The other stand-out of the Gotham pilot was the eleventh hour appearance of Carmine Falcone, the crime boss we'd been hearing so much about throughout the preceding forty or so minutes and who turned up just in the nick of time to stop Gordon and Bullock being iced on orders of Jada Pinkett Smith's Fish Mooney, another gang leader who is nonetheless below Falcone on the criminal food chain. Falcone was played deliciously by John Doman, a traditional Italian mafia don who speaks the language of the home country as he dresses down the naïve James, whose father he claimed to know back in the day. The elder Gordon's connection to Falcone (and past as Gotham's District Attorney) are inventions for the series, but Carmine himself has a long and storied history in the comic books. And in the screen adaptations too, come to think of it. Again he was introduced in Batman: Year One but played his biggest role in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's classic The Long Halloween story arc, where he was more directly based off of Don Corleone from The Godfather. That's certainly what Tom Wilkinson was going for when he played Falcone in Batman Begins, as the crime lord Bruce Wayne originally goes after during his first trip back to Gotham after getting all Knighted up. In The Long Halloween a new serial killer called Holiday winds up being Falcone's son, trying to impress his dear old dad. Sorry if that's spoilers for a future Gotham arc.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
