Warning: Spoilers are ahead if you haven’t seen the May 4 season finale of Gotham.
The season finale of Gotham brought big changes to the city that will one day belong to the Dark Knight, but perhaps not changes that the audience expected: Marked-for-death crime boss Falcone–played by John Doman–choosing to retire in Florida, rather than stand up for his legacy? Butch shooting Oswald and Fish, giving the former a chance to kill the latter? As showrunner Bruno Heller tells The Hollywood Reporter, “When you’re telling a story that everyone knows all the characters and where they’re going, you have to surprise people.”
According to Heller, even the writing staff of the Fox drama was thrown for a loop by some of the major beats of “All Happy Families Are Alike.”
Heller says, “We knew the season was the story of Penguin’s rise to power, so that was always there, but how we got there was up in the air as we were writing it. So much of the mythology is laid out before you because of the future that everyone is aware of, but there are many things where, to keep a sense of life and things happening without the knowledge of history, we’d just tell the story and see how things unfold.”
