When it comes to comic book-based television, few characters that seem to die are ever guaranteed to stay 100% dead. While that can be frustrating at times, sometimes the characters are just so good that we can’t help but want them back. The second season of Fox’s Gotham has been something of a bloodbath. Fortunately for those of us currently in mourning for some of our favorites, Gotham star Ben McKenzie promises that almost no character is off the table for a return.
In a panel at the recent Wizard World convention in New Orleans, McKenzie had this to say about the possibility of Gotham resurrecting Jerome:
Not only can we but we might. I can’t definitively say yes. I’ll put it this way: almost nobody that you’ve seen go away is dead. They are all able to come back.
News that death on Gotham has more shades than just black and white is certainly excellent when it comes to delightfully dastardly characters like Jerome, but we do have to wonder just how Gotham could go about bringing some of them back. A healthy number of characters had somewhat ambiguous deaths that could be reversed easily enough, but Jerome was super dead. He was shown in rigor mortis in a morgue after being stabbed in the neck. Gotham will have some explaining to do if Jerome makes a triumphant and undoubtedly terrifying return.
There are plenty of possibilities for how the dead could come back to harass Jim Gordon in the future of Gotham. The mysterious Indian Hill facility has seen a fair few villains pass through for experimentation by the as-yet-unseen Dr. Strange. The terribly burned Firefly was brought in still breathing in an earlier Season 2 episode, and the midseason finale ended with the corpse of Theo Galavan arriving. Eagle-eyed viewers even saw the body of none other than Fish Mooney floating in a tank. Scientific shenanigans in a secret evil facility would be a perfect way to bring some characters back.
Of course, no matter how Gotham goes about resurrecting the seemingly dead, the show will be pushing further into the fantastical than in the past. Arrow had its Lazarus Pit, The Flash has time travel and a parallel universe, and Supergirl has carte blanche alien technology, but Gotham has always been more of an over-the-top crime procedural than a comic show.
The series will have to be cautious in how often and how easily it brings characters back from the dead. Much of what made deaths such as Jerome and Galavan so impactful was that they were such big characters that killing them off was incredibly brave. Cheapening death is usually not the best plan when it comes to great television, but Gotham has had such a solid Season 2 so far that there’s no reason not to believe that it can go about returning dead characters in the best way possible.
Gotham is currently on its winter hiatus and will not be returning until February 29, 2016. Check out our list of midseason TV premiere dates to see when all of your other favorites are making their 2016 debuts. Or head over to the next page to catch more from the panel.
