Gotham Season 2 spoilers below.
I know I’m not alone in thinking that Gotham has totally figured out how to keep things exciting in Gotham City on a weekly basis. Some of it has to do with James Frain’s intelligently devious Theo Galavan, but more of it was tied to Cameron Monaghan’s manic performances as the Joker-ish psychopath Jerome. Even though the character was murdered in one of the series’ most shocking scenes, fans have wanted to see more. And we just might get it.
Before we start pulling out our bat-calculator watches and figuring out how this could possibly happen, let’s look at what was said by writer/producer John Stephens.
If you watch the episodes closely, as they go forward this year you'll start seeing the seeds of the way that story will continue to develop. And we probably have not seen the last of that fellow.
This response, according to ComicBook, was to a New York Comic-Con attendee whose Q&A moment was spent pleading for Jerome to get brought back to the show. Stephens would know, since he was the guy that wrote “The Last Laugh,” the episode in which Frain stabs Jerome in the throat, and the killer’s brief reign of terror serves as an inspiration for future lunatics, which is halfway serving as the origins of the Joker’s ideology, which itself may be the “real” Joker in Gotham.
Even in something as relatively simple as a character concept on a comic book prequel drama on Fox, The Joker is chaos.
If he would return, we have to assume this wouldn’t involve raising Jerome from the dead, unless they pull a viewer double-cross and reveal that the hospital and morgue guys were Galavan’s goons and the entire thing was faked. That’s certainly not an impossibility, but…dammit, I don’t even know if I’m willing to suspend all critical disbelief in such a ruse if it meant Monaghan would be back on the show.
More likely, though, is that he’ll be present through footage shown on the news or through his “followers” watching him and getting all jazzed up to set fire to anything that can’t also be stabbed. My hope is that someone stumbles onto a cache of anti-inspirational videos that Jerome made in an attempt to one day Project Mayhem the shit out of Gotham City. Or something like that. I don’t just want to see the same clip of him inside the GCPD all the time.
For Episode 4, the show brought The Penguin front and center, with Nygma’s Riddler persona coming out at an awkward time. And it had the added bonus of introducing viewers to Michael Chiklis’ new PD captain and Silver St. Cloud, Galavan’s ward and Bruce’s new eye-apple. It was good, though it lacked the kinetic energy of the previous episodes. More Jerome would help that in the future.
No longer cackling into the air, Gotham airs Monday nights on Fox.
