When we heard Gotham wasn’t bringing back Renee Montoya for its second season on Fox, we weren’t pleased. The out detective (played by Victoria Cartagena) was one of the reasons we started watching the show in the first place, and the minimal screentime she received was frustrating.

Gotham executive producer John Stephens says he doesn’t see it as having written Montoya off the show.

“I wouldn’t say that. You know, it’s one of those things where these shows do evolve at a certain point, and I think that—I know that—the show began as a police-centric show with a lot of cops, and as Season 1 evolved and definitely as Season 2 began to take shape, it became more of a Gotham supervillain-centric show. We’re spending more time with the supervillains that we see. So we started sort of diminishing all of our cops, and unfortunately, both Victoria and the actor playing Alan—when you’re giving more screentime to Penguin or to Riddler or to our new Joker-type character, all of a sudden they get squeezed out of the sides, which is too bad.”

Victoria’s ex-flame Barbara Gordon (Erin Richards) is still a part of the show, and John is excited about her new slightly evil turn.

“Barbara’s character is so exciting. It’s hard to say without giving too much away, but she went through a big change at the end of the last season—killing her parents, etc,” John said. “But honestly, watching the beginning of this year—four episodes now—Erin’s just killing it. This new conception of her, she’s having so much fun with a totally different character. When you tell these superhero stories, you always talk about dual identities, like he’s Bruce Wayne here, he’s Batman there. So we’re always interested in writing wise, character wise, was watching that moment of transformation, when you stop being one person and start being another person and become another person, so we’ve actually seen her become something new. Not just a parent murderer but somebody else, too. I think she finds a much more powerful wilder side of her self this year. Homicidal, obviously.”

John praised how Erin has helped inspire the new direction for the show in Season 2.

“I can say I feel like Erin really kind of broke open what we could do with the show. Because once we took that character and were able to change her in the way we did, all of a sudden it opened up a realm of writerly possibility, like all of our characters,” John said. “Like, let’s define this spectrum they all live on and take them to this end and take them back over here and still remain true to who they are.”

As for her romantic life, bisexual Barbara will have a new pair of lovers, which might keep LGBT fans watching despite our loss of Montoya.

“She’s in a little difficult romantic situation. A romantic triangle with basically two main villains this year—one of whom’s a man, one of whom’s a woman. So she’s caught in the middle between the two. So it’s a triumvirate of romantic villiany. By episode two you’ll know,” John said. “That relationship, that triumvirate relationship, plays out through episode 10. It’s episode 201 through episode 210, I think. We really tried to make everything more saga-esque this year, so you seed it here and then you develop it there and play it off there, so it’s not all one episode.”

I’m thinking it’s the one with the whip, aka Tabitha Galavan as Tigress.

And even though Renee isn’t going to return this season, it doesn’t mean our favorite member of Gotham PD is gone for good.

“It’s a bummer, you know. When you do this for a long time, you have these actors and they’re good actors and you like working with them, but at a certain point the ship starts moving in a certain direction and you want to get everybody on the ship at the same time, and you say ‘Okay, the ship will move back over here and we’ll get you again!'” John said. “But we always think about is both Victoria and Alan still live in the world of Gotham, so even though they’re not series regulars anymore, if we need to, we can go back and see them again.”

As queer women know all too well, ex-girlfriends are never too far away, so we’ll keep the hope alive that Renee Montoya can reemerge soon.

Gotham Season 2 premieres September 21st at 8pm ET/PT on Fox.