Why Poison Ivy is 'Ivy Pepper' in 'Gotham'

In a recent interview while on the Television Critics Association, Gotham producer Bruno Heller talked about their versions of the Rouges Gallery. In particular, The Joker and Poison Ivy. CAUTION: SPOILER ALERT.

When asked about why Ivy is called Ivy Pepper instead of Pamela Isely, like in the comic canon:

"It’s really about being able to tell the secret histories of these stories. If you just re-tell stories exactly as they’ve been told before, whilst you’re being true to the created mythology, you’re not really adding anything to it. So you have to find ways of finding more. And in this case, we’ve set up a situation in which Ivy Pepper, her mom is sick, her dad is dead… She’s going to go to the orphanage. And she’s a nice young girl; relatively undamaged. And she will find people to adopt her. And then we will start on the Poison Ivy story that people are familiar with."

Seems like the writing’s on the wall there. When asked about The Joker, Heller laid out an even larger plan:

"We will be playing with… Not just with Joker. Half the fun with all of these characters is who is going to turn into what and when? Certainly the Joker is a good example. In the pilot, you see there’s a comedian there. People immediately leap… And that’s really letting the audience do our work for us. Because I haven’t said anything about that guy and people go there!Yeah, we’ll play with that down the line. Not over the course of one season, no, because people will still get tired of that. ‘Is that the Joker? Is that the Joker?’ No. In a subtle way, we’ll be doing that and hopefully we’ll fool them in the end."

Well, that’s certainly comforting. I appreciate the idea of not completely, or at least not detrimentally, rewriting important characters for the sake of simply ‘being different’. One potential show-wide disaster averted. Now if DC would just tie their on-screen universes together.

Source: IGN

Why Poison Ivy is ‘Ivy Pepper’ in ‘Gotham’

By Skip Harvey | Jul 20, 2014