'Gotham' Season 3 Promo: Hey, Is That Killer Croc?

Even by typical superhero standards, Batman has a crap ton of enemies. Which is good, because Gotham seems determined to burn through them all as quickly as possible. A new Gotham season 3 promo shows what appears to be the show's take on Killer Croc — or rather the "proto version" of Killer Croc, because everyone on this show is a "proto version" of something else. Check it out below. 

The Gotham season 3 promo shows a man with spikes running down the center of his head and down his back and shoulders. He sure looks like a version of Killer Croc, whom producers John Stephens and Ken Woodruff have confirmed would be coming to the show this season. "We will be seeing proto-versions of some of those [Suicide Squad] characters. We see them as sort of a proto-Killer Croc version," teased Stephens at the TCA. "So if you see someone who has a scientific anomaly so their skin grows in a certain way, and someone says, 'Oh, I'm going to take that' and then grow Killer Croc from that in the future."

Indeed, the seeds for Killer Croc's arrival may have already been planted, in the form of Hugo Strange's Indian Hill laboratory. "One of the things we wanted to accomplish with Indian Hill and with Hugo Strange's work there was to, one, show that these skills, these powers were possible and that they existed in the world of Gotham," said Woodruff at the same event. "And, to really make the patients that came out of the Indian Hill the precursors of the inspiration for some of the more canonical characters that we see, [such as] Killer Croc, Solomon Grundy so that Indian Hill was the bridge to those villains, in other words."

This all seems like awfully fanciful stuff from a drama whose showrunner, Bruno Heller, recently said, "I don't think superheroes work very well on TV. Probably because of the costume thing." I suppose partially covering Killer Croc in spikes — rather than entirely covering him scales — is one way to "keep it real and unreal at the same time."

In any case, even with early versions of Killer Croc and his Suicide Squadmate Harley Quinn set to drop by this season, we can probably rest assured Batman's rogues gallery is deep enough to continue powering Gotham for quite some time. As Jim Gordon (the proto version of Commissioner Gordon) sighs in the Gotham season 3 promo, "I don't think Gotham's running out of monsters anytime soon."

Gotham returns September 19 on Fox.