SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the series finale of The CW’s Gotham Knights.
Gotham Knights ended its one-season run on The CW on Tuesday, as the network bids farewell to many of its scripted series.
The episode, titled “Night of the Owls,” opens with the crew in quite the predicament as they try to explain to Gotham PD how they’ve once again been set up by the Court of Owls. Meanwhile, Rebecca (Lauren Stamile) is holding Harvey (Misha Collins) hostage inside Wayne Tower with his daughter Duela (Olivia Rose Keegan) strapped to a bomb. If Harvey unleashes Two Face, then Rebecca promises to disarm the bomb.
While he’s being questioned, Turner (Oscar Hayes) gets quite the shocker: Batman didn’t kill his parents in cold blood. In fact, he was defending himself from the couple, who were hired to murder him. In a (somewhat) fortunate turn of events, the police station is overrun by Rebecca’s henchmen, and the Gotham Knights are released from their jail cells to help stave them off.
A phone call from Duela lets the rest of the Knights in on Rebecca’s plan, and the group jumps into action to save them. But before they get there, Harvey takes matters into his own hands, caving to Rebecca’s request. He summons Two Face to keep Duela out of harm’s way. But, he still isn’t exactly on Rebecca’s side. In a final fight with Rebecca, she smashes a vial of acid across his face, thus prompting the infamous physical transformation into the Gotham villain we all know.
The episode ends with Two Face/Harvey escaping from his captors, and Turner being taken by another mysterious group right before Wayne Tower explodes. His friends think he’s dead, but really he’s been summoned to see his parents’ former boss.
While the finale may feel premature, it does wrap up several of the biggest loose ends of the season. Misha Collins spoke with Deadline about his complicated feelings on the end of Gotham Knights and how he’d hope to continue to explore the villain in subsequent seasons. He also discusses the end of The Winchesters, which closes the Supernatural chapter of his career as well.
DEADLINE: Last time we spoke, you alluded to the idea that Harvey’s evolution into Two Face would involve a choice he had to make, which would give him no other way out. Now we know that was saving Duela.
MISHA COLLINS: This is a story that has been told time and time again, both in the comics and in movies. The story of Harvey Dent devolving into Two Face is not new, but it’s been told in different ways many times. I really loved that we got to delve deeply into his psychology and give Harvey some agency in the decision to unleash Two Face as opposed to it just being how it’s been portrayed in the past typically, [which] is that he just comes to a psychic breaking point and cannot contain his alter ego. And what we have done in Gotham Knights is actually made it a conscious decision on Harvey’s part. He’s unleashing the Two Face character in order to serve what he thinks is the higher good.
DEADLINE: It is a much more complicated version of Two Face/Harvey Dent. You’re tasked with balancing both personas throughout the season, like you said. Did that make it more of a challenge to play the characters?
COLLINS: It was definitely a challenge. I mean, we had a couple of episodes where it was just a lot from an actor’s standpoint to juggle these two different characters, which we also tried not to make cartoonish. The delta between Harvey and Two Face is not enormous, and it’s not like we had major costume changes or anything like that to differentiate the characters earlier on. It was played a little bit more subtly, and that was both challenging and rewarding. I have to say, I had so much fun with it. And when I got home from filming, I went straight to bed.
DEADLINE: We also finally got to see the infamous physical transformation of Harvey into Two Face with the acid burn. What was the process like for those practical effects?
COLLINS: The prosthetic makeup took about four hours to get on. So it’s nothing to scoff at. What you see in the final episode is mostly prosthetic. It is augmented with some CGI, and they did an incredible job with that as well, but the plasticity of the real appliance — the fact that it can move with my face — nothing compares to that. Even in this age of AI, you can tell when it’s real like that, I think. We listened to podcasts kill time. It was actually kind of fun. I was so excited to be getting to play this DC Universe. villain that the time in the chair flew by.
DEADLINE: I have to agree. Watching the episode, the prosthetics are pretty cool.
COLLINS: It was pretty gnarly. I have to say, my kids were like, ‘Can I see a picture?’ And I was like, ‘No, no. You can’t, because you’re gonna have nightmares.’
DEADLINE: You did share some of your thoughts on the cancellation on social media, but what are you most disappointed about in terms of leaving this character behind?
COLLINS: Well, as the series winds up, we’re really just getting introduced to the Two Face character, and it would have been rich and rewarding to have explored him devolving down the road and the inevitable fights to bring Harvey back, which would, of course, have involved a tremendous amount of inner turmoil. We had lots of conversations about what a prospective Season 2 might look like. I have to say, as it plays, this season ties up so many of the story arcs on the show with a bow so neatly that it almost works as a one-season miniseries. I’m glad that we’re not leaving the audience hanging…it feels like a very nicely encapsulated chapter and an okay stopping point. Yet, I felt like this the show was really getting cooking, and I would have loved to have had more time with it. I loved working with this cast. I loved working with these producers and writers. It was a very fun, fertile, creative playground. And I’m gonna miss all of that.
DEADLINE: I was relieved to see that the ending did tie up enough loose ends that the season could stand alone, as you said.
COLLINS: With the state of affairs as they were with the CW and DC and the Warner Brothers universe, all of the various variables that were coming into play here, our showrunners knew that from the outset of this season. In fact, when we were shooting the pilot, they knew that the deck was stacking against it for a Season 2. So that factored into the decision, I think, not to make this a pure cliffhanger, because it would be really unsatisfying for everyone involved if at least the season’s main arcs weren’t resolved.
DEADLINE: Most of your scenes in the finale are opposite Olivia Rose Keegan as Duela. How was working with her, and with all the young actors, as scene partners over the course of the season?
COLLINS: I have to say, this is always happens in television, where everyone is finding their feet at the very beginning and the characters are getting solidified. In television, we don’t have a ton of rehearsal time. So you actually have to, on the fly, get to know your character and how the characters interplay with one another. I was just watching Friends with my kids, and it was just amazing to see the evolution in the first several episodes of the first season on how all of those characters are finding themselves. But we were really lucky with this cast. Everyone started fantastic and grew as performers and the characters really coalesced in beautiful ways. Working with Olivia, she did so much homework and it showed in every scene. It was just really, really gratifying working with her and really cool to have her turn out to be my daughter, which only diehard DC fans will know this, but there is a Duela Dent in the comic book lore. So this is a nod to some obscure comic book heritage there.
DEADLINE: As Gotham Knights comes to an end, so does The Winchesters, which closes out another chapter of your career in a way. How does it feel to see that franchise end at the same time?
COLLINS: I was just cleaning out my garage, and I had all of these boxes and I was finally sorting through it. I don’t know where all of this stuff came from, but I had like 60 or 70 Supernatural t-shirts and dozens of copies of Entertainment Weekly magazines that we were on the cover of. I was like, ‘Oh. I just have to bring all this stuff to Goodwill. This chapter of my life is over.’ I was gonna say bittersweet, but it’s actually just sad. I’m not sure what the sweet part of it is. We have to move on and take on other exciting projects in our lives, but Supernatural is always going to have just such a fond place in my heart because it was such a big chapter of my life, but it also so radically changed my life. I still hold on to some shred of hope that, at some point, we can do some resurrection of the show. Some movie or limited-run series… find some way to say hello and goodbye to the characters one more time.
DEADLINE: Is there anything else that you wanted to add about Gotham Knights?
COLLINS: I know that fans of Gotham Knights went out of their way to with a campaign to get the show resurrected. Or to save the show. They somehow managed to get billboards put up all over the U.S. saying ‘Save Gotham Knights.’ And I just wanted to extend a real heartfelt thank you to those fans and hopefully they can follow us on to our next projects.