Even though Gotham‘s fifth and final season will be a truncated 13-episode affair, we’d be fools not to think that at least a few more villains culled from the Batman mythos will be introduced. Having already brought the likes of Professor Pyg, Clayface, Flamingo and Hugo Strange to the mainstream, it should be exciting to see who else this show will bring to the party before it’s all said and done.
On that note, when recently speaking with CBR, executive producer John Stephens let us all know which aces him and his colleagues will pull from their sleeves before having to take their final bow, saying:
“There are a whole bunch of characters I want to see that I feel the viewers at large aren’t fully aware of, like Scarface or Ventriloquist. There’s a great dark version of that character somewhere out there who I would like to see come out. Some characters we know we want to see are Mother and Orphan. We want to see Lady Shiva. We are going to see all those characters in Season 5.”
When it comes to the Scarface-Ventriloquist duo, one would naturally expect to see the classic Arnold Wesker iteration known to most comic book readers and fans of animation, but if Stephens and company truly want to go darker, then we may want to bone up on Gail Simone’s Batgirl run from the early days of the New 52. There, the Ventriloquist was a woman by the name of Shauna Belzer and, quite frankly, her arc was truly disturbing.
As for the name-dropping of Orphan, this has led some to jump to the conclusion that Cassandra Cain – perhaps better known as one of the pre-New 52 Batgirls – will show up, but given the mentioning of Mother, it’s more likely we’ll see her father, David Cain, raising child assassins along with the murderous matriarch. Add Lady Shiva to the mix – who happens to be Cassandra’s mother, mind you – and you have to admit the puzzle pieces are really falling into place. Remember, this is a prequel series.
Be sure to catch the season finale of Gotham tonight on Fox.