Before Batman: Gotham Gets Its First Trailer With Young Catwoman, Riddler, Bruce Wayne [Video]

Fox’s Gotham won’t debut until later this year, but the network is already hyping its Batman prequel series, giving viewers their first look at the city the Dark Knight will come to protect, as well as a glimpse of a few familiar faces before they became familiar.

A 45-second version of the trailer showed up Monday night during the premiere of the new season of 24, but Kotaku pointed us to a fuller version, which is light on Batman but shows a Gotham City that’s on a knife’s edge.

As Inception-style horns blare in the background, the trailer gives us a view of a Gotham that’s falling apart. We get a glimpse of a mournful press conference centering on Thomas and Martha Wayne, two Gotham luminaries whose murder was the catalyst for young Bruce’s eventual transformation into the Batman. At that press conference, Gotham’s police commissioner assures Gotham’s citizenry that the killers, robbers, rapists, and thugs will not win, “not on my watch.”

That almost guarantees that the aforementioned ne’er-do-wells will win, necessitating the rise of the Batman, but let’s let the commissioner have his day for now.

There’s also a younger Jim Gordon being mentored by Harvey Bullock. That pairing will no doubt lead to some ethical arguments, as evidenced by their arguing over whether or not their police work is part of a larger “war” against Gotham’s criminal elements. By the time Batman rolls around to Gotham, Gordon and Bullock are grizzled veterans of that war, so we’re thinking Bullock’s viewpoint wins out over the course of the Gotham series.

We also get a look at the one true turning point of young Bruce Wayne’s life: the murder of his parents… oh… uh… Spoiler Alert?

The rest of the trailer gives glimpses of the younger versions of Batman’s future rogues gallery, with Young Riddler, a Young Catwoman, a Young Poison Ivy, and a Young Penguin all getting some screen time. Apparently, a hard-bitten police drama set in a world without Batman isn’t quite enough; the show’s writers have got to promise potential viewers that the Bat is totally on the way, kind of.

There’s also a view of Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney, a character who has no counterpart in the DC Comics series or Warner Bros. Batman movies. Mooney appears to be a criminal mastermind on the rise, and the trailer shows her opining that “somebody has to take over and it might as well be me.”

Previous leaks about Jada’s character have described her as a psychopath with the “brains of a chess grandmaster and the morals of a jackal,” as well as a “sadistic lust for power behind an exquisitely polite demeanor.” That’s well in keeping with other Batman rogues, but we’ll wait to see whether Jada can turn in a performance on par with other Batman villains in Gotham’s previous incarnations.

With Fish not appearing in the Batman comics and the Penguin supposedly being one of her underlings in the series, we’re not thinking that Jada’s going to make it too far before there’s some betrayal. The show does, after all, purport to show how Gotham became the Gotham of the comics and movies, a cesspool of crime and desperation with costumed loonies pulling off daring schemes and another costumed loony as its sole protector.

At the center of the show, though, may be the interplay between Jim Gordon and the young Bruce Wayne. The trailer plays up this relationship, with Gordon obviously trying to play the Good Angel on the nascent Batman’s shoulder, counseling him to believe there is good in the world. Spoiler Alert: Good Angel loses, and we get Batman, the hero we deserve, for our trouble.

We’ll be looking forward to checking out Gotham’s decline (read: Batman’s ascension) this fall.