -- who wants to destroy Gotham City. When actor David Mazouz spoke to CinemaBlend recently about Bruce's downward spiral, he told me things are only getting way darker. But could things go so wrong that Bruce actually kills someone? It's not clear, but it sure sounds like it. In Mazouz's words:
[Bruce] is so desperate to find the answer that he believes what these new influences in his life have to tell him. He is going to be conditioned in a way that it looks like he will never be able to return, and I don't know that he ever fully will be able to return. And maybe that's why he eventually chooses to put on the cape and cowl. But your question of 'Will he take these destructive forces back to Gotham City when he eventually returns?,' the answer is completely yes. He will be a completely new person. And in order to break away from that, he will have to be stripped down to his most bare and vulnerable state in order to build himself back up again as the man that we know from Batman, and the man that we started to see him become before this transformation. But throughout this transformation he will be stripped of all of his morals and it will take a great deal of effort and time and support from his loving characters around him to get back on the right track.
Now, if you describe just about anyone else in Gotham City as being vulnerable and without morals, you're not going to have a hard time imagining that character committing a murder or two. This show seriously has far more leads who are guilty of killing others than those innocent of it. But again, this is Bruce Wayne we're talking about, and Batman is one of the only fictional heroes out there who has repeatedly made declarations that killing people was not his M.O. for bringing justice to the world. But let's not forget that Batman is nowhere near the events of this series yet, and Bruce Wayne is currently a teenager whose body and personality are equally malleable to those in an advantageous position. So if he's currently being developed into a Gotham-destroying warrior, how could he possibly take the city down without dropping a few bodies?
Of course, it would have been a lot cooler if David Mazouz had specifically referenced Bruce punching someone's throat out or running over a villain with a car, but we all know actors can't get quite so loose-lipped with their upcoming twists. And in any case, no one really expects Bruce Wayne to become a killing machine on Gotham, so there are other logical steps to take with that information. (Such as...well...maybe Bruce could give Jim Gordon a wicked big wedgie.) In fact, it wasn't that long ago in Season 3 when Bruce had the chance to kill his tormenter Jerome, but he refused to go down that non-retractable route.
Still, even with all the reasons against, it'd be one thing if David Mazouz had made only a passing reference to Bruce turning into a less virtuous citizen of Gotham City, but he drove that point home. It could have been passionate enthusiasm, of course, but I choose to think conspiratorially in this case. Especially since Mazouz continued down that same speculation-friendly path when talking about Bruce's current sense of "goodness."
I don't think Bruce is all good. I think there is a great deal of darkness in him. There are evil urges inside of him also. I feel like that's really what makes him so flawed, and not just in Gotham, but in all of Batman's incarnations. He, of course, has a really strong moral compass. At the same time, I feel like he has the capability of knowing what it is to be bad. But I feel like with all of our characters, good and bad, we see hints of the other side.
Great deal of darkness inside or not, viewers haven't really gotten a chance to see that side of him play out in a way that affects anyone beyond himself. Sure, we know he's a depressed dude because of his parents' death and the havoc that followed, but he doesn't ever expel that darkness out into the world the same way that Penguin or even Selina does. It's apparently going to happen soon, though, and it'll probably look pretty badass, too. And my biggest question then will be the same as it is now: is Bruce going to kill someone?
With much more psychological wrangling on the way from Bruce Wayne and more, Gotham airs Monday nights on Fox at 8:00 p.m. ET. Check out Season 4's big timeslot change, and then to see what else is hitting the small screen in the near future, head to our summer TV guide.
