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jippy-kandi · 4 years

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Digimon Adventure: 2020 – Yamato “Matt” Ishida & Sora Takenouchi

Thoughts on the new Digimon reboot series, Yamato, Sora, and the potential for Sorato . . . before it airs on 5 April 2020.

Which . . . is actually today in Japan. Yeah, I’m cutting it really close! But I wanted to write a post about it before it airs. The new Digimon Adventure: series will broadcast several hours from now in Japan -- and then be released online via Crunchyroll “worldwide” (select countries) a few hours after that. Which is great!

I’m going to refer to the series as Digimon Adventure: 2020 just to make it more obvious I’m talking about the reboot. Toei, please fire the person who suggested simply adding a colon to the original title was OK. Thanks.

So, when I first heard about the reboot, I did sigh and think, CAN DIGIMON PLEASE JUST DIE ALREADY?

I was thinking primarily of my wallet, because I have this irresistible urge to purchase almost every single Digimon merchandise with Yamato’s face on it (and usually Sora’s face, too -- as well as Taichi’s, to a lesser extent). So the fact that Digimon was still going? Well . . . yes, my wallet has continued to bleed.

I also thought Toei Animation were being really tired and greedy to reboot Adventure. No new ideas? Really?

But that was when the last Digimon series I watched was Digimon Adventure tri. in 2018 -- which I wasn’t particularly impressed with (save for Chapter 3: Confession).

Now?

I’m actually pretty excited about the reboot -- thanks largely due to having seen Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna a month ago. It even fuelled me to rewatch tri.! Which is quite a feat, because it was such a slog for me to get through the first time (. . . and still a slog on a rewatch). But Kizuna made me hungry for more Digimon!

So Digimon Adventure: 2020 has turned out to be a godsend (so far . . . that could change after it airs). I haven’t thought so much about Digimon in well over a year -- and Kizuna has made me think about it quite a bit this month.

My first thought about the first Digimon Adventure: 2020 key image was that, from the little we can see of it, Yamato’s purple top looked awful (I focus on Yamato a lot, if you couldn’t tell). Thankfully, it does look a lot better now that we can see it properly! In fact, I quite like Yamato’s reboot outfit.

But it really feels like this conversation happened in the Toei Animation offices:

Staff A: “Let’s modernise Digimon Adventure for a 2020 audience.” Staff B: “How about, instead of Yamato wearing a green turtleneck . . . he wears a purple turtleneck?” Staff A: “BRILLIANT!”

I’m sure they came up with the title for the series in the same meeting. *cough*

So I guess “modernising” the kids means tweaking their outfits a bit. I think Taichi, Jou, Koushirou and Mimi look fine, because their new outfits most resemble their old outfits. I also like Yamato’s, as I said. Sora’s took me back a little at first, because there’s just too much pink, but I’ve since gotten used to it and thinks she looks cute. Takeru and Hikari’s outfits are the worst, I think.

But I like that Yamato’s purple turtleneck “matches” quite nicely with Sora’s pink everything. And that they’re both wearing wristbands on opposite wrists! Sora’s appears to be a normal red sports wristband, and Yamato’s is a green handkerchief (obviously a throwback to his green turtleneck). Cute!

I also like that Sora is being “motherly” over Takeru in the first key image . . . because that was part of the Sorato foreshadowing in the original continuity. ;)

We can assume that the reboot is targeting two different audiences: the primary audience being adolescent boys (and girls, to a lesser extent) in 2020, and the secondary audience being the generation of children who grew up with the first series -- and are now adults.

Us.

So they want to sell more Digimon toys to a new generation of kids, because kids buy (or force their parents to buy) the most merchandise and generate the most money. Simple.

But they’re also betting on the old generation to be interested in it as well, and generate even more money on merchandise sales (as has been the case for tri. and Kizuna). That’s why they’re using the original Adventure characters, instead of just creating an entirely new Digimon series from scratch.

So while they’re going to aim to introduce a new generation to Digimon with an updated world, I think they’ll be aiming to “please” us old fans, too -- so I don’t think they’ll stray too far with the characterisations.

From what little information we have so far, it looks like it’s pretty much the same characters, placed into a modern 2020 world. It’s an entirely new story (canon), and there are modern updates to their clothes and accessories (tablets, smartphones).

But Yamato and Takeru still live apart due to their parents being divorced, and Taichi and Sora are still childhood friends . . . so it looks like their character backgrounds are still the same in the reboot.

Even so, a different staff can reinterpret their characters completely differently to the original staff. So even if the aim is to keep the characters the same, I think they’re going to end up being at least a little bit different, just because different people are involved in their creation this time around.

Is it possible Yamato won’t even be my favourite character in the reboot?

Yes.

It’s highly unlikely, because of my sheer 20-year attachment to him (HOLY FUCK I’M OLD T_T), but the possibility exists.

This has actually happened to me once before. Yamato has been my favourite fictional character of all time since I was introduced to him in, I think, 2000? It might have been late 1999.

But before Digimon aired on Western shores, my favourite fictional character was Raphael from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ‘90s movies (and the cartoon series, to a lesser extent). As a kid, I was completely obsessed with the very first TMNT ‘90s movie.

However, in Nickelodeon’s 2012 reboot of the TMNT series, my favourite character was Leonardo (best fictional leader of all time, people). He’s my favourite in the most recent reboot movies, too. But Raphael is still my favourite in the ‘90s movies -- I wish they hadn’t changed his character to that of a super typical brute in the reboots (which is what tri. almost did with Yamato, too. SIGH. MY EMO BOYS ARE NOT BRUTES).

It’s such a fine line between someone who pretends to be brutish to hide their emotions, and someone who is an actual brute -- because just having deep emotions doesn’t cancel out a character being a brute, if they’re just being a complete brute with their actions . . . it’s a really fine line! The TMNT ‘90s movie and original Digimon Adventure series got it right, but the TMNT reboots this past decade and tri. got it wrong.

But I don’t “force” myself to like things. If Toei screws with Yamato’s characterisation too much, he might not be my favourite character in the reboot. Tri. Yamato came close to making me dislike him in a few scenes in the first two tri. movies -- but thank god he got a lot better as the series went on, otherwise I might’ve dropped him, lol.

Just going off the official Toei Animation profiles, the 2020 characters appear to be pretty much the same with the same backgrounds. But there is an entirely new cast of voice actors for all of the kids (the digimon cast are the same from the original series, except Tailmon’s VA).

I think the reason the original voice cast for the kids didn’t return is because Taichi and Sora’s original VAs, Toshiko Fujita and Yuuko Mizutani, have unfortunately passed away (RIP), so it was an “all or nothing” thing. It would’ve been nice to have Yuuto Kazama back as Yamato, though.

Reboot Yamato will be voiced by Daisuke Namikawa (Daigo in Digimon Adventure tri.), and reboot Sora will be voiced by Ryoko Shiraishi (Akari in Digimon Xros Wars). I haven’t seen Xros Wars, so I have no thoughts on Sora’s new voice, but . . . Daigo as Yamato? Really?

I rewatched a scene where Daigo and Yamato converse in tri., and Yamato definitely has a lower voice than Daigo (who has a low voice himself), so I guess it makes sense for Daigo to be younger 11-year-old Yamato. (Although . . . Yamato has always had a too-low voice for a kid, lol.) But I’m really looking forward to hearing the entire new cast!

But if it’s possible that I might not like reboot Yamato, is it also possible I won’t even ship Sorato in the reboot?

Yes.

I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but the very first time I watched tri. (Chapter 1: Reunion), I thought to myself: If Yamato is going to act this way, Sora should just ditch him for Taichi.

Yep.

And this was because Yamato and Taichi switched roles in tri. (especially in the first two movies). I just don’t see Sora being attracted to guys like Yamato in Reunion (who was acting like Taichi in Adventure), but I do see her being attracted to guys like Taichi in Reunion (. . . who was acting like Yamato in Adventure). Thankfully, Yamato and Taichi go back to their usual roles/characterisations by the end of tri., so I still shipped Sorato in tri. and all is well in the world. ^_^

But if the reboot characterises Yamato and/or Sora a bit too differently that I just don’t like them together . . . I’m out. Again, I’m not going to “force” myself to like Sorato if I don’t think their personalities are compatible, or if there is zero connection shown between them in the reboot. There’s no point to me, personally, to ship what’s not there. For example, I actually like Mimato -- but I don’t “ship” it simply because it’s completely non-existent in Adventure.

But I guess, if there really are zero connections shown between Yamato and Sora in the reboot, I might still “like” them together anyway (casually) just from the fact that I have an attachment to them from the original continuity. But I hope there’s an actual connection shown in the reboot so I can ship Sorato harder, lol.

Hiroyuki Kakudou, the original series director of Digimon Adventure, told Misato Mitsuka, the new series director of Digimon Adventure: 2020, to do whatever he likes because it’s an entirely different canon. So Kakudou doesn’t feel “protective” of his old series from the new series, because he knows it’s not touching his canon.

(FACT: Yamato and Sora got married and had two adorable babies together in Digimon Adventure. The reboot can’t change that.)

At the moment, I think it’s likely that Digimon Adventure: 2020 will just be one season -- but who knows how greedy Toei will get? Maybe there could actually be a 02 where the original cast are the main characters!? (I personally would have wanted that, instead of the 02 we got with the 02 cast. :P)

Can you imagine if this reboot got a new season 15 years later a la tri.? Poor reboot Yamato will be forced into purple tops for the next 20 years, lol.

The reboot isn’t being narrated by a man this time (at least, a woman was hired to do the narration . . .), so Takeru is definitely not telling the story this time. I also don’t think they’ll do an epilogue, simply because it was done last time -- and they wouldn’t want to “restrict” themselves to staying true to it, like the original continuity did. But . . . what if the reboot wants to follow and frame the series with a similar narrative, and there is a reboot epilogue?

If that’s the case, I think it’s highly unlikely they would go with “another” canon couple/s, because it would be odd and disrespectful to the old continuity.

Can you imagine if Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask never hooked up? But Tuxedo Mask and Sailor Mercury were canon instead?

Yeah, insane.

Let me be blunt: I don’t think Taiora has a chance in hell of becoming canon in the reboot.

Will Taichi and Sora be portrayed as close childhood friends? Yes.

Will they have shippable moments? Probably.

But will they date and end up together? Nope.

As I said, I think it would be really weird (and even disrespectful) for there to be an original canon where Sorato is official, and a reboot canon where Taiora is official instead of Sorato. I just really don’t see it happening.

But, having said that . . . I could end up shipping Taiora in the reboot, and hoping like all Taiora fans that it does become canon, lol. The irony would be amazing. XD;

I think the reboot was/is being worked on as a one season idea. So even if they choose to do a second season for it later, that shouldn’t affect their plans for this first season (until towards the end, anyway, when the possibility of a second season can come to fruition). So let’s accept that the staff have worked on it as a one season concept for now.

It won’t have “romance” because it’s a shounen anime aimed primarily at prepubescent boys and the characters are 8 to 12. I think we’re going to get exactly the same treatment as the first Adventure -- and people worldwide will just naturally ship all the friendships between the kids.

Since the reboot is not the brainchild of Kakudou, I doubt they’ll be foreshadowing anything. But they could?

But if they don’t foreshadow Sorato, it does open up the possibility that they might make Sorato more overt instead? Even with no romance, they could make them better friends . . . because, remember, they do have knowledge of the original continuity. And I just don’t see them swaying from it (or against it) -- but that doesn’t mean they need to make it “official”. Especially as they’re just 11-year-old kids and there’s probably no epilogue. (But it would still be really amazing if the reboot made this a reality.)

But Sorato or no Sorato: I hope Digimon Adventure: 2020 is a good children’s anime, even if I’m way too old to be watching it. I hope they don’t just rehash all the old growth of the kids shown in the original continuity . . . I can’t handle another tri..

I guess I’ll make another post with my first impressions of the first Digimon Adventure: 2020 episode a day later. Maybe. It’s only 20 minutes, right!? But I don’t think I’ll be writing about it every week . . . that��s too much Tumblr for me (especially after I ignored Tumblr for a year). ^^;

Or maybe I will write a weekly post . . . because the world has gone crazy with the coronavirus pandemic. Stay safe, everyone!

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure:#digimon adventure 2020 #sorato #chosen children #taichi yagami #yamato ishida #sora takenouchi #koushirou izumi #mimi tachikawa #jou kido #takeru takaishi #hikari yagami

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futuresandpasts · 6 years

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Futures & Pasts | MRR #419

1144 words in this column; most of them are about Mark E. Smith & the Fall, but early ‘80s femme-punk heroines UT & Helter Skelter also get their due. As seen in Maximum Rocknroll #419 (April 2018), which happened to be the issue that caused everyone to collectively flip their shit because they thought MRR wasn’t going to review bands with Bandcamp pages anymore.

I don’t think that I can really get around mentioning Mark E. Smith’s passing a few weeks ago, given that I stole the title for this column from a FALL song, and that my feelings for that band are well-known enough that I had no fewer than five people send me messages right after the news hit, all saying something to the effect of “I immediately thought of you.” I’ve always openly admitted that there’s no way that I’d have learned how to play or even think about music in the way that I do now if it hadn’t been for having my entire consciousness flipped by Perverted By Language and Live at the Witch Trials and countless other FALL records, which helped me come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to write a song that’s just one single part repeated over and over again for its whole duration, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to get that same song out of the bare minimum number of notes (four is good, three can be even better), and that it doesn’t matter that you’re completely self-taught and that all of your “technique” is guided by invented patterns rather than any sort of concrete theory. But Mark E. Smith was also problematic as hell, particularly in regards to the verbal and physical abuse that he notoriously inflicted upon his bandmates, including a handful of his partners. Would I be as willing to listen to the FALL if they were a newly formed basement-dwelling punk group fronted by some asshole dude, instead of the band that essentially wrote the musical textbook that seemingly every DIY post-punk band from the past forty years has referenced at one point or another? Is it possible to acknowledge someone as being a brilliant artist while also recognizing that they’re an unequivocally shitty person? I was actually incredibly comforted to see so many of my friends grappling with that same dilemma as they spoke of how important Mark’s work in the FALL had been to them, because it’s something that’s weighed heavily on my mind for years, thinking back to every time I’ve pulled out “City Hobgoblins” or “Rowche Rumble” at one of my DJ nights, or when my band was recently crashing through a cover of “Big New Prinz,” or when I read Brix Smith Start’s The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise and Steve Hanley’s The Big Midweek, both of which chronicled the complex persona of Mark E. Smith in bluntly honest detail. When a co-worker friend dropped into my office on the afternoon that he passed, we talked about how formative of an influence the FALL had been on both of us as musicians, and I somewhat jokingly said that finding out about Mark’s death was my BOWIE/PRINCE moment, thinking back to how everyone in our workplace immediately went into collective mourning when they heard that those two had died. It’s really a much more fitting analogy than I had initially realized, though—in the midst of the posthumous narratives hailing BOWIE and PRINCE as creative geniuses, many people were rightfully pointing out some of those men’s past abuses and transgressions that shouldn’t be erased from the conversations surrounding their talent and cultural impact. The FALL were a truly mind-bending band, and Mark E. Smith deserves due credit for that, but as the man himself once said, “check the record / check the guy’s track record.”

No Wave heroines UT have just reissued their first two EPs (1984’s Ut and 1985’s Confidential) in a combined 2x12” collection on their own Out Records label. Although they started out in 1978 as part of the same community of New York City’s visual artists and avant-garde noisemakers who formed the core of the era’s downtown scene, the trio left for London in 1981 before releasing any proper recordings, which has left them somewhat disconnected from the commonly circulated histories that tend to center No Wave around the bands who were documented on the No New York compilation LP (TEENAGE JESUS and the JERKS, MARS, JAMES CHANCE and the CONTORTIONS, and DNA). One of the instigating factors for the group’s relocation was actually an UT cassette that fell into the hands of Mark E. Smith, who offered them slots supporting the FALL on their next UK tour, and it’s a historical footnote that I think provides some spot-on context for UT’s very FALL-aligned approach to dissonance and deconstruction through repetition. Sally Young, Nina Canal, and Jacqui Ham took turns rotating instruments and vocal duties on all of the band’s songs, with the various configurations of those roles (generally drums and dual guitars, but not always) and each member’s distinct performative approaches serving to refract the resulting sound from one track to the next in subtle but ever-shifting ways. On the self-titled EP, “Sham Shack” writhes at a slow but steady mutant disco pulse, dispensing with guitars altogether in favor of ominous organ, hypnotic tom-heavy drumming, and a loping, insistent bassline like BUSH TETRAS reinterpreting the more sprawling moments on Hex Enduction Hour, while the DNA-ish scratchy six-string strangulation and stammering vocals on “This Bliss” demonstrate UT at their most classically “No Wave.” By the time they had recorded the Confidential EP, UT were charting a very similar course as their former New York peers in SONIC YOUTH and transforming their tangled squall and razor-edged scrape with an almost conventional pop-leaning bent (just check that acoustic guitar break in the otherwise martial drone of “Bedouin”), but without completely smoothing out the sharp angles that made their raw post-punk clamor so electrifying. A very necessary reissue. (Out Records, utmusic.bandcamp.com)

Yet another entry in the “unjustly neglected ‘80s femme-punk outfits” archive: HELTER SKELTER, a Sydney, Australia quintet whose recorded output is limited to a two-song 7” from 1984 on Hot Records that expertly twists together gauzy coldwave and jaggedly rhythmic post-punk. There seems to be little to no trace of the band’s existence to be found in the deep abyss of the internet, but I’m guessing that they spun out of the same art-damaged Sydney post-punk underground responsible for similarly-minded (but far less enigmatic) groups like PEL MEL and SARDINE. “Make Believe,” the A-side of that lone HELTER SKELTER single, sounds like some parallel universe SIOUXSIE SIOUX fronting an early ‘80s Factory Records band, with guitarist Diannah Levy’s dramatically icy vocals cutting through the clatter of electronically-treated drums and trumpet. On the B-side, “The Party” is essentially everything that made me so enamored with PYLON—cavernous, repetitive bassline pushed to the forefront, sparse and trebly single-note guitar stabs, Levy’s fiercely detached delivery of her oblique lyrics, total anxious dancefloor energy for the freaks and weirdos. If you’re only going to put out one record, it should be as good as this one.

#mark e. smith #the fall #UT #helter skelter #futures & pasts #maximum rocknroll

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justgotham · 7 years

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Edward Nygma, aka Gotham City's puzzle-prone supervillain The Riddler, has always had the potential to be one of Batman’s most intriguing, multi-layered foes, though it took comic books several decades to elevate the man from a one-note gimmick to a complex, three-dimensional character.

It was a transition of the most glacial pace, not exactly aided by largely goofy on-screen portrayals in the mid and late 20th century, with two prior live-action TV iterations (Frank Gorshin and his successor, John Astin) and a feature-film appearance by Jim Carrey cementing The Riddler's status as little more than a hyperactive nuisance with a Lycra fetish and an inexplicable need to tell his opponent — albeit cryptically — exactly what nefarious plans he had up his sleeve.

But, even with early animated appearances in the 1960s-80s reinforcing the campy, unitard-clad interpretation of the character, change eventually took hold: the 1990s' Batman: The Animated Series gave Nygma a new look — actually first worn by Gorshin in 1966's Batman: The Movie, and since adopted as his primary outfit in the comics — as a suit-and-bowler-hat-wearing genius initially out for vengeance against an employer who had scorned him, consequently driven forward by his obsessive desire to outsmart his nemesis and anyone else who would oppose him. (Granted, the series' successor, The New Batman Adventures, reverted to the unitard, and mid-2000s series The Batman went full weirdo-goth — but the less said about that, the better.)

Along with that reinterpretation and a few consequent re-imaginings in the comic books, his mythos has found further substance elsewhere: he was a persistent presence throughout the Arkham games of the past decade, and — although not canon — writer/artist Alex Ross even suggested in his 2005-2007 series Justice that Nygma's penchant for riddles was the result of an abusive father who used to beat the truth out of his son when he suspected the latter was lying, the villain's clues a manifestation of his ensuing psychological inability to be untruthful about his intentions.

All of which is to say: The Riddler has come a long, long way since his first appearance almost 70 years ago.

In the case of popular Fox TV show Gotham, a similar degree of depth has been achieved for the character, though it's done so in a much shorter time frame, across its three seasons to date, gradually coaxing Nygma's inner evil out from underneath a shell of naivety and social awkwardness. Even so, for actor Cory Michael Smith — presently in Australia ahead of his impending appearance at Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming Expo — reaching the point where he has finally stepped into the shoes of one of Batman's greatest supervillains still felt like an eternity.

"I actually said to the producers ... ‘When does this change? When does my life change? When do things start happening?'"

"It started so slow for me; season one really tested my patience," he laughs. "I was just some dopey, gawky, chipper dude walking around the GCPD, trying to make some friends and make people laugh and test people, and I just kept pissing people off and upsetting them, but it was this long period for him — it felt very much like his life.

“I kept coming in and kept making effort to impress these people, as Edward, and make people laugh, and was just getting shutdown after shutdown, and I actually said to the producers ... ‘When does this change? When does my life change? When do things start happening?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah; yeah, that’s Edward’s experience, isn’t it?’ But, once the ball started rolling, I started having a blast, and I’m having more fun than ever. And, now that we’ve finished season three, I can officially call myself The Riddler, and that feels pretty darn fantastic."

Describing Nygma's shift from maligned and misunderstood coworker, to accidental murderer, to aspiring criminal mastermind as "one of the most extreme and cared-for evolutions on the show", Smith says that his character's journey represents "a very smart transition" for Gotham over the course of its existing arc, one that has served both show and character in very good stead by establishing Nygma's underlying humanity before tearing him down and rebirthing him as The Riddler, ensuring a genuine connection was established with the series' viewers.

"I certainly try to connect everything to a piece of humanity, and not just be evil for evil’s sake; that’s not that interesting."

"I think the audience got to sit with Edward as a genuinely well-intentioned young man, and to see him kind of suffer, and then the unfortunate events that befell him," he muses, reflecting on Nygma's journey. "At a certain point, when you’re in your late 20s and you just can’t catch a break, and when you finally do have the first taste of normalcy in your life ever — that being a relationship with a beautiful woman who loves you back — and you’ve lost your virginity and you’re going on dates, and all of a sudden this guy at your work, Gordon [Ben McKenzie], likes you, and is on a double-date with you, and that’s taken away from you by you accidentally killing your second person... at a certain point, it’s like, you know, this guy looks at his life and he goes, ‘You know, I’m not making these decisions; this is the world taking over my life. This is fate.’

"I’ve always found that to be a really interesting way to kick Edward into villainy, by him forfeiting his attempts at being a good guy, at being kind, and trying to make friends with people, just trying to love someone. It’s like, the world’s just not going to let him do it, and he can’t do it any more. He has to kind of forfeit that, and accept the role that he thinks the world has given him. And I think there’s a tragedy to that, that a viewer, as they watch that, can have some sort of compassion and sympathy for him, so that as he goes forward, it’s almost… you feel so bad and sad when you see this person doing all this stuff. So, I don’t know, maybe that’s what people are attached to. I certainly try to connect everything to a piece of humanity, and not just be evil for evil’s sake; that’s not that interesting."

While Nygma's slide into villainy appears, at face value, to be something of an inevitability — it was a foregone conclusion at the outset that we'd eventually see the man take on the persona of The Riddler, though there was no telling when that change would take place — Smith says that he enjoys the idea "that there is a way that he could not have been this evil, evil person".

"I like to think that there’s a way that most people who cause harm and destruction wouldn’t be that way, for whatever reason, whether it’s ideological, or abuse or neglect, or mental illness," he reflects. "I think his turn into villainy is an amalgamation of a few of those things, so, yeah, I think he’s more interesting if he’s someone who possibly could have had a life where he wasn’t harming people or choosing to wreak havoc. Perhaps still contentious, and liked challenging other people, but I like that there was another life and another path for him that was a bit brighter."

It's nice to think about whatever alternative universe exists in which Nygma ultimately got his happiest ending, but in Gotham's reality, it was not to be — especially not once the character started rubbing shoulders with the city's ascendant crime lord, Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor). Since their very first scene together back in season one, the pairing of Nygma and Cobblepot has been one of the series' most compelling relationships, and it has only grown in both complexity and entertainment value — through the duo's blossoming camaraderie, underlying antagonism and genuine love alike — as the show has progressed.

"Oswald is really one of the only people who can sometimes outsmart Edward, for now, because he’s understanding what Edward’s intentions are, what his habits are, what his neuroses are."

Echoing Taylor's sentiments about the innate chemistry that exists between both actors and their characters, Smith says that their fruitful onscreen compatibility is the product of several factors.

"Well, I think they work together for a couple of reasons: one, because Robin and I are dear friends now, and we get along very well, and that dynamic transfers very well to the screen," he explains. "Even when we are at odds with each other, Robin and I are very… it feels very safe, working with each other, and we’re able to do things with each other and mess with each other and be quite competitive on screen with each other, trying to get the upper hand, and when we finish … we just, like, hang out. It’s just easy. It’s a really great environment.

"But I also think that Edward admires Oswald so much, and Edward is able to use his skills and intelligence and ability to… he kind of understands Oswald better than Oswald sometimes, and knows what he wants and what motivates him, and he’s able to guide Oswald to getting what he wants, and vice-versa. Despite Edward not wanting to hear it, Oswald knows him just as well, and it creates this really interesting dynamic where Oswald is really one of the only people who can sometimes outsmart Edward, for now, because he’s understanding what Edward’s intentions are, what his habits are, what his neuroses are, because he’s spent so much time with him, and so he’s able to predict some things that Edward is going to do, which is dangerous for Edward, because he thinks he can outsmart everybody.

"It’s just a really interesting relationship; I think it’s one of the richest relationships on the show, because they’ve allowed us to have so much history together and so many shared events. It’s been really, really fun; it’s been really fun to spend so much time with him at work."

The on-set fun of Gotham also translates to the finished onscreen product of the show itself. In fact, it's pretty broadly accepted by fans of the show that, in its second season, Gotham underwent a fundamental shift in tone that saw it distance itself somewhat from its straighter crime-procedural origins to more fully embrace its comic-book roots and get a little looser, a little more ambitious, a little more exciting in what it was bringing to the table in terms of charting the rise of several of Gotham City's best-known and best-loved villains. According to Smith, it was a transformation that was "absolutely" felt among the cast and crew as the show reimagined itself anew following its (still generally successful) maiden season.

"We were all very, very aware of the transition of style and format at work, and we were all very excited as each episode kind of came out," he says of the series' structural changes. "We always get together as a cast with our producers and the writer and director, and read each episode together. It’s just a nice little family bonding time for us, because, you know, we don’t all get to work together. So we get to reconnect and read each episode together. As we were reading them, it just… each one just felt like, ‘Yes! Yes! This is heading in the right direction.’ We have rerouted ourselves, and it felt way more exciting. It felt right. So we all were very aware of it, we were cheering on the writers and the showrunner, and were really celebrating the redirection of the show."

"It’s pretty exciting to now have this moment where he is donning the name and donning the hat and is wearing the green suit, but that doesn’t mean anything if he doesn’t know what his objective is."

Although the Gotham crew have finished filming season three, the final eight episodes are yet to air, and Nygma’s ultimate acceptance of his destiny as one of the city's foremost supervillains will only be seen when the show returns this week in the US, with an episode titled — fittingly enough — How The Riddler Got His Name. For his part, Smith is positively jubilant about the prospects of what that means for the character after so long a journey.

“I finally get to call myself The Riddler on-screen for the first time,” he enthuses. “And I feel like it’s just a very cool thing, because up until that point, it’s like, I wasn’t really The Riddler, so I wasn’t really the third live-action Riddler; I was the third live-action Edward Nygma on my way to becoming The Riddler. But now, as it stands, I am truly the third live-action Riddler, and that’s just a pretty cool thing.

"But, in terms of the narrative, it’s pretty exciting to now have this moment where he is donning the name and donning the hat and is wearing the green suit, but that doesn’t mean anything if he doesn’t know what his objective is, or what he wants from this, or how best to be this person, and so there’s still so much — and really this is going to go well into season four — how does he become the best version of that? So, at the start, I had him kind of experimenting with how to deliver a riddle, how to interact with an audience that is captive, how to present yourself, and initially I have him doing things that are a bit brusque and tight and forced — he’s trying to figure it out — but I want him to kind of move to a very different version of The Riddler; his expressions are perhaps a bit more elegant and with grace."

"It would be very interesting to see how The Joker would handle puzzles and problems set up by The Riddler where he is in danger, and the only way to solve them is to be analytical."

It’s not just his own character about which Smith is excited, but Gotham’s direction in general. With The Riddler set to make a proper return to the comic books in the near future — facing off against the Dark Knight's arch-nemesis, The Joker, in a kind of supervillainous civil war, with Batman's rogues gallery taking sides in a skirmish sure to be one for the ages — Smith says that he would be keen to see his Nygma go toe-to-toe with the series' own take on The Joker, a young madman by the name of Jerome (Cameron Monaghan), because, despite their similar names, their modi operandi couldn't be more diametrically opposed.

"I think that it’s an interesting pairing-off, and I think I’ve said this at a comic con recently; somebody had asked me who I wanted to work with on the show, and I said Jerome, you know, our pre-version of the Joker," he elaborates. "I think it’s an interesting pairing, because The Joker is really about anarchy and destruction for destruction’s sake, and when you have someone that likes questions and answers and analysis and puzzles — things that have to be solved, not crushed — I think it’s very interesting. It would be very interesting to see how The Joker would handle puzzles and problems set up by The Riddler where he is in danger, and the only way to solve them is to be analytical. I think that’s a pretty exciting dilemma for The Joker character."

Hypotheticals aside, Smith teases that Gotham is set to delve even deeper into the comics’ mythological well as the show stares down the barrel of season four, with surprises and delights in store for long-time fans of Batman and his crime-riddled city, and new devotees alike.

"Our team of producers, they��ve kind of taken on a new way of going about this, now, and it starts, really, with… towards the end of season three, they decided to go less obvious with most of their choices," he allows. "We're going to see some transitions happening at the end of season three, and some identities unveiled that I think are going to be really surprising, and people aren’t deep into the mythology probably won’t — may not — recognise. But, like, the people that love Batman and the mythology are really gonna get excited by some of this stuff that we’re doing. So I’m excited to see who else in season four they’re going to pull out from the deeper end of the well in terms of the villains.

"There are some very, very cool ones. I think that they make a few choices towards the end — and Ra's al Ghul is coming in at the end of the season, which isn’t as, like, obscure by any means — but there are a couple of revelations at the very end that are so good. So good!"

#Gotham #Edward Nygma #Cory Michael Smith

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