How Gotham created the most faithful version of the Joker

“You will be a curse upon Gotham”

The first thing to understand about Gotham’s version of the Joker is that he’s not in the strictest sense the Joker. In the show’s first season, a character called Jerome Valeska was introduced. At first, Jerome seemed innocuous, a worker at a circus who was brought in for questioning after his mother was murdered. Under questioning, it emerged that Jerome was not a hapless traveler; he was a matricidal psychopath who possessed a familiar bone-chilling laugh. Upon his initial appearance, Jerome seemed like a fun Easter egg, an unsettling allusion to the actual Clown Prince of Crime.

In the show’s second season, that all changed. Jerome was broken out of Arkham Asylum by a villain named Theo Galavan (James Frain) to help him destabilize and then seize control of the city. During this period, Jerome went on a very Joker-like reign of terror, killing dozens of people and tormenting wealthy citizens like Bruce Wayne. Ultimately, Galavan betrayed and murdered Jerome as a way to establish himself as a hero and that seems to be it for the proto-Joker.

However, death was not the end of Jerome’s story. During his crime spree, he attracted a sizable personality cult that, echoing a prophecy by Valeska’s fortuneteller father, wholeheartedly embraced his legacy of insanity and evil. Jerome’s minions used one of Gotham’s many resurrection methods to bring back their leader. But the process of death and rebirth fundamentally changed Jerome and began the character’s journey to being the most accurate media translation of the Joker.