Gotham’s Harvey Bullock on Why It Doesn’t Need Batman

I, for one, thought the addition of Donal Logue to FOX’s Gotham cast instantly gave it a little credibility. Especially as an oft maligned character like Harvey Bullock. He brings a potential for depth and complexity to someone who is sometimes portrayed as  one-sided. In an interview with IGN, Logue explained why Gotham is worthwhile world building without ever seeing Batman.

"It appears as though there is a symbiotic relationship between the cops and the criminal underbelly in Gotham, and sometimes good intentions have unforeseen and long-reaching repercussions. When asked if Gordon and Bullock may inadvertently help to create the very rogues they’d spend years fighting, the actor replied, “I would say Bullock more than Gordon in a way… Because some of them are coming from both the ranks of the underworld and the police department. I won’t say who it is, but I met someone recently who was in the military, and this person was at this place in their career where they were making a decision between going Special Forces and going full “Hooah!” into the life, or not knowing if they were going to remain there. There was someone above them who was like, ‘The only reason you’re here is because you couldn’t make it in the outside world.’ So in a case like that, sometimes decades later, that’s why people do what they do, because someone back then told them they couldn’t do anything else.”“It’s interesting because people will say, ‘What good is Gotham? A Gotham without Batman is stupid!,'” the actor acknowledged. “What’s fascinating about Gotham is like, what happened in the 20 years before Batman was so effed up that it needed a vigilante to come and save it — and those moral decisions have repercussions. Like, Gordon does stuff that seems to come from a good place, but you can do something and — this kind of goes back to the statecraft argument — say, in Vikings time, if I want to kill my enemy, I have to kill his kids. If I don’t kill sons, they’re coming after me and mine for the rest of our lives. So you’ve got to pull the root out. That’s something that Gordon struggles with, being that brutal. Then later, if some bad s**t goes down, you can say, ‘Well, that was your bighearted moment.’ It’s kind of mock politics, so it’ll be interesting to see. I’m super fascinated to see where a lot of these things go. The question is, how did we get there? How did we get to the point where we had to have a Batman?”"

If FOX sticks to these ideas, Gotham may actually be worth watching after all. For the full interview, check it out right here.