Before, it was always cool to hear whatever information pertained to appearances made by Jerome Valeska, the proto-Joker, but now the excitement has been kicked up a notch knowing how greatly he factors into the remainder of Gotham season 4. Not only that, but whatever that’ll entail is expected to yield events greatly influenced by some of the most definitive Batman stories to have been produced by the comic book medium.
Just yesterday, we learned that the season finale will be titled “No Man’s Land,” which’ll obviously be influenced by the story that saw Gotham suffer the effects of a massive earthquake, with the U.S. government evacuating the city before leaving the metropolis to itself. Standing isolated with no bridges out of town, supervillains ran amok, with Batman and his allies doing their best to restore some kind of sanity.
In fact, actor Cameron Monaghan wasn’t shy at all in talking about this stuff in a recent interview with ComicBook.com, saying:
“We’re borrowing very heavily from some of the most iconic Batman storylines. I think that they’re deep enough, and they show where its really splitting that duality and start totally embracing the main arcs. I think that we did a little bit in season three to bring it into The Killing Joke.”
As Monaghan continued, he let even more juicy details slip:
“I will say that the second-to-last episode of the season is called ‘One Bad Day’. That will be a little bit of an indication of how much we’re gonna be ingrained in the books, specifically the No Mans Land storyline.
I don’t want to say what it exactly is for the people that haven’t read it yet, but if you have read it, you know what it is, and the show is going there. And we’re picking up the pace in a way that the show has never gone, done before. It’s getting real.
Continuing on, he revealed:
And the show is going on a different time, and at great speed and at the same time it’s also taking us to a level of stakes that it never has before, and we really do see a really epic number of arcs reach their climax and cause an escalation that we’ve never seen on the show before. Where, if you’ve seen all these different situations force Bruce into the man he’s going to be and it’s going to be challenging him in a way that he’s never been challenged before, both in a grand scale but also in a very personal sense, as well. Yeah, can’t wait for people to see it.”
After reading that, it’s hard not to think that The Killing Joke‘s influence won’t continue being felt. I mean, after learning that this season’s penultimate episode is titled “One Bad Day,” one has to believe that may very well be when we see the true emergence of the Joker. Time will tell, of course, but we’ve come to learn that these titles aren’t being used by accident.
Gotham airs on Thursday nights on Fox.