Spoilers ahead for the midseason finale of Season 2 of Gotham. Take your bat butts elsewhere if you’re not caught up!
The first half of Gotham’s second season ended on a high note with the midseason finale episode “Worse Than A Crime”. In addition to a confrontation with The Order Of Saint Dumas, and James Gordon’s controversial decision to kill Theo Galavan, Gotham also dropped a major bomb in a post-credit scene. Namely: we were teased with the arrival of Batman favorite villain Mr. Freeze. Since that moment, which made us Batman nerds collectively squeal with joy, Mr. Freeze has been present in all of the teasers, posters, and other materials for the back half of Season 2 which will be titled “Wrath of the Villains”. Gotham’s showrunner Bruno Heller recently spoke to the soft-serve side of freeze, saying:
We're taking it back to the roots of the origin story. It's about him and his wife before he became a bad guy, how he became a bad guy. It's very much a story of the heart rather than a story about technology and super-villainy. It's a doomed romance. It will make people cry.
Per Bruno Heller’s comment to TV Guide, it seems that we’ll be feeling for the unfortunate fate of Mr. Freeze that leads to his wreaking havoc with a freeze ray.
Mr. Freeze’s backstory has been used in a variety of Batman medias. In most versions of the character Mr. Freeze’s real name is Victor Fries, and he falls in love with and marries a woman named Nora. At some point, Nora contracts a fatal disease and in an attempt to save her life, the villain decides to freeze her in a form of cryo-stasis until a cure can be found. And, most often, something goes awry that results in Nora being killed and sending Mr. Freeze into a state of anger and madness that creates his life of super-villainy.
Since we’ve already seen Mr. Freeze in his costume with freeze ray in hand, it’s likely that Gotham audiences will receive this exposition in a set of flashbacks, rather than before our eyes in real time. This would be a new device for the FOX drama, as we’ve mostly been able to see the villains of Gotham City form into their criminal selves through a series of unfortunate events.
I’m also interested to see how Mr. Freeze’s technology progresses the story of Gotham as a whole. After all, we saw that Dr. Strange, who will also be introduced in the back half of Season 2, is keeping and experimenting on the bodies of characters who have perished in the series thus far. In addition to the body of Galavan being utilized, we also saw the corpse of Fish Mooney who appeared to be in a type of cryo-stasis. Is Mr. Freeze working alongside Dr. Strange in his experiments?
Gotham will return to FOX on February 29th, 2016. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.
