Batwomans Marquis Jet is Inspired by a Deadly Gotham Villain and Its Not the Joker

Batwoman’s Marquis Jet is Inspired by a Deadly Gotham Villain — and It’s Not the Joker

Batwoman’s latest adversary, her psychotic half-brother Marquis Jet, takes inspiration not just from the Joker, but also a lesser-known DC villain.

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Part of the mission statement for the third season of Batwoman has been to bring the best known Gotham City villains into the Arrowverse. Already this season, viewers have been witness to new versions of classic bad guys like the Mad Hatter, Killer Croc and Poison Ivy. However, the biggest name to be reappropriated is the Joker, who now takes the form of Marquis Jet, Ryan Wilder’s half-brother. As a child, Marquis was attacked by the Clown Prince of Crime, who electrocuted the boy with his signature joy buzzer. The trauma of the incident set Marquis down a path of psychopathy and violence, culminating in him aiming to replace the Joker and bring his vision of a world gone mad to life.

However, while Marquis’s style and goals are unmistakably pulled from the Joker’s playbook, he also shares a lot in common with a lesser-known villain in the DC Universe: James Gordon Jr., the estranged son of Commissioner Jim Gordon and sister to Barbara Gordon.

James is introduced in the 1987 story arc Batman: Year One, with his birth coinciding with the start of his father’s time on the GCPD. When Detective Gordon makes an enemy of Gotham’s organized crime and the corrupt police that back it, a mobster is dispatched to kidnap the infant to send a message to Gordon. James ends up being thrown off a bridge, but is saved by Batman, with the vigilante finally earning Gordon’s trust for the act.

Since Year One, James only made sporadic appearances, but finally made his full return in the 2011 story arc, The Black Mirror. There, it’s revealed that James grew up showing early signs of being a psychopath — not just his withdrawn nature and difficulty empathizing with others, but also his hobby of torturing small animals and the fact that anyone who teases or slights him ends up horribly injured or worse. There’s no evidence linking James to these attacks, which leaves the now-Commissioner Gordon unsure of where his son stands. Barbara, however, is under no illusions that her brother is anything but a monster, and his return to Gotham after so many years puts them all in danger.

It turns out she’s right. Since leaving Gotham to travel the world, James has been operating across the country as a highly intelligent serial killer, torturing and eliminating anyone who slighted him and never getting caught. He explains that he once attempted to clean up, participating in an experimental drug trial involving a medication that would stimulate his amygdala, allowing him to better understand and engage with the world around him.

Shockingly, it worked. James found himself able to empathize with other people for the first time in his life. However, he also came away with the conclusion that empathy was a weakness that was holding humanity back, and that the future truly belonged to the psychopaths like him. With this realization, James returned to Gotham to finally confront his family — and his sister’s longtime friend Dick Grayson, whom James had deduced was patrolling the streets of the city as Batman.

Already, James’s story lines up well with that of Marquis: abducted by criminals as a child, demonstrating early signs of sociopathy and psychopathy and being brother to a Gotham City hero. However, what truly binds the two ends up being their means and motivation.

Part of James’ plan involved reconfiguring the chemicals in his medication to reverse its effects, causing the pills to suppress empathy instead of encourage it. James intended to distribute them among Gotham’s youth to create a new generation of psychotics, but was stopped by the combined efforts of Batman and the Gordons before he could put his plan into action — or so they hoped.

Meanwhile, in the latest episode of Batwoman, Marquis finally got his hands on the Joker’s joy buzzer, the very weapon that started his journey to becoming the new Ace of Knaves. According to the show, the buzzer was designed specifically to make its victims go mad and turn into psychotics, much like James’s modified medicine. Team Batwoman has been hoping to reconfigure the buzzer and use its effects to cure Marquis, but since the device has only one use left before its completely fried, the race is on to reclaim it from the new Joker before his plans come to fruition.

Despite Marquis’s best attempts, he better resembles James than he does the Joker. While he matches his idol’s outlandish sense of style and flair for theatrics, Marquis is much closer to his enemies than the Joker ever was to Batman. He knows Ryan’s secret, he knows how to get under her skin and he’s willing to use their desire to help him against them. In this way, Marquis takes the worst from both the Joker and James, making him a unique and dangerous threat to the heroes of Gotham City.

New episodes of Batwoman air Wednesdays on The CW.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/batwoman-marquis-jet-james-gordon-jr/

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