Gotham Producer Confirms More Joker In Season 3

Spoilers for Gotham season 2

Sounds like Gotham won't be quite so serious much longer. Producers have confirmed that the Joker mythology will be a big part of season 3.

In the season 2 finale, a group of patients from the Indian Hill research facility housed beneath Arkham Asylum escaped into the night–and if you listen close, you can hear the faint sound of Jerome (Cameron Monaghan) laughing. Although showrunners have yet to reveal that Jerome actually is the Joker, he's certainly the most likely suspect.

Executive producer Ken Woodruff told TV Guide that was definitely Jerome's laughter, but we shouldn't expect to hear much more from him right away. "[The laugh] was really to keep [the Joker] alive, to keep Jerome and that threat of the Joker alive. We wanted to make sure fans don't feel that we're completely done with [the mythology of the Joker] because we are 100 percent, absolutely not," Woodruff said. "[But,] it's not going to be something we delve into right way at the top of the season."

Instead, season 3 will open with the Mad Hatter (Benedict Samuel) as the primary villain. But there's always room for more evil–even if it doesn't come in the form of just one character. "We are absolutely planning in Season 3–but primarily in the mid to second half of Season 3–to delve back into the mythology of the Joker, and characters that may or may not be the Joker, but more likely characters that are an amalgamation of what we'll come to know as the Joker," Woodruff said. "We are definitely going to hit it."

In fact, executive producer John Stephens said the Joker storyline will be a major part of season 4. "We're going to see how the cult of the Joker, which we started at the beginning of last year and we touched on in the middle of the year, is going to extend and deepen and change a little bit this year," he said. "You have these sort of underground movements that have started to talk about Jerome and what he represented and how he's going to come back on the day, sort of like John the Baptist."

So it all sounds a little complicated. "Hopefully we'll bring that back in a much bigger way, and you will see these different versions of the Joker myth that develop next year with Jerome and with other characters," Stephens said. "[Then] we can put those pieces together and go, 'Oh,' eventually, 'that's where the Joker himself came from.'" Meanwhile,  producers said we might already have met Harley Quinn.

Gotham season 3 premieres Sept. 19 at 8/7c on Fox.