The showrunners of Gotham had plans to transform Barbara Kean into a comic canon character

Barbara Kean has been an unpredictable character ever since she first appeared in Gotham’s pilot. Although she’s from the comics, the writers quickly moved her character in a different direction away from canon. Portrayed by Erin Richards, Barbara has been everything the Demon’s Head, a crime boss and more.

At the conclusion of season 3, Butch was revealed to be the comic canon character, Solomon Grundy. However, Butch wasn’t the only who was suppose to have a “comics canon revelation” in that episode. There were plans for Barbara to become an existing Batman character, but they were abandoned. I asked both showrunners John Stephens and Erin Richards about this during various press events throughout season 4, but they wouldn’t say who the character was.

Now that Gotham has only 10 episodes left, I thought I’d try to see if Stephens would be more candid about what his plans were. I had a chance to speak with him during Gotham’s press room at New York Comic-Con on Oct. 7.

“I think we were briefly thinking of turning her, for some reason I don’t know why…now it seems like a terrible idea..into Magpie. So we’re not going to do that. We’re just gonna have Magpie”, Stephens told me.

As Stephens mentioned, Magpie is set to appear during the final season of Gotham. Magpie is a crook with a compulsion for shiny objects. She was created in the 1980’s by John Byrne and was killed off on two separate occasions.

Stephens also confirmed another longtime rumor about the showrunners plans for Barbara. “There was a brief period where we said ‘is there a way to turn her into Harley Quinn’ but we didn’t do that either”, he revealed.

Erin Richards had denied she was going to be Harley Quinn when we spoke in 2017, but fans have long speculated that Barbara would become her. John Stephens not so subtly confirmed that Harley Quinn would be showing up, as a separate character, during Gotham’s fifth and final season. Gotham will return on Fox in 2019.