Who’s The Scarecrow? And What’s He Going To Do On ‘Gotham’?

By Meghan O'Keefe Twitter @megsokay
Published Nov. 4, 2014, 10:15 a.m. ET

We’ve already met Catwoman, the Penguin, and the Riddler on Gotham, but which infamous villain will be next? Gotham executive producer Danny Cannon revealed this weekend that they are working on an episode involving the terrifying Scarecrow.

Now, the Scarecrow is one of the oldest villains in the DC Comics universe. Bob Kane and Bill Finger — the guys who invented Batman in 1939 — created Scarecrow for DC in 1941. Since then, the character has popped up in numerous animated series, important comic book stories, and in all three of Christopher Nolan‘s Dark Knight films.

Scarecrow’s alter ego is Dr. Jonathan Crane. In the comics, he’s a professor and psychology obsessed with fears and phobias. He winds up doing experiments on the nature of terror at Arkham Asylum and quickly goes insane. How crazy does he get? Well, in addition to dressing up like an actual Scarecrow and trying to scare people to death, the Scarecrow likes to talk in nursery rhymes.

Christopher Nolan stayed pretty close to this origin story in Batman Begins. There, Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy played the insidious Dr. Jonathan Crane: an amoral court psychologist who was using inmates at Arkham as laboratory rats to test a fear serum that the League of Shadows hoped would decimate the city.

 

It sounds like Gotham producers might be changing Crane’s origin story up a bit. According to reports, we’ll see Jonathan Crane as a child on the show. His father will be the original Scarecrow, and young Crane will inherit the mantle from his father. This way, the elder Scarecrow can be an adversary for Jim Gordon, while the younger one can be the villain we all know and love to hate.

Gotham has also announced plans to introduce a young Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) in an upcoming episode. Dent will be played by Nicholas D’Agosto on the November 17th episode. No word yet on who will be playing the older and younger Scarecrows. [Where To Stream Gotham.]

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[Photo: Everett Collection]