“Gotham” is, for the most part, a show about bad guys — and that means there have been a whole lot of them introduced in the first two seasons.
But even by “Gotham’s” standards, the season 3 premiere was villain overload, thanks to Fish Mooney’s gang of freaks who escaped from Hugo Strange’s Indian Hill facility at the end of season 2.
We didn’t get a good look at them last year, but they were front and center on Monday night — and even for hardcore fans of the DC Comics on which “Gotham” is based will likely have found themselves confused about who all these people were.
And that’s because nearly all of them are, apparently, original to the show. This would make some thematic sense, as Fish Mooney herself is not drawn from comic book lore. In any case, let’s go through the main ones and take a look at what we’re dealing with here.
The first new beastie we see is a a hulking dinosaur-looking dude listed in the credits as “Ridgeback Monster.” This is likely the show’s version of Killer Croc, which audiences just saw in live action for the first time in “Suicide Squad.” Like many characters who have popped up on “Gotham,” the ridgeback monster might be a “proto” version of Killer Croc rather than the real thing (his design here is not a familiar one, certainly), but since nobody on the show said his name yet only time will tell.
Later, Jim Gordon encountered several of Mooney’s gang while trying to use Ethel Peabody as bait to catch Mooney. The first was a young man, listed in the credits as Sid, who appears to have super speed, which could mean he’s a Reverse-Flash (though this would be an unfamiliar version). Sid was followed by Nancy (this is not the first time “Gotham” has had a low-key Sid and Nancy gag), who is clad in a shiny leather body suit and a breathing mask.
We also see Gordon go toe to toe twice with a man with actual bat wings (pictured above, on the right). The natural connection to make here is Man-Bat, though, again, this is likely not the one we know from the comics. The real Man-Bat fully transforms into a bat rather than just having wings and he also turned himself into a bat rather than being the victim of experiments.
The last major player in this episode is Marv (pictured above, on the left), whose touch causes a person to rapidly age — and he uses this ability on Ethel Peabody, quickly turning her into an elderly corpse.
This is hardly all of Fish’s monster gang, of course, as a number of others are seen in her entourage, like the man with scaly skin (credited as “Scale Skin Man,” which could also make him a sort of Killer Croc-alike), the really tall guy which poofy hair and a woman who, in the teaser for next week’s episode, wields electricity powers.
So, we’ll continue this when we know more.