‘Gotham’ Season 3 To Introduce ‘Proto’ Versions of Harley Quinn and Killer Croc

At the wake of the hugely financially successful opening weekend of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) supervillain team up "Suicide Squad," some of DC Comics' other live action adaptation projects are set to ride on the film's expansion of the DC Comics character stable by introducing their own versions of the film's characters.

"Suicide Squad," David Ayer's entry into the budding DCEU, just hit the previous week and brought with it a new take on the superhero genre by instead focusing on a ragtag bunch of indentured criminals forced to barely function as an off-the-books wetworking special ops group.

Among those criminals are Harley Quinn and Killer Croc, two characters well known to Batman fans as major players in the Caped Crusader's rogues gallery. Now it looks like the characters are set to head back to their home city as Heroic Hollywood reported that "Gotham" executive producer John Stephens announced that they plan to introduce the characters to the show, or at least "proto" versions of them.

Speaking with reporters at a Television Critics Association press tour, Stephens said that the characters will "not necessarily" be present in the upcoming season; instead, "Gotham" viewers can expect characters that carry elements of the famous villains with indications that the show might eventually fully feature the villains themselves.

The announcement is interesting in a couple of ways, the first of which is that it will continue the trend of "Gotham" focusing on the "origins" of the villains that DC fans have come to know and loathe. One of the more recent and major examples is the character of Jerome who was introduced in during the first season before eventually becoming a younger version of The Joker in all but name.

After a rampage throughout the first half of the second season, the Jerome character was killed with hints that his brand of maniacal slaughter still lives on and is what would eventually lead to the existence of the joker.

Aside from kid Joker, other examples of proto villains were Gerald Crane, the father of Johnathan Crane whose experiments would eventually lead to his son's obsession with fear and the existence of Scarecrow, as well as the strength-enhancing Viper drug which was inferred to be the progenitor of the Venom drug used by Bane.

The other interesting aspect of Stephens' announcement is that it is another step in DC's television adaptations regaining the freedom to use their own versions of characters existing in the DCEU.

A couple of major "Suicide Squad" characters, Floyd Lawton/Deadshot and Amanda Waller, were previously pressed in the "Flash" and "Arrow" series until they were suddenly killed. Reports at the time indicated it was done so DC could streamline the adaptations and to avoid confusion between multiple versions of the same character.

With Geoff Johns promotion to President of DC Entertainment however, that stance has changed and the publication is now allowing for the television series' separate universe to have their own versions of the characters. A recent example is Superman, who will now be making his way to the first episodes of the second season of "Supergirl" despite his prominence in the DCEU.

If the opportunities would allow, this could very well be the start of DC Comics live action adaptations having a wider pool of material to work with.