Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy, and (most likely) Joker aren't the only Bat-villains slated to appear on Gotham , FOX's Batman prequel series.

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I chatted with Gotham executive producer and show runner Bruno Heller at today's FOX presentation at the Television Critics Association, during which time Heller told me that Professor Hugo Strange will soon be appearing on the show. Strange -- who is familiar to gamers for his role in the Arkham games -- was known for making monster men, either psychologically or through chemical means. He also learned Batman's secret identity and became obsessed with him."Hugo Strange is going to pop up because we're going to start dealing with how Arkham was created and why Arkham was created in the way that it was so, yeah, absolutely. It's a Season One thing because in our telling of it the way Arkham was created and the why and how is one of the causes of the particular criminal climate in Gotham that allowed Batman to happen. The revolving door of Arkham is both a brilliant narrative device because it allows you to -- you don't have to kill people off, you can just put them in cold storage -- but if you're telling the story from the start you kind of have to explain, 'What the f***? Why don't you make that place a place people don't escape from?' We're going to explain why it is the way it is and Hugo Strange is a big part of that."Heller also said Harvey Dent will be a character on the show, but don't expect him to be some classmate of young Bruce Wayne's. "We're playing Harvey Dent slightly older. He's more Gordon's age in this telling. One of the things to avoid in order not to tell a high school story -- which would be great, but it''s a different show on a different network at a different time that I would not be a part of. But he will go back to school and villains will be part of that world."

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Heller added, though, that they don't want to bow to any pressure to overstuff or front-load the series with so many popular villains because they need to make sure they have enough characters and story for future seasons.The CW's Arrow has mentioned Ra's Al Ghul's and included his daughter Nyssa. Does that DC Comics show using those traditionally Batman villain preclude incarnations of them from possibly appearing on Gotham? "That's a good meta-physical, trans-network question. I don't think it would preclude anything, but I think it would be tough to do cross-overs because the worlds are so different. Like I said, there's so many rich, great characters that we can't get them all in there."Meanwhile, Gotham's other exec producer (and the pilot's director), Danny Cannon, inferred that we'll learn how Poison Ivy and possibly even how Mr. Freeze came to become involved in cryogenics. As for more grounded allies such as Dr. Leslie Thompkins, in particular, Cannon admitted that he and Heller rely on DC's conduit to the show Geoff Johns to expose them to such characters. "Let's hope we get a couple more seasons and all those people will work their way into it."