Gotham executive producer Danny Cannon, who also directed the pilot episode, said back in June that he would like to bring beloved Batman villain Mr. Freeze into the proceedings. Now, Cannon has confirmed that Freeze will appear on the show, and gave a bit of insight into how he’ll be brought into the fold.
At San Diego Comic-Con this past weekend, Cannon spoke with Digital Spy and said that Freeze will get an origin story on the show, but it will be re-imagined a bit in order to fit Gotham‘s more realistic, grounded approach. Cannon hopes to explain the science behind someone like Mr. Freeze, and says his past work on CSI gave him some ideas on how to do that properly:
“Without giving too much away – because I’m not allowed to – the great thing about working on a ‘CSI’ procedural show for so long was we worked with so many experts -specialists in each field. There’s a lot of things I picked up along the way.
My first conversation with [showrunner] Bruno Heller about the villains in this show is always that they need to be very credible and relatable and the science behind them needs to be real… So I had a couple of stories that I’d held onto – real, true stories – and one of them just related to Mr. Freeze. I know a real way to create an origin story.”
There have been several iterations of Mr. Freeze’s origin in the comics, the most notable of them depicting experiments with cryogenic freezing. The recent New 52 origin depicts Victor Fries accidentally dousing himself in cryo chemicals during a violent outburst. It may seem ridiculous to some, but there’s definitely a way to use that in a more grounded approach. We just saw a “realistic” show like Arrow introduce super-powers in a believable fashion (which in turn led to the very super-powered Flash spin-off), so I could see a “real” Mr. Freeze origin working in a series like Gotham (even if it requires a little suspension of belief).
The most important thing about bringing Mr. Freeze into the mix is not necessarily how they explain his origin, but how they implement it in the series. He’s an easy villain to screw up (I’m looking at you, Batman & Robin!) but when adapted well (see: Batman: The Animated Series episode “Heart of Ice”), he can lead to some exemplary storytelling.
Cannon unfortunately didn’t specify when we should expect to see Mr. Freeze arrive in Gotham or whether or not we’d see any Easter eggs teasing his appearance. It may be quite some time before he shows up, with villains like Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, Joker, Hugo Strange and Harvey Dent already in the mix.
Tell us, would you like to see Mr. Freeze on Gotham? Which origin story would you prefer to see on screen? Let us know in the comments below.
Gotham premieres on Fox on Monday September 22nd, 2014.