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Home , Azrael (Gotham episode), Cluemaster, Dark Angel (DC Comics), Incognito (comics), Lady Shiva, Maggie Sawyer

NINE LIVES

Writer’s Guide

by Lee A. Chrimes

Version 1.1 – 10/6/2011

SERIES CONCEPT ...... 3 Mission Statement ...... 3 Background ...... 4 Themes...... 5

CHARACTER BIOS...... 6

Selina Kyle ...... 6 Backstory ...... 6 Overview...... 6 Dialogue...... 7 Appearance ...... 8 Arcs...... 9

Holly Robinson ...... 11 Backstory ...... 11 Overview...... 11 Dialogue...... 12 Appearance ...... 13 Arcs...... 13

Renee Montoya ...... 15 Backstory ...... 15 Overview...... 15 Dialogue...... 17 Appearance ...... 17 Arcs...... 17

Other Characters...... 19

GCPD ...... 21 Central...... 21 Overview...... 21 Structure...... 22 Cop Stories...... 22

BACKSTORY AND MYTHOLOGY ...... 24 Overview...... 24 Bat-Years ...... 26

STORYLINES ...... 28 Arc ...... 28 Episodes...... 29 Story Ideas...... 31 Season Summary ...... 32 Future Seasons ...... 34 Spin-offs ...... 35

ACTION...... 37

SUMMARY...... 38

2 SERIES CONCEPT

Mission StatementS tatement

Nine Lives is a show without any obvious superheroes. It takes elements of spy-fi action ( Nikita , Alias ), urban drama ( Dark ), cons and thievery ( Leverage ) and bundles it all up under the world as reimagined by Christopher Nolan ( Batman Begins, The Dark Knight ).

NL will be a show about finding your place in the world, about starting off at rock bottom, a stranger in a strange land, and learning to trust those worth trusting, slowly pushing yourself to newer and greater things and leaving the tragedies of your recent and distant history behind. There’ll always be new challenges, obstacles and tragedies to encounter, battle and overcome, but ultimately it’ll be a show about finding ways past whatever roadblocks get thrown in your path.

We’re going to be taking Selina Kyle on a journey from down-and-out, disgraced former thief for hire, full of youthful arrogance and disdain, into her own kind of hero, one who plays to her own rulebook but can stand side by side with Batman and mean it. Holly is going to go from former junkie and hooker to bona fide ally of , albeit again by way of Selina’s own particular moral code. Montoya will start as a fresh-faced recruit and probably take the hardest journey of all, fighting a corrupt system she may never truly conquer, but she’s got just as much guts as Selina to down her opponents and never blink. Our three lead girls will always be the focus of our stories – this is their show. Too many shows are content to leave their leads largely unaffected by years of progress – not us!

The unique opportunity NL offers is that nobody’s ever traced the early days of Selina Kyle in any detail. Flashbacks and origin stories only give us part of the puzzle – post 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths , which along with Batman Year One is the rough starting point for our chronology, all we know about Selina is she’s an orphaned runaway who learnt thievery while living rough, and turned it into a career. Nine Lives will show us how that happened.

We’re going to do this without any of the flashy cape-and-tights theatrics of – this is the grittier, more realistic take on superheroics that the Nolan movies captured so well. The world of Batman’s Gotham is a colourful, violent place full of crazy characters, but they will always feel real . I don’t want any of that cosmic Gods, aliens and magic bollocks here wherever possible – we’re not going near things like , , or any of the Crisis events, because those aren’t the stories I want to tell. Nine Lives will be street-level action – DC prides itself on having one foot in reality and this show will toe that line. It’ll help us stand out, for one thing.

We will, however, be using the DCU concept of ‘’, people with extraordinary talents, gifts and abilities, whether inherited through accident, genetics or any other means. Possibly not to the full extent of characters like , but in order for characters like or to work we’ll need to be flexible with this.

We’re also going to be fun . I’m not aiming for the kind of dark, gritty storytelling you’d find on The Wire , nor the teen-friendly camp of Smallville . Somewhere between the two. Moments of tragedy, sadness, pain and loss, and moments of joy, exhilaration, fist-pumping ass-kickery and dry wisecracks. I’ve been known for action-heavy shows with strong characterisation and a line in witty humour,

3 and while Nine Lives won’t be as quiplash-y as my other shows, we’ll still known when to crack a joke, and when to shut up and kick some ass.

And most importantly, we’re not slave-tied to the canon of the comics. Anyone who reads comic books will tell you that their own chronology and continuity are hopelessly muddled, contradictory affairs, with reboots and retcons aplenty (and, in fact, one about to happen across the DCU later this year which will, if I’m honest, fuck a load of things up). When I originally started trying to map out Nine Lives , I quickly found that trying to find a consistent throughline of stories was nearly impossible, and when I realised that some big Bat-events that I wanted to play off wouldn’t be available canonically for six or seven years, I decided we need to strike off our own way with everything. Be respectful to the comic history and try not to deviate too massively unless necessary, but by and large do our own thing.

For example, while our setup here is very much based around late 80s/early 90s Batman, the first volume of ran from ’93 to ’01, putting it out of sync with where Season One begins, and Volume II from 2002 is where my head is with Nine Lives in terms of setting, scale and style. originally didn’t debut until 1992, so she’s been brought back to fit into earlier continuity (and the GCPD stuff in takes a cue from the excellent Gotham Central series, ’03-‘06).

There was also the issue of how much Batman to use here. Nine Lives will hit the major Bat-arcs ( Knightfall, A Death In The Family, No Man’s Land etc.) but as strictly background only. Batman will feature only occasionally (at least in the first few seasons), with reference to events and storylines off-camera when appropriate. Batman as a character could easily dwarf Selina early on, so to avoid that we keep him in the shadows until our Selina is more established. Same goes for the more major league Gallery like and Two-Face.

We’ll be doing tightly-packed, 13-episode seasons. No filler. I don’t mind a more serialised style, especially in later seasons, but early on character development is essential so if that means more contained stories then that’s how we do it.

So that’s what you need to know – what I want to do, how we’ll do it and why. Ladies and gentlemen… Nine Lives .

Background

DC have reset or rebooted their continuity many times down the years, but the chronology I’m working to begins around the time of ’s iconic reinvention of Batman in 1987’s Batman Year One . This showed ’s initial steps into becoming Batman with a near-disastrous first encounter with the GCPD, Selina and Holly popping up in a handful of scenes throughout. Year One ends with Selina designing the first version of the Catwoman costume (the ‘purple suit’ as it’ll be known), and that’s roughly where our first season will end. We’re focusing on Selina’s story during these events.

No purple suit, though!

Prior to that, there isn’t much background that either you or the readers necessarily need to know, because we’re literally creating it as we go along. There’s character specific stuff we’ll address as we proceed, but by and large we’ve got and is just an urban legend. Bruce Wayne hasn’t been in the mantle that long, and is very much still finding his feet. As

4 such, very few people outside the cops and community have even heard of Batman, let alone seen him, which is just the way he likes it.

Superheroes and (also known as ‘capes’ by the cops) are just starting to come out of the woodwork – some are crooks with colourful fetishes, some genuinely unhinged individuals allowing their psyches free range to soak up the dark carnival atmosphere of Gotham by moonlight. Some people would tell you Batman’s presence is what caused the rise of these costumed freaks, some would say they were always going to be around, Batman just came along at the right time.

Gotham City is a cluttered, cramped that best resembles New York and Chicago fighting over the same space. Affluent upstate areas are reminiscent of mainland New York and one of Selina’s primary hunting grounds, whereas the grimy downtown slums are where we’ll spend the rest of our time. Gotham City Police Department is a corrupt, crooked affair, with honest cops like Captain Gordon (he’ll make Lieutenant by the end of S1) struggling against it all. The East End, where Stan’s brothel is based, is the run down end of town where nobody wants to go, but anyone there knows they’re stuck in it. It’s best visualised by a mash up of the Nolan version of Gotham and the post-Pulse Seattle from Dark Angel – the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.

Themes

As is common with most of my shows, the primary theme of Nine Lives is about finding your place. Who am I trying to be? Who should I be? Can I be that person, or have I been missing the point of my own existence? Selina wants to be the world’s greatest thief, but starts to realise she makes a pretty good hero too. Holly just wants to pick her life up but has no idea how, and is inspired by Selina to create her own destiny. Montoya wants to be a good cop and clean up the city she cares about, but has a few secrets she can’t face revealing.

While Selina is automatically distrustful of male authority figures, Nine Lives isn’t going to turn into some OTT feminist agenda. We’ll have female villains who create just as much havoc, and male characters who accept that women can be their peers. A element of Season One is how Selina and Holly stand up to and escape Stan’s control, and after that how the girls make their own future, so as long as we don’t try to browbeat our audience with misplaced sociological tenets, we’ll be alright.

And a final theme at this early stage follows on from finding your place – it’s about enjoying that place. Discovering what you excel at and having fun with it, as well as developing skills you lack or need to improve. No matter what it is you enjoy, nobody can ever take that from you, or make you feel bad or guilty about wanting to do it. For Selina it’s the freedom to run wild across the city, nothing but the sky above her; for Holly it’s getting stuck into her programming and tech stuff and also trying to be a normal teenage girl at last; and for Montoya it’s both the satisfaction she gets from a job well done, and the romantic side of her life, the stuff she doesn’t let out of the box at work.

5 CHARACTER BIOS Selina Kyle

Backstory

Selina was born into a troubled family – an alcoholic father and depressed mother, alongside younger sister Magdalene or ‘Maggie’ – and after her mother’s suicide was powerless to stop her father drinking himself to death. Selina’s dad dropped hints on more than one occasion that he wasn’t her real father, but she was too young to understand what he meant. Selina and Maggie were taken into welfare, but while Maggie stayed in the system Selina soon escaped, living rough for a few years and falling in with the pickpocket troupe of Mama Fortuna, operating out of Gotham’s East End.

Befriending another girl, Sylvia, but going on the run to stop Mama from taking all of their earnings while the girls lived in poverty, Selina and Sylvia were forced to live rough again, briefly turning to prostitution (during which time she saved a young Holly Robinson from two crooked cops) before Selina was caught shoplifting and sent to a detention centre.

Here she fell foul of the fearsome administrator, finally devising an escape plan when she uncovered evidence of the embezzling scam she was running. Selina won her freedom in exchange for anonymity – her records expunged and eradicated, making her a , another name lost in the system. Spurning offers of comradeship from other detainees as they fled the compound, Selina was back on the streets again.

This time, she was harder, tougher and more skilled all round – expanding on her training under Mama Fortuna, by her late teens Selina had become a somewhat notorious thief, specialising in faultless high risk, high reward jobs on Gotham’s elite, stashing away plenty of resources for rainy days along the way. She didn’t have a boss, but she had plenty of contacts, her identity a well-kept .

Then came that fateful night at Robinson Park where she let her guard down for just a fraction too long…

Overview

Selina Kyle of Nine Lives is guarded loner, someone who got burned once too often in her youth for trusting people and now makes sure anybody who wants to try has to get past a lot of walls to do so. Her formerly sky-high confidence took a literal nosedive following the Robinson Park incident, and now she’s questioning for the first time her abilities in her chosen field. Did she get shot and almost caught because she was sloppy, or because she was complacent? If she slowing down? Too old for the game despite only being 21(ish)?

Not that this means she’s a cold fish – Selina unashamedly loves what she does, even with her newfound sense of doubt over it, and that sense of release she gets from pulling off a successful job, evading the cops or besting a opponent is what will help the audience connect with her throughout Season One. She’s damn good at what she does, and a combination of her skills (even as they

6 blossom and develop during the season) and her attitude (which gradually thaws) will balance out her aloofness and defensive attitude towards most of our cast.

Selina has a weakness for strays – literally in the sense that stray cats are inexorably drawn to her wherever she hides out, and emotionally in her relationship with Holly. Selina looks at her and sees a girl she could easily have become in a lot of ways – beaten down by abusive male authority she feels powerless to resist, hooked on dangerous drugs and stuck in a downward spiral desperately trying to stay afloat before she’s pulled under. This is why she lets Holly in – she can’t in good conscience sit back and watch Holly make the same mistakes she did (or almost did) when it’s in her power to help. The fact that Holly’s current shitty circumstance is built around how Stan treats her is another factor – she wants to get Holly out of that just to two fingers up at him.

This moral code is an important part of Selina’s personality – she won’t do something because it’s right, she’ll do something because it’s right by her . She won’t stand to see people on the underbelly abused and exploited by those better off – crooked cops roughing up hookers for their takings, gangsters extorting honest businessmen, supervillains generally trashing everything just because they can. Nobody stands up for these people, and as far as the system is concerned they don’t have a voice, so early on Selina realises she has the means and opportunity now to become that voice. It’s a long journey for her but her first steps will be taken this season.

Her mindset when at Stan’s is simple – survive by any means necessary until the time comes to break out. She knows Stan’s got her on a short leash for now, both because he could have the cops on her in a heartbeat if she steps out of line, and because of Holly. Stan can see the bond between them and even though Selina is unaware of the fact Holly is reluctantly spying on her, Stan knows Selina will go to bat for Holly if she has to, meaning whatever pressure he can apply to keep Holly there will also keep Selina around.

Dialogue

HARLEM You want to have a problem with me?

SELINA That depends. You somebody I want to have a problem with?

SELINA Selina, you never learn. Doesn’t matter what kind of a stray it is, you’ve always got to be the one who opens the window and lets them inside.

STAN Got a thing for the small furries?

SELINA They’ve done more for me than people have over the years.

7 Selina talks like somebody in her situation would – choosing her words carefully when around people she doesn’t trust (i.e. most people except Holly and Sensai), being careful not to show any weakness and never giving too much away.

Tough without being aggressive, dry of humour without being a wisecracker and able to show strong emotion when she truly believes in something, she’s always going to be a complicated character to write for. When she needs to turn on the charm or tell people what they need to hear, she can slip on the and purr with the best of them, but she always knows it’s just an act. Maggie Q’s Nikita is a good base point – scrub out Nikita’s more laidback, defensive sense of humour and you’re mostly there.

One thing Selina will become better at under Sensai’s tutelage and on into later seasons is acting. Putting on a personality, playing a part – not things she’s used to before now, but they’ll become increasingly valuable tools as she starts to pull more cons and grifts over time. Thus when she’s undercover she’ll be able to fully inhabit any new character she’s playing – this will allow for us to have a lot of fun with her dialogue as we put her into new outfits!

Appearance

Selina has four distinct ‘modes’ she’ll be seen in – her brothel outfits, off-duty incognito, high society glamour and the proto-Catwoman gear that will eventually evolve into version one of her Cat-suit by the end of the first season.

Brothel outfits are what she wears when ‘on duty’ for Stan, and usually consist of slicked back hair, corsets, fishnets, boots, leather, PVC and thick, tarty makeup – the usual fantasy fetish gear that reduces most right-minded men to blubbering cretins. She hates having to wear this stuff and tries to minimise it wherever possible – it reminds her of the life she almost fell into, shows her the disgusting side of male dominance she loathes and also makes her feel trapped into this current situation. Elements of this form part of her later Cat-suit (principally the ) as part of her way of reversing the negative associations they created.

Incognito will see Selina dressed down – baggy tracksuit pants, t-shirts, beanies, hair loose or pulled back, little makeup. When she’s trailing a mark, casing a new location or just out for a walk, this is how she’ll look. It helps her blend in and also gives her a welcome relief from what she’s forced into at the brothel.

When Selina needs to infiltrate somewhere a little more upmarket – a society dinner, art exhibition, ballroom party and so on – then she’s got an outfit or two for that. Traditionally she’s never been comfortable in these kinds of environments, which is why the training she receives from Sensai in etiquette comes in so handy. Think of Sensai and Selina as Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady in this respect – she’ll easily pass for a cut glass snob with a little more work. Society Selina will sport elaborate hairdos, dazzling jewellery and expensive dresses that mix class and elegance with just a little bit of sauce. When she needs everyone in the room to notice her, they will.

And finally, the Cat-suit. Version 1.0 is a simple black jumpsuit with a few affectations like night- goggles (lending Selina her distinctive ‘cat’s eyes’), plenty of pouches, hidden compartments and so forth for stashing her gear, and that’s basically it. It’s a combination of lycra, leather and other lightweight, durable materials – doesn’t need to be too specific.

8 The 1.1 upgrade following the events of ‘Claws’ gives her some new toys to play with, like a grappling hook, extendable ‘claws’ for climbing in gloves and boots, and an advanced scanning suite built into the cowl (which will give her the ‘ears’ her costumes always sport). Past that, the basic outfit won’t change too much. I don’t want NL to become a show full of guys and girls prancing around in brightly-coloured costumes – I much prefer the more realistic tone set by the first two X-Men movies in this regard. So any of you hoping to see Selina in a purple jumpsuit complete with tail and thigh high hooker boots will have to look elsewhere!

Arcs

As our lead, Selina’s arcs will obviously form the spin of each season, although the influence of Holly and Montoya’s own stories will be just as important overall. Selina’s Master Plan is to go from down at heel, rough diamond loner to champion of the downtrodden by our eventual final season. She starts off doubting her abilities and realising she still has a lot to learn – by the finish, she’s learned everything she needs and is out there using it to protect the East End (and Gotham in general) from the maniacs who want to destroy it. Bear in mind she’ll never go completely White Hat – at heart she still operates outside the law, and unlike Batman is willing to make hard choices for the greater good, even when that brings her into conflict with the Bat-family.

Selina will also keep moving from trainer to trainer during the first few seasons, people she can learn something from and then move on. After Sensai, the next biggest figure in her life is retired boxer and JSA member Ted ‘Wildcat’ Grant, who gives her and Holly some improved fighting skills (and again later on when Selina needs to up her game and take down hitman Zeiss). She’ll even learn a lot about detective work from one day.

At this point, I haven’t decided whether or not to use the controversial plot from 52 that revealed Selina’s turn towards heroism was the result of selective brainwashing by , because like many fans I felt that cheated Selina out of years of character development. I also feel pretty sure the MZP crowd would lynch us for a retcon like that, so unless you hear otherwise, Selina’s arc on Nine Lives will be all our own doing!

To summarise the rough plans for her year-to-year:

Season One – her rivalry with Kai spurs her on to excel under Sensai’s tutelage, learning combat and stealth skills as well as etiquette and confidence tricks. Makes a of sorts in Montoya, becomes closer to Holly and builds her resources, biding her time until she can defeat Hellhound, graduate from Sensai and move out of Stan’s brothel, shopping him to the GCPD to cover her trail. She’ll go from guarded loner to independent spirit, confidence restored. There’ll be the hint of a romance with Bruce Wayne too, and in the final moments she’ll officially adopt the persona of ‘Catwoman’ for the first time.

Season Two – with Gotham under the cloud of the Holiday Killer ( The Long Halloween/Dark Victory ), Selina investigates a link between herself and the Falcone crime family, believing herself to be an illegitimate heir ( When In Rome ). Her search amounts to nothing, but again she’s matured as a person – she now appreciates she has to find her own fortune and not rely on inheriting another’s hard work. Selina grows closer to Bruce but they still keep each other at arm’s length throughout.

9 Season Three – with the Bat-family growing and supervillains popping up every five minutes, Selina will find her life getting a lot harder this year. Costumed rivals confound her, the newly-minted and nefarious gang lord especially, but Selina will also be focused on building up her corner of the East End and building up a network of allies and resources within. This is the year Selina learns to trust people, and things develop at last with Bruce.

Season Four – dark times for the Bat-family, as is murdered ( A Death In The Family ) and paralysed ( The Killing Joke ) by year’s end. Selina’s role in the group starts to grow as a result, Batman impressed by the hard work she’s put into protecting the East End. Selina thus learns how to work as part of a wider team – right before Black Mask starts tearing her world apart.

Season Five – Batman’s back is broken by Bane ( Knightfall ), and his successor quickly descends into righteous madness, terrorising Gotham as the months roll on. Without Batman to keep an eye on her, Selina falls back into her old ways, knowing that’s not ‘her’ Batman out there, but ultimately she joins the eventual fight to depose Azrael and help Bruce return. Selina will come to feel she belongs in the Bat-family this year, earning her place.

Season Six – after surviving the outbreak of the ebola virus ( Contagion ) and Ra’s Al Ghul’s attempt to unleash an even worse plague ( Legacy ), Selina already has her hands full when an earthquake ravages Gotham ( Cataclysm ). This is the year of disasters, and everything Selina has been working for will suffer.

Season Seven – No Man’s Land . Gotham is cut off from the outside world, and in the midst of the rebuilding efforts Selina shows her heroic side by aiding Batman in his battle to stop President from taking over Gotham. Selina steps up to become a full-fledged Hero of Gotham this season, culminating in a vicious battle with Scarecrow - and the attempted murder of Jim Gordon which Catwoman gets the blame for!

Season Eight – on the run as Gordon recovers, Selina displays increasingly erratic behaviour until she’s finally arrested. We learn she actually lost to Scarecrow last season, and has been slowly cracking under fear gas poisoning ever since. She’s shot and presumed killed by assassin in the finale.

These are obviously all subject to change, and there are plans for her resurrection (Selina’s Big Score ) and another four seasons after this, but one step at a time, eh? Our overall goal here is to build Selina up and then knock her back down, force another renewal of her character from the ground up. Could be we end up doing this in six seasons instead of eight – time will tell. We also have her various romances to factor in (Bruce Wayne, Slam Bradley etc.) and even the birth of baby Helena one day, but again – long way off yet.

It is very important that even when she’s considered an ally of Batman, this is always Selina’s show. She doesn’t work for him, she only takes orders if they suit what she was going to do anyway, and his presence each episode should still be kept minimal. This can’t become Batman’s show with Selina reduced to a recurring support role. That said, down the line I’d like to have Poison Ivy and become more regular faces, both to set up their later team-up (in the recent monthly Gotham City Sirens ) and also because they’re two fun, complex characters.

10 Holly Robinson

BaBaBackstoryBa ckstory

Holly was a young runaway who was forced into life on the streets from an early age, quickly adopted by Stan as one of his ‘girls’. A chance encounter with Selina (when she beat up two cops who were hassling her) always stuck with her, so when they meet again many years later she’s sure it’s a sign she’s meant to stick close to this incredible woman.

Little is known of Holly’s life in terms of canon, which is handy for us because it means we can make it all up ourselves. We know her stabbing of Bruce in his early days lead to the night of brooding that resulted in the creation of Batman ( Batman Year One ), which will be an awesome fact to spring at a later date, but the comics tell us that after their early days together, Selina left Holly behind to become Catwoman full-time, and after a stint with Selina’s sister Maggie at a convent, Holly returned to the streets, fell into drugs and is eventually reunited with Selina in Catwoman Vol. II #3. That’s obviously problematic for us, so what I’ve established instead is:

Holly runs away from home at 13 (reasons to be decided) and ends up on the streets as one of Stan’s girls. Selina saves her from some cops one night (and is never seen again), and she has the encounter with Bruce as written, but following that she just stays with Stan until Selina’s return in ‘Crash’. It keeps their dynamic fresh and also leaves us a few reveals for down the line. The rest is up to us! She’ll still have her addiction to drugs – the exact nature to be decided – which is a habit she wants to kick but has no clue how to.

The only extra detail to keep in mind is that she’s spent the last few years learning the art of IT support, initially to help Stan fix his old, broken PC, and later as his unofficial secretary, a deal she set up to keep her off the street. She’s been in regular contact with Barbara Gordon’s hacker alter ego, Oracle, but doesn’t know her real identity. Consequently, Holly knows a lot more about technology than Stan realises – and that’s Selina’s secret weapon.

Overview

Holly is a perky, bubbly character but one permanently on the edge of some kind of breakdown. She’s fragile, eager to keep the right people happy but painfully aware of what a mess she’s made of her life despite the brave face she tries to put on. Don’t mistake her for our version of Claudia from Warehouse 13 – there are similarities but Holly is more like a rescue shelter cat. She wants to come out from hiding under the sofa, but every time she does she knows she’s likely to get kicked. The kind of role Brittany Murphy was so good at.

She has a pretty good sense of humour, more akin to wisecracks and self- deprecating humour, but to avoid quiplash and further Warehouse 13 associations let’s not have her spouting pop culture and geek references. Let’s be honest – that’s overused right now, and we already have Emy on The Parcel View for that. Holly’s seen the dark side of life, despite her moderately optimistic veneer, so her attitude should reflect that.

11 She’s long idolised Selina since she saved her from those cops all those years ago, so the chance to finally be close to her hero is a pretty thrilling prospect, especially when she can actually help the legendary cat burglar with her jobs. Holly accepted a long time ago that they’re on the wrong side of the law, so as long as nobody innocent gets hurt she’s happy to help Selina pull any score she can manage.

Holly’s technical skills have been honed first through a childhood interest in what made things work (she was the kind of girl who’d take her toys apart to see how they worked, then try to put them back together), then through seizing an opportunity to get in Stan’s good books by fixing his broken PC, and later by her online friendship with Oracle teaching her bigger and better tricks. She knows her way around gadgets and software, and while she’s far from a master hacker she knows enough to give Selina the edge on her runs. The fact Holly can speak to Selina on her jobs also gives us a way to include Selina’s comics voiceover without relying on an actual voiceover track.

Off the record, Holly is gay but too shy to do much about it. Her teenage experiences with the paying men (and sometimes women) of Gotham has all but put her off anything physical, and she makes a point of not dressing up or making herself look attractive on purpose, both to distance herself from the actual girls at Stan’s and to make sure she doesn’t get any attention she may not be able to turn away. Down the line, she’ll hook up with a local waitress named Karon, but her intimacy issues will obviously get in the way there.

Holly’s addiction started when she was first on the streets, as with so many like her, and while she’s now less of an addict than she used to be, the first time we meet her is when she’s ODing. The reason why will be revealed later – Stan spiked her stash after she saw something she wasn’t meant to in his files, but after Selina’s arrival decides he can still use her after all. May even be a nasty surprise later to spring that she always knew it was Stan who tried to kill her, but she was too scared to say anything.

All of which leads to the dark secret – Stan is using Holly to spy on Selina, to make sure she’s not thinking of bailing on their agreement and to give Stan time to hand Selina over to the cops if she looks like she’s going to cause him any trouble. Holly hates having to do this, especially as Stan is using the promise of an uninterrupted flow of clean stash if she does so, but will be too scared to tell Selina until late in the season, following which Selina will forcibly detox her as part of their escape plan. I want to really amp this one up – have Holly really under the screw to keep this hidden, even have Selina get into trouble that Holly could save her from if she could just confess what she’s been doing. Her eventual admittance needs to feel like a huge moment – her first open act of defiance to Stan and the beginning of freeing herself from his control at last.

So for Holly, you have a girl who’s something of a screw up and is painfully aware of the fact, but who also has a tiny spark of rebellion and self-improvement buried inside her, waiting for the right catalyst to turn it into a proper . And Selina just literally fell back into her life…

Dialogue

HOLLY Piece a cake. I can open a new session on their intranet, run a few bypass hacks to get inside, then print ‘em off like I was

12 writing a letter.

HOLLY Yeah, I mean... why wouldn’t I? Okay, sure, everyone was shouting, and Stan was all: (bad impression) ‘Holly, you’d better patch this girl up or I’m gonna tan your hide...’

Holly could easily fall into the trap of tech-savvy, intelligent loveable nerds like Willow or Emy from The Parcel View if we’re not careful – a bit of a Mary Sue, cute and silly with very few obvious flaws. And by ‘flaws’ I don’t mean adorable ones like the nervous babble those two examples do either!

Holly’s a runaway, an addict and for several years as a teenager was also a hooker. That kind of baggage leaves a mark, no matter how much the girl in tries to hide it. So don’t have her shooting off the pop culture references like a stereotypical wacky sidekick – there’s a fragility in Holly at all times, a lack of self-belief that stronger people have exploited. She’s smart but knows her limits, desperately wants to impress Selina and is terrified of Stan. She’s hesitant but quick to babble when she finds something she enjoys talking about – and hates being treated like a kid.

Appearance

Now that she doesn’t have to see clients thanks to her agreement with Stan, she doesn’t dress in the same provocative manner as she used to, so while the rest of the girls are striding around in high heels, boots, fishnets, miniskirts, bodices and bustiers, Moulin Rogue-ing their way through each day, Holly will be in a baggy top, tracksuit pants, hoody, scruffy trainers – as far from sexy as she can get.

Her red hair is usually messy, she doesn’t wear much makeup, if any, and this accentuates her tomboyish qualities (i.e. preferring to be tinkering with computers and gadgets than outside chasing tail). Part of this is so can distance herself from her past (though some of Stan’s girls dislike her for this perceived slight on them), and part of it is because the thought of physical intimacy terrifies her, which isn’t surprising given she was on the streets barely into her teens.

However, more than once this season Holly will have cause to doll herself up – usually to help Selina run a confidence trick or some other diversion, and while Holly isn’t at all comfortable with this, Selina will use it to teach her not to be ashamed of her own body any more – to take it back from the people who made her feel like an object. And that’s not feminist speechifying, that’s character development. Okay?

As she becomes more comfortable in her own skin we’ll see Holly start to dress more like a typical inner city girl in her late teens, but that won’t really start until Season Two. And speaking of which…

Arcs

Holly should never just feel like Selina’s sidekick – she’s got to have a story of her own to follow through. Holly’s ultimate goal is to become Catwoman following Selina’s ‘death’ at the hands (or gun barrel) of Deathstroke, having been training

13 in Selina’s footsteps over the preceding seasons. Even after Selina’s return she’ll maintain elements of this new persona, having finally grown up to be the girl she’s supposed to.

Season One – drawing strength from Selina’s defiance of Stan, torn between the hold he has over her and the loyalty she wants to show to her new best friend, Holly keeps impressing Selina until the time comes for them to fly the nest at last. Holly will battle her addiction, attend night school and befriend bright star Barbara Gordon, as well as help out at the East End clinic Dr. Thompkins sets up – even though this proves to be a gateway back into addiction.

Season Two – embracing her newfound freedom, Holly acts as the voice of reason as Selina is drawn deeper into the Falcone crime family as she searches for the truth about her past. Sacrificing her friendship with Barbara after using her to access restricted GCPD files and getting kicked out of her job with Thompkins after being caught stealing supplies, Holly ends the year at a low ebb despite having finally met Karon.

Season Three – as things develop with Karon, Holly starts asking Selina to help her train, wanting to be more than just the tech nerd. She also acts as a face for Selina to develop the East End network, winning back a lot of the trust she jeapordised last season.

Season Four – the big test for Holly as Black Mask’s war against Selina’s hold on the East End takes its toll on her allies first and foremost.

Holly’s plots will sometimes be in support of Selina, sometimes focusing on her own dramas (and interactions with people like Stan, Barbara and Leslie), so that she has a life outside of Selina to develop over time.

14 Renee Montoya

Backstory

Montoya’s backstory is again more down to us to create, given her canonical introduction isn’t until 1992 as a lead-in to her part in Batman: The Animated Series . Luckily, the basic details remain the same – the daughter of immigrant Dominican shopkeepers downtown, Renee graduates from police academy with flying colours and joins Gotham Central under Captain Gordon to be partnered with Harvey Bullock. We’re skipping ahead to have Montoya show up in ‘Crash’ as a newly-minted homicide detective, mainly because her years as a beat cop don’t give her the access to cases and characters we need for her to be effective in Season One.

Renee grew up in a community of migrants so already has plenty of ties to the Gotham Hispanic community, earning her mother’s guts and her father’s brains. Always a protector to the kids in her neighbourhood from bullies or other threats (making her very much a White Hat equivalent of Selina in a lot of ways), after studying Criminology at Gotham State University, she went into the police force and never looked back (despite a training incident when a crazed cop opened fire on her batch of recruits, leaving her with an impressive scar).

Passing with flying colours, university is where Montoya discovered her sexuality, principally that she was gay. Whereas Holly realised early on and is comfortable with it, Montoya never has been – she can’t tell her parents or family, and doesn’t want any of her cop buddies to find out, knowing that a gay Hispanic woman in a position of authority would cause all the wrong kinds of ripples for her career.

A traumatic incident during the training stage of her career also shaped a lot of the modern Montoya – in the Batman story Dead To Rights , after his wife is coerced into suicide by Joker, Officer Geoff Enscoe goes crazy and shoots up an academy class, Montoya being the lone survivor. In the story she encounters Batman, but to make this fit with our timeline we can drop that element, and reveal the details down the line. Allusions to a ‘bad night’ she had while training will suffice for now.

She’ll join the cast in ‘Crash’ on her first day at Gotham Central having recently graduated to detective and requested a transfer to GCPD, wanting to be where the action is and for a chance to serve under the well-respected Captain Gordon, as well as being intrigued by the growing scene of masked vigilantes and villains starting to appear on the streets.

Overview

Montoya is similar to Selina in many ways – strong, proud and beautiful, not afraid to get her hands dirty and blessed with a passion for her chosen field that not even pretty major knockbacks can dissuade her from.

While your typical fiery Latina in many ways, Montoya also has a strong sense of justice that’s been with her since her early days, taking on bullies picking on smaller kids and righting playground wrongs. However, she also appreciates that sometimes the rules need to be bent a little to get the right thing done – there

15 are lines you can never cross, but knowing where those lines are is the difference between her and those vigilantes who claim to be protecting the innocent.

Show her a fleeing suspect and she’s the first on her feet to chase them down; give her a domestic violence case and she’ll drop the abusive husband if he looks at his battered wife funny; put her behind the wheel of a car and point her at an escaping drug dealer, and she’ll ram that sucker off the road as soon as nobody innocent is in the crossfire. This gets her chewed out by exasperated superiors as often as it gets her commended for bringing a perp to justice, but as long as she’s getting the job done she feels the end justifies the means.

With a reserved demeanour and a dry sense of humour, Montoya may get some stick for being a teacher’s pet to Gordon, and the endless tirade of sexist drivel she endures off Bullock just becomes background noise fairly quickly, but she’s got a sharp eye for detail and is always keeping tabs on more than she appears to be. This means her growing discoveries of the depth and nature of corruption infecting the GCPD fills her with distaste, especially with some of her closest comrades under its spell.

Gordon recognises a lot of positive traits in her, taking Montoya under his wing before the crooked cops get their claws into her. He gives her the ‘Cat Woman’ cold case to work in the hope she’ll find the resolution he never could, and when he eventually starts to construct the Major Crimes Unit she’s at the top of his list.

Her working relationship with Harvey Bullock is a tempestuous one – chalk and cheese in any way you could think, she may not like his slovenly ways, chauvinist attitude and especially not the hints of corruption, but he continually surprises her with his insight, streetwise knowledge and the fact that, under all the brash acting he’s actually a damn good cop. On his side, he may be exasperated by her bursts of reckless behaviour but the two will gradually warm to one another, forming a bond of mutual respect and eventually something approaching friendship.

At this stage, I haven’t decided if Harvey’s corruption is genuine, or whether to run it into a plot that Jim Gordon is assembling a team of ‘untouchables’ to battle the cancer in his department, and Harvey’s been acting like he’s on the take for months to give them an inside man. Appearing to take bribes when Montoya was around was a test to see if she could be taken into the team’s confidence. Decision on that arc to follow.

Montoya understandably keeps quiet about her private life – afraid of the ostracisation she’d suffer if she ever came out, it may be an effort sometimes to maintain the appearance of heterosexuality, but to her it’s a sacrifice her career demands. Ever since she busted socialite Kate Kane (and future ) for speeding back when she was a beat cop, the two have had an on-off fling behind closed doors that neither would like to publically admit.

So Montoya is a headstrong but smart cop, like a younger and more impetuous Kate Beckett from Castle in many ways (probably like Beckett herself in her youth, based on what she’s told us thus far), honest enough to keep her head above the corruption and driven to succeed out of a combination of civic duty and also a sliver of guilt – she knows that her personal life could affect her career, so in a way she overcompensates in case the truth ever comes out (which it will).

16

Dialogue

MONTOYA Keep an eye on your perp next time, officer, and maybe I won’t have to.

BULLOCK I’d try to tell you this could be just a power cut or somethin’, but I get the feelin’ already you wouldn’t listen to me.

MONTOYA You’re smarter than you look, Harv.

BULLOCK Yeah, I get that a lot. And it’s Sergeant Harv, newbie.

While Harvey knows the streets and how to blend in, Montoya’s lack of experience means she can’t help talking like a cop. She tries to pick up on slang and police vocabulary, walks and talks like someone with a badge and gun and as such tends to stick out a mile when she and Harvey are trying to fade into the background.

Off duty, Montoya maintains her reserved, guarded demeanour but that’s down to her upbringing – she was fearless as a kid, standing up for the weaker kids on her block, so much like Selina developed a thick skin she doesn’t like to expose to any surprise attacks. Her sense of humour is a little stiff, but as with her personality and attitude that’ll soften over time as she settles into the GCPD.

Appearance

Now that she’s a detective, Montoya can wear what she likes, but she sticks to a smart casual look in the office – blazer, shirt, pants – not to try and look more professional than her peers, but because she feels her role requires a degree of pride in one’s appearance. On duty and on the streets she’ll favour jeans, t-shirts, bomber jackets – tomboyish but trying not to scream ‘cop’ when she’s out.

Her hair is often back in a ponytail, saving letting it down for the occasional night out she allows herself. When Montoya chooses to get dressed up she’s stunning, but this is a rare thing, both because she prefers to keep working rather than hit the town after hours, and also because the effort of telling interested suitors she’s not looking for a good time, thanks, is far more than she can be bothered with. Plus, she can’t risk another girl giving her attention she’d rather keep private!

Arcs

Over time, Montoya’s journey is perhaps the hardest of the leading trio – after she’s outed during a corruption inquest across the whole GCPD, she struggles to regain the momentum she’d worked so hard to build up. Along with a bizarre relationship with Two-Face to contend with, life in the MCU starts off good but the spectre of corruption soon drifts back in, with the department eventually disbanded after a series of scandals that ends with Montoya’s resignation. One

17 day the costumed vigilante known as The Question will come calling, but as with all of our girls there’s a way to go yet!

Season One – fresh-faced and eager to start with but gradually developing the thicker skin needed to survive life at Gotham Central by season’s end, Montoya’s two main opponents this year are Selina and the GCPD corruption. She doggedly pursues Selina all season, working from Gordon’s old case file and building up a new investigation even though it’s dismissed by her colleagues. As far as she’s concerned, Selina is a perp that needs to be taken down, end of story. With the corruption, once she’s taken into Jim’s ‘untouchables’ team, she becomes more determined than ever to rise above the filth and help clean her precinct out, even if that means betraying the confidence of some of her comrades. She also brings in Hellhound, albeit unknowingly with Selina’s help.

Season Two – promoted into Gordon’s newly-formed Major Crimes Unit, Montoya is in her element helping crack the case of the Holiday Killer, as cops and City officials are mercilessly targeted by the mystery murderer. She also interrupts a rooftop meeting between Gordon and Batman, starting to look into the world of costumed vigilantes more closely.

Season Three – Montoya is finally forced to testify against Bullock, leading to his dismissal from the force, but not before his parting shot to out her at last to her colleagues.

Montoya’s plots each week will be obviously cop-centric, sometimes bringing her into conflict with Selina and sometimes not, but the two sides of the show should always be linked. We’ll see GCPD officers tackling thugs of crime bosses Selina is mixed up with one way or another, or the consequences of jobs Selina has run being investigated by the detectives. This degree of synchronicity is essential to make sure we don’t feel like two separate shows glued together, and also that both Montoya and Selina’s sides of the coin maintain a consistent tone and style.

18 OOOtherOther Characters

Stan – late 30s, Asian, wiry. A cunning, manipulative man with plenty of illegal business interests to protect. Runs an empire that stretches out into racketeering, smuggling, theft and counterfeiting from his East End brothel front. Connected to plenty of criminal families including the Falcones and Sionis, and has a little dirt on each to help secure his somewhat precarious role as a middleman. Tries to kill Holly with an OD after she stumbles across hidden files on his computer relating to blackmailing the Falcones, but changes tack after seeing her bond with Selina and instead keeps her supplied in return for having her spy on Selina’s movements. When Selina and Holly leave, they take his files and make sure the GCPD find a good trail right to his front door.

Harvey Bullock – late 30s, overweight, slob. Irascible, impatient, chauvinistic and a cigar-chomping, hard- drinking kind of guy, Harvey is what you’d expect to find if you went looking for a slovenly, unmotivated and probably crooked cop. His ‘fat Columbo’ appearance hides a sharp, savvy police , with years of experience working the streets meaning suspects often underestimate him, and he’s all too happy to bust the perps who think they can pull one over the big, dumb cop. Harvey’s far from perfect – borderline alcoholism, some ties to less than reputable criminal figures and a brush with police corruption too – but he’s trying to make amends for that now, working with his staunch supporter Jim Gordon to clean up the GCPD.

Kai/Hellhound – 30s, Asian, powerful. The head student at Sensai’s dojo, immediately making himself a rival to Selina after she interrupts his attempt to steal a priceless Egyptian artefact with alleged mystical properties. Sensai orders the two to train together, knowing their enmity will spur them both on to greater things, but Kai’s other career as costumed thief and assassin Hellhound also has the GCPD as an enemy. Kai is attempting to recreate an arcane ritual that will grant him the demonic of his namesake, killing along the way (making him the ‘Ritual Killer’ Montoya and Bullock are pursuing), a ritual Selina eventually disrupts, leaving Kai scarred and in police custody. He’ll be seen again but not for some time.

Jim Gordon – early 40s, red hair. Han Solo: The Later Years. Captain Gordon (Lieutenant by the end of Season One) runs a tight ship at Gotham Central, taking Montoya under his wing and encouraging her to follow up the ‘Cat Woman’ cold case. Jim’s relationship with his officers is a strong one – everybody knows he’s a good cop, but his outspoken stance against departmental corruption has also made him lots of enemies. Jim has been seeing Detective in secret for a while now, but is keeping the affair low key despite his failing marriage to keep life at home stable for son James Jnr. (we may follow the plot of his developing psychopathic tendencies down the line) and adopted daughter Barbara (Jim’s neice, orphaned by her parents’ death in a car crash a few years earlier). Doesn’t have a working relationship with Batman at this stage.

Bruce Wayne – late 20s, strapping and handsome. You know the score here – billionaire playboy, inherited heir of the industrialist empire,

19 and also just getting started as the fearsome costumed vigilante Batman. As we open Nine Lives , Bruce is still in his first year under the cowl, very much finding his feet. He’s yet to face foes like Joker in action, his reputation built on shadowy encounters and whispered rumours. As Bruce, he’s the charming, witty buffoon everybody expects him to be, though again still in transition between the troubled youth who spent years roaming the world on a voyage of self-discovery and improvement, and the fun-loving party animal everybody expects him to be. His initial encounters with Selina start a genuine spark between them, though they remain unaware at first of each other’s night-time exploits.

Barbara Gordon – late-teens, smart and pretty. A very intelligent young girl destined for great things, Barbara wants to be a cop like her dad, and with early enrolment into college alongside plenty of time meeting her dad’s comrades at the precinct means she’s already got a head start. To avoid her feeling too much like Alexis from Castle , Barbara’s going to be less of an obvious goody two-shoes – she’s spent the past several years developing the online hacker persona of Oracle, working to expose corruption, lead the police to cyber-criminals and also teach her many buddies and supporters a few tricks of the trade, including our very own Holly Robinson. Holly will meet Barbara in person at night school and the two will become good friends, although when Holly is forced to use Barbara to access GCPD files this friendship will break. Barbara is also the first Batgirl, a transformation planned for Season Three, so her first steps will take place this year – martial arts and acrobatics training. There are vague plans for a possible Batgirl spin-off but that’s a way off yet.

Dr. Leslie Thompkins – late 40s, firm but fair, elegantly attractive. An experienced Gotham trauma surgeon who went private after frustration at budget cuts and hassle from gangsters, Leslie sets up a free clinic in the East End that Selina adopts as one of her early pet projects to help restore the East End’s reputation. Leslie’s a tough cookie – she’s served as an army field medic and worked for Doctors Without Borders – and an old of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred. She’ll give Holly a job but be forced to sack her when Holly’s caught stealing supplies, and despite her reticence towards ‘capes’ she’ll accept Selina’s help (as Catwoman) to help guard the clinic from troublemaking crooks.

Sensai – 50s, Asian, deceptively strong. The Armless Master of Gotham (that’s right, dude has no arms) runs a dojo designed to train thieves and assassins, and identifies Selina as a talented prospect early on. Pairing her with Kai to bring the best out of them both, he eventually loses control of Kai’s obsessive quest to attain demonhood, and gives Selina carte blanche to take him down. Hellhound’s arrest leads to Selina graduating from his tutelage, after which he and his dojo relocate overnight to parts unknown.

Alfred Pennyworth – late 40s, classic English Gentleman. Not much is planned for Alfred beyond him being Bruce’s confidant and sounding board for any scenes that focus on Bruce, although his relationship with Leslie may give us cause to use him elsewhere.

More characters to follow, but in terms of our key roles for Season One, it’s our leading ladies and then the guys and gals above. The GCPD will get some more faces, and Selina will build up a network of criminal contacts too. There are people I’d love to get into play (Slam Bradley, first and foremost), so as with Montoya we may end up changing their canonical entry points to suit.

20 GCPD

Gotham Central

Overview

The many and varied characters of the Gotham Central Police Department are going to form a big part of the show – I want the precinct to feel like a living, breathing family unit, because they’ll be interacting with Selina and her activities a great deal.

Now, this is an element that could easily fill a show all by itself – and anyone who read the amazing Gotham Central monthly can attest to that – but police procedurals are something that traditionally I don’t know all that much about. I watch Castle but that’s about it, although that’s probably a good fit for how I want to portray the PD here. I’m not aiming for the gritty realism of The Wire because that won’t fly up against Selina’s stuff, so finding the right balance of tone will be an important task of our first season.

I’ll put up some reference links within the Backstage board to help with this, because I want to base GCPD on the real life set up of both the New York and Chicago police departments, as they’re closest to GCPD in terms of real world equivalents and inspiration. I’d like to see our cops talking like cops – absolutely nailed this so anything he’s written will be a good guide for capturing the attitude and lingo. Cops speak in shorthand and we need to catch that.

Likewise the structure of the department as a whole – while we’ll be focusing first on Homicide and later on the newly-formed Major Crimes Unit, we need to at least acknowledge the presence of affiliate ‘desks’ like Arson, Traffic, Vice and so forth. Patrol cops, desk sergeants, records clerks, PAs, the coroner – they’ve all got to be in there. No named characters unless we plan on repeat use, like Gordon’s assistant Stacy, but if the station feels like a place buzzing with activity and not just a big room full of faceless drones and a handful of named characters, we’ll be doing our jobs just right.

GCPD cops are only just starting to experience vigilantes and villains by the time our series opens – Batman’s been going for less than a year and is still very much a shadowy presence, his partnership with Jim Gordon not yet established. Caped and costumed villains have been sparse before now – after all, Gotham had a in the form of running around back in the 1940s, depending on which vein of canon you choose to follow – but they’re starting to become more frequent, leading to a shift in police attitudes as a result. They’ll treat the rise of capes with their trademark cynicism, but also grow frustrated at the involvement of vigilantes along with their inability to effectively combat them.

There’s also a huge amount of corruption within the GCPD, from the Commissioner down to the patrol cops, and that plays a big part in our cop stories too. Gordon’s clean, so is Montoya, and as Gordon assembles a team of ‘untouchables’ to fight corruption and eventually set up the MCU in Season Two, the internal opposition all our good cops will face, as well as temptation at every turn, is going to add another level of challenge.

21 Structure

The basic structure as of 1x01 is:

RANKED OFFICIALS

• Commissioner Gillian Loeb – a crooked official. • Chief Miles O’Hara – a good old boy of the police.

HOMICIDE

• Captain Jim Gordon – head of Homicide, also leading up an off-the-books anti-corruption team with designs on cleaning out the GCPD. • Detective Sarah Essen – the future Mrs. Gordon, currently having an affair with the boss. • Detective Arnold Flass – Gordon’s corrupt partner. • Detective Harvey Bullock – an asshole but a good cop, appears to be on the take but actually part of Gordon’s sting force. • Detective Renee Montoya – you know this one by now!

QRT (Quick Response Team – Gotham’s SWAT)

• Lt. Gerard "Jerry" Hennelly – head of QRT • Officer Billy Petit – hardcase and eventual murderous nutjob.

I’m happy to keep the named cop roster small for Season One while we settle in, then gradually introduce more as we move Montoya, Gordon and Bullock into the Major Crimes Unit for S2 onwards. Crispus Allen will be coming in as Montoya’s new partner after Bullock gets kicked out, will transfer in to become Captain of the MCU, and I also want to bring in a new detective to take over the Catwoman case from Montoya (that’s a separate arc to play out).

There’ll also be occasional with detectives from other departments, for example if a Traffic case leads into a murder investigation and the case is traded from one pair of characters to Montoya and Bullock. Things like that happen all the time in the real police world, so it’ll be a good element to maintain.

We’ll also be keeping up a decent body count for the cops, from retirement, dismissal or death in the line of duty. Gotham’s a hazardous place, and it needs to feel like one for the downtrodden cops!

Cop StStoriesories

Imagine crossing the realistic, street-level crime of famous cop shows like Law & Order, Homicide, The Wire and even the more theatrical ones like Castle and CSI with the world of Batman, and that’s what Gotham Central life is like.

As such, we’ll have some more typical cop stories – with a focus on Homicide with Montoya and Bullock – alongside increasingly outlandish, -based activity. Sometimes these can cross over with what Selina’s doing, sometimes not, because trying to link every case of the week with Selina’s travails will quickly get stale, but these two sets of characters are running around the same city and in similar circles, albeit different sides of the fence, so it needs to feel honest in that regard.

22 I’m happy for staff writers less familiar with the world of superheroics to take more of a lead on cop-driven stories, because I want this aspect of the show to be strong and at the moment it’s the element I have the least experience in. So by all means work on ‘normal’ crimes – not everything needs a superhero angle for it to work – but always apply them through the filter of Gotham. It’s a rough, dangerous and crazy place that breeds a different kind of criminal after all.

23 BACKSTORY AND MYTHOLOGY

Overview

The full, mind-boggling backstory of the DC Universe can’t be easily explained. It’s completely rewritten itself on several occasions, for one thing, with continuity-busting mega-crossover events like Zero Hour , Crisis on Infinite Earths and essentially destroying and rebuilding the DCU many times over. Largely it’s an attempt by editors to continually reassess the fragmented chronologies of their various titles, thanks in large part to storylines and writers going off in a million different directions at once, as is their wont.

Grant Morrison has someone refer to Bruce Wayne as being ‘in his forties’, a dozen other stories go into conniptions because they’ve got Bruce in his thirties and now all their timelines are off. Cameron Stewart’s recycling of Holly Robinson in the 2002 Catwoman monthly reboot was done out of ignorance of the fact she’d been killed off in a arc in the 90s (although he did a throwaway story later on called ‘Why Isn’t Holly Dead?’ to humorously skirt the issue). The excellent Batman Chronology Project resource is one I recommend you all check out, though for ease of use I’ve been breaking down his , comprehensive collection of Bat-storylines into more relevant and manageable chunks, based on the major Bat-events we’ve got going on in each season.

The easiest way to describe this is to imagine present day Batman continuity as having started off around the time of 1987’s Batman Year One . This followed the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot anyway, and took Batman back to his grass roots – no , brand new on the scene, and allowed him to redevelop as a character free from the often painful memories of those 1950s-1960s camptastic Batman adventures, which most of us would like to forget. Except for , the scamp, who keeps trying to make them canon and give us all a headache. We can divide Batman’s career from that point into ‘Bat-years’ of chronology, with storylines taking place across many titles at many different times all roughly fitting into what is currently twenty-three Bat-years of continuity. We’ll be cherry- picking key events from a handful of years at a time, to allow us to get to the good stuff in better time and also to allow for solid, major events to underpin our seasons without having to lose screen time focusing on things we don’t need to know about or see happening.

Simply put, there is no correct chronological order to the stories of the Batman universe. Too many stories, too many retcons, too many contradictions. There are enough stories that do fit together into a surprisingly coherent storyline, however, that as long as you make a point of skipping or ignoring some of the crazier ones (or ones that just plain get things wrong), you can just about make sense of everything.

How does this apply to Nine Lives ? Well, our mandate here is to tell our own stories in our own time, but be respectful enough of the main beats of established Batman canon that we still feel like a series chronicling the early days of a long- running character’s life. So I’m not expecting anybody to be intimately familiar with 70+ years of Batman history – I’m certainly not, and the headaches we’d have trying to squeeze and buckle our own plots into the timeline established by the comics isn’t worth it.

I’ll hand you over to the guy behind the Batman Chronology Project , as he explains it pretty well from here:

24

The chronology will begin with Batman: Year One by Frank Miller. This is a great place to start because The Crisis on Infinite Earths had recently occurred and this was DC's big attempt to reboot all of its characters, including The Dark Knight. Unsurprisingly, here's where it first gets confusing. But to fully understand, we must go way back to the beginning. Batman's history begins with Detective Comics #27 by in 1939. He has countless adventures for a long, long time before The Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs in 1985. The original Crisis not only rebooted Batman as a character, but functioned as an epic, earth-altering, time-shattering, crossover event that essentially erased Batman's storied 46 year history and replaced it with a group of stories that were relatively continuity error-free. These stories fell under the label "Year One", and most of them had yet to even be written. In fact, because there was a blank-slate where Batman's history used to be, there are still some gaps which writers are filling even to this day. But why did this event take place? Well, because it was a compelling and crazy story at the time. And also because Batman's history was previously riddled with bizarre plot holes and plagued by campy, unrealistic, and extremely dated stories that editors wanted to do away with or repair. So, along comes the ultimate super-being known as the Anti-Monitor and he alters everything and combines the infinite Earths into one single Earth, with one collective, shared history. Bear in mind, while the Anti-Monitor combines hundreds of thousands of Earths into one "New Earth" that becomes the main DCU's Earth, an unspecified number of alternate universes remain unscathed and out of his vast reach (i.e. the Marvel Universe, Wildstorm Universe, Universes, and more). In this way, the continues to exist. I should also mention that the term "New Earth" is not used until much later (not until after the events of Infinite Crisis when the Earth and its history are remolded once again). To re-iterate, the new Earth made following the original Crisis is simply referred to as "Earth-1". It then becomes renamed "New Earth", which is also known as "Earth-0" at the conclusion of Infinite Crisis . But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's not forget Zero Hour .

Zero Hour was published in 1994. In this storyline, Green Lantern goes insane and becomes symbiotically linked to the cosmically-powered being known as Parallax. Wielding immense power and a equal amount of rage to , he alters time (eventually compacting the entire 20 plus year DC Universe time-line into fewer in-story years and then having those first years lead up to the year 1994, then 1998, then 2000, then 2002). Another way of explaining it is to say that a sliding time-line is created which uses Zero Hour as a place-marker. To keep stories contemporary, DC editors kept sliding the debuts of the major heroes to a more current date. Technically, the year 2000 was the last time they officially slid the time-line (in Guide to the DC Universe 2000 Secret Files ), but it is pretty apparent that the Zero Hour place-marker was shifted once more to 2002 based upon character ages and current story-arcs going on today. DC editors haven't done any shifting of time-lines since the official move in 2000 (or since the un-official move in 2002), and let's hope they don't EVER again. Because of these intense time-alterations, some parts of Batman's past obviously changed yet again. I should mention that the editors of DC wanted Zero Hour to function the exact same way as the original Crisis , meaning they wanted there to be a blank historical slate leading up to 1994 (and then 1998, then 2000, then 2002). While my chronology gives a quasi-blank slate to the history of the DCU for everything prior to 1986, I'm hesitant to do the same regarding Zero Hour 's sliding time-line. I mean really, are DC editors trying to tell us that only stories published after 2002 are officially canon and the rest are just retroactive reference materials? I don't buy that for a second. Moving on.

(just a quick note – unfortunately we are indeed about to see another timeline- resetting retcon this year within the DCU, although the full scale of the changes are yet to be unveiled. Whatever they are, screw them. We do our own thing!)

Then in 2006 Infinite Crisis occurs, which shakes the roots of the DC Universe to its very foundations once again. In the story it is revealed that from the original Earth-2, from the old Earth-Prime, and Alexander Luthor, Jr. from the old Earth-3 (all characters who were erased from existence during the original Crisis ) have been watching the DC Universe from a crystalline limbo to which they have been expelled. Years and years have passed and they aren't too happy with what they've seen. This unhappiness leads them to break out of their prison, which unleashes intense vibrational ripples that distort the fabric of time. So, once again time is altered significantly and "New Earth" is re-created (which is also known as "Earth-0"). In fact, for Batman, specifically, much of the character-alteration that happened during Zero Hour is reversed or undone, so to speak. Also, 52 brand new parallel Earths are not only added to the mix, they have always existed. Our chronology reflects all of the changes made by Infinite Crisis , thus making it the official detailed historical record of

25 Batman's existence on "New Earth" aka the primary Earth which functions as the epicenter for the canonical continuity and history of the entire DCU. Since this is an up-to-date chronology, I shall refer to the primary DCU Earth as "Earth-0", once we get rolling.

I feel it is important to mention all of this in layman's terms because we have the ability as omniscient readers to know the complete history of Batman dating back to 1939. And to really know Batman's full history is to read every single issue of every single Batman has ever appeared in since that time. However, the time-line I'm constructing here is Batman's history as he lived it. And that is how comic book continuity works. Period. It isn't about the whole story from beginning until end. It's about the fictional life the character lives from his own perspective. We know that Batman fought in World War II because we read it in a comic book, but because of certain events that occur later in his life, Batman never fought in World War II, so therefore that isn't a part of the life he would have perceived. Batman, at this point in 2009, looks back and sees the mid 1980s (or even the mid 1990s arguably) as his jumping off point, which makes a hell of a lot more sense than looking back and seeing the 1940s.

You see, while time-altering, character rebooting, massive retcon-laden events like the Infinite Crisis or Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour are extremely editorial and industry-based stories that sometimes have more to do with economics and industry politics than story-telling, they needn't only be viewed that way. These huge events, like them or not, can all be read as happening naturally in Batman's life, albeit as natural as a life led in a completely over-the-top science fiction multi-verse could ever hope to be. What I'm saying here is that there are two types of retcons (short for "RETroactive CONtinuity"); one where you simply ignore past stories and change continuity (bad), and the other where you have an in-story event which alters the past and therefore alters continuity (better-- in fact, some argue that the latter isn't even a retcon at all, but for the intents and purposes of this blog we will just say that it is). These three major DC events that I've mentioned, for Batman, function as in- story occurrences which alter his past.

To explain this concept even further, you can look at it this way; Bruce Wayne's parents are killed. He becomes Batman. Robin joins him. They fight villains like The Joker and The . They fight in World War II. Their adventures get progressively sillier as the duo grows into the next two decades. A host of new characters are introduced. Dozens upon dozens of team-ups and huge events occur. The original Crisis occurs and everything we have just mentioned up to this point is erased in one foul swoop. But there's no need to worry. See, Batman has a new history that mirrors his old history, but this one is stronger, more cohesive, and more appropriately fits the time. Now he never fought in World War II. Instead, he becomes Batman in the mid 1980s and his adventures never get campy. Batman stories continue on. Zero Hou r happens and the past is altered again. Batman stories continue on. Infinite Crisis happens and the past is altered again. Batman stories continue on. Final Crisis happens and Batman is zapped by the Omega Beams. Batman stories continue on...

Every time, we (the reader) the effects of a huge time-altering event, the characters are unable to because they are inside the story whereas we are outside of it. So to re-iterate, the past life that the character perceives becomes his one true past, even if we know the truth.

Did you follow all that? Good, because there’ll be a test later. I’m not kidding. Start revising.

Plenty more reference materials will be available Backstage for you all, so anybody who wants to study this in more detail is welcome to do so. I’ll try to build more relevant selections of data to help us plot what’s going on with the extended family of Batman-specific characters when they’re off screen. It’s going to help us immensely in the long run if we keep a pretty tight grip on what we want to have happening where and when right from the start.

Bat-Bat ---YearsYears

So the next point to raise is what Bat-Years are we using to form the backdrops of our season? As I’ve said, I’ve got much more detailed versions of these, breaking the years down into major events for each character where I’ve got them in terms of overall DCU continuity, but in a cat-shaped nutshell:

26

SEASON ONE – Bat-Years 1-2 SEASON TWO – Bat-Years 3-6 SEASON THREE – Bat-Years 7-9 SEASON FOUR – Bat-Years 9-10

And some of the major storylines that fall into each year are as follows:

SEASON ONE

• Batman: Year One • Batman & The Monster Men • Batman & The Mad Monk • The Man Who Laughs • Dead To Rights • Trail of the Gun (a Batman/Catwoman team-up) • Gothic • Venom

Very much the early days of Bruce as Batman, so no Robin or Batgirl and only a handful of Rogues Gallery villains active. ‘Trail of the Gun’ has Catwoman working with Batman to smash a smuggling ring distributing deadly accurate new guns into Gotham, and could be a nice story to adapt. ‘Dead To Rights’ is the incident from Montoya’s Academy days that we’ve mentioned – it’s a Year One story here so just needs shuffling to fit.

SEASON TWO

• The Long Halloween • Dark Victory • Catwoman: When In Rome • Robin: Year One • Dark Detective

The epic ‘Long Halloween/Dark Victory’ story this season, and as Catwoman is a major player in that it makes sense to frame our season around it – her role in it, I mean. We’ll also have the first Robin, , active during S2, and by year’s end Barbara Gordon will take up the mantle of Batgirl.

SEASON THREE

• Faces • Catwoman: Defiant • Batgirl: Year One • Photo Finish • The Cat and The Bat

Batgirl debuts this year, though this may mean her spin-off series (if that goes ahead) kicks off alongside Nine Lives Season Three, so we can focus on her in that and not take screen time off our girls. ‘Defiant’ is an odd Catwoman TPB that might be useable, but frankly it’s kind of weird. Dick Grayson will retire as Robin and become at the end of the season.

That’s it thus far – still working through the documents to help me break everything down (and I haven’t visited the Chronology Project site for a while so it should be updated past 2008 now too).

27 STORYLINES

It’d be painfully easy to drill ahead for the full ten to twelve seasons of Nine Lives I have sketched out, although as with all things every element is subject to change. I know I have strong storylines for some or all of our main girls for some seasons, but very sketchy ideas only for others, so we may end up condensing some events and plots together to give us more to play with in any given season.

In addition, I’m strongly considering having a long time gap between some seasons (at least a full year), especially early on, so that we can allow for more Bat-years to pass us by quickly and get some of the interim, dead time out of the way. This should help us get around situations like introducing Batgirl one season then retiring her at the end of the next, because from the characters’ perspectives much more time has elapsed. This also gives us room to do bigger events, like the earthquake that ravages Gotham in Cataclysm , as between seasons movies, meaning we can shake things up without using up our episodes in season. This also helps keep the cast current with the actors portraying them, although that’s admittedly more of a cosmetic concern.

However, the first and most important thing to ask yourself with every story is ‘what are the characters’ angles?’ Look at how cases in the average House (or indeed most medical procedurals/dramas) have a parallel to one or more of the main character’s plots for that week. Or how character-centric episodes in shows that know how to do them tie together events in the show’s world with personal stuff affecting them at that stage. The same logic must be applied to whoever is the focus each week.

Say we have a story where Montoya investigates racially-motivated beatings by crooked cops. She’s Hispanic so no stranger to racism, she dealt with bullies as a kid and she’s dead set against police corruption. Thus, a simple case offers her plenty of opportunities for personal character development. Maybe Selina catches a young pickpocket and trails her to a training ground for similar kids hidden deep in the East End. She can remember her own childhood experiences and how that worked out, and look to get the kids away from their taskmaster – but then she’d be against handing them over to social care because of how fostering worked out for her, so it already becomes a complex issue. Holly takes down a computer hacker who then gets busted, and when she digs deeper she feels guilty for having ruined the hacker’s life and decides to help them out, because again that could easily have happened to her.

By making sure that at least one of our characters – preferably one of the three girls, but stronger recurrings like Bullock, Bruce or the Gordons can take over too, and indeed should do to help flesh them out – has a stake or connection to the A plot each week that goes beyond their immediate dealings with it, we’ll have a consistent, continual flow of character development start to finish.

So without further ado, let’s break down the current plan for Season One so you can see where we start, end and do in between.

ArcArcArc

Season One is about a fresh start in many ways. All three of our lead girls find themselves in a new situation, with challenges they’ve never faced before to overcome, and plenty of obstacles in their path. In each case, their actual talent and ability isn’t in doubt – what we’re testing is their determination. If we place

28 these hurdles in their path, will they be able to leap over them or crash face first into the track?

Selina goes from independent spirit to caged bird (or kitty) as her moderately successful solo thievery career comes to a crashing end within the first few pages of 1x01. She’s low on luck, confidence and resources, forced into a situation she hates working for a man she loathes, but no obvious way out of it. Holly has just survived a near fatal overdose and knows she’s not strong enough to kick her addiction yet, and that she’s stuck working for Stan until he no longer feels she’s necessary. Montoya has taken the big step of moving away from the hood she grew up in, along with her family and friends, to start a tough new job in a tough part of town, where her ideals will be challenged at every turn.

Selina’s discovery of the dojo (and rivalry with Kai) starts putting the fire back into her belly, reforging her piece by piece into tougher shape than ever, giving her the skills she needs to survive on her own again, and the confidence to escape Stan’s clutches for good. Holly finds an idol in Selina, and a purpose in helping her out in the field as well as starting to finally develop a life outside of Stan’s world by getting a part-time job and attending night school. Montoya gets the ‘Cat Woman’ case file and is brought into Gordon’s confidence to help him clean up his department, as well as closing in on the Ritual Killer.

Selina stops Hellhound’s ritual and leaves him for the police, escapes the brothel and leads the police to Stan, graduates from the Sensai’s dojo and can finally strike out with freedom again, albeit this time with Holly in tow. Holly manages to kick her addiction, escape the brothel and feel like she has a reason to be out in the world at last, able to start living her life the way she feels she deserves. Montoya may not catch Selina but she does bring in the Ritual Killer, earning her and Bullock a place in Gordon’s newly-unveiled Major Crimes Unit.

So there’s your beginning, middle and end!

Episodes

So far I have an old incomplete outline, so I want to update this soon. Presently, our episode naming convention will be to have words beginning with the letter ‘c’, although if that starts to get problematic we can try something else – I’m a little concerned that we’ll feel like we’ve copied Smallville , for example:

• ‘Crash’ – After a heist goes badly wrong, an injured Selina finds herself holed up at Stan’s brothel, agreeing to run jobs for him in return for safe haven there. She falls foul of Hellhound at ends up a pupil of the Armless Master. After saving Holly from an OD, she takes the youngster under her wing and makes a deal with Stan to keep her safe. Montoya graduates to Detective and is partnered with Bullock.

• ‘Claws’ – After casing the joint as Selina (and meeting Bruce Wayne), Catwoman plans to rip off a WayneTech exhibition for some new thievery tools, leading to a tussle with Montoya during her getaway and then a rooftop chase and confrontation with Batman. She gets away with the goods but has landed herself on both Batman and Montoya’s radar.

• ‘College’ – Selina strikes a deal with Stan to let Holly attend night school, where she befriends a bright whizzkid named Barbara and works on her computer skills. As a reward, Selina lets Holly tag along on her next job, but

29 Holly has a lot to learn as the duo run into Montoya and Bullock and are forced to improvise.

• ‘Clinic’ – Dr. Leslie Thompson opens her free clinic in the East End but immediately falls foul of a racketeering scam. Holly applies for work there and informs Selina of the racket, leading Catwoman to offer her services to Leslie in scaring off the goons. Selina also gets Bruce to chip in and help with the clinic, after learning that Thompson is an old flame of Bruce’s loyal butler, Alfred. Holly, however, finds the acres of free drugs from the taking too much temptation to resist.

• ‘Cracks’ – Hellhound kills again, and this time Selina pushes Holly to use her friendship with Barbara to gain access to the police files. Selina’s suspicions are confirmed – Hellhound is behind the murders in an attempt to recreate the ritual Selina interrupted when they first met. She confronts Kai at the dojo and he flees with several accomplices. Montoya becomes aware of an gaining access to the police files.

• ‘Corrupt’ – Gordon meets with ADA Harvey Dent and the two discuss a move against the widespread corruption in Gotham’s police and government. Holly’s attempt to help on one of Selina’s jobs as a grafter comes unstuck, and the two have a ferocious argument afterwards. Holly hits the drugs from Leslie’s clinic.

• ‘Copy’ – With her reputation growing with every heist, Selina finds herself tracked down by erstwhile reporter , who manages to secure an exclusive interview with her. Vale also bumps into Bruce, the obvious sparks between the two of them noticed by Selina. Selina then asks Holly to use Barbara’s connection to the Gotham PD to plant false evidence and lead Montoya off track, before she solves the Hellhound murder case and robs Selina of her chance for revenge against hellhound.

• ‘Connection’ – Barbara recruits Holly to help break up a crime gang operating off the college campus. In the aftermath, when Montoya accuses her of hacking into Gotham PD servers, Barbara discovers that Holly has been using her to gain access to sensitive police information, ending their friendship as a result. After failing to nab Selina once again, a frustrated Montoya is told by Gordon that it’s time for his move against the rogue elements of the MCU.

• ‘Clean’ – Gordon makes his move, indicting a dozen officers on corruption charges, Bullock included. Realising Montoya ratted him out, he outs her to the department. Selina puts the pieces together and realizes Hellhound plans to strike again soon to complete his ritual following another murder. She undergoes a final training session with Sensai, who assures her she is ready to defeat Hellhound despite Selina’s doubts. Selina also forces Holly through a painful detox, getting her ready to flee the brothel with Selina.

• ‘Confrontation’ – Selina faces off against Hellhound at a consulate raid that leaves Hellhound scarred and the ritual foiled, with Hellhound arrested by Montoya following a tip-off by Selina. Selina graduates from Sensai’s tutelage following this, and adopts Vicki Vale’s nickname of ‘Catwoman’. Several of Montoya’s former colleagues are kicked off the force following Gordon’s anti- corruption sweep and the resulting hearing, with Montoya, Bullock and Gordon promised promotions.

30 Story Ideas

At present I have some vague outlines for a bunch of stories (see below), but beyond that I have some common elements I want to hit:

• Thievery – Selina going on runs to steal something; • Cons – less action, more deceit and trickery; • Crime – cop cases for the GCPD • Character – centric episodes that develop one or more facets of a character; • World – episodes that develop an element of the Nine Lives universe

In the first two seasons, I’d like to have every episode further some character plot or develop an aspect of the show’s world. It’ll mean we build a more solid and coherent sandbox for ourselves going into later seasons, as well as helping us flesh out our cast more evenly.

I’m also raiding the Batman comic archives for plots, characters, locations and story ideas – we’re not going to be recreating specific stories except in occasional moments (like the aforementioned Selina vs. Zeiss arc), more like general arcs and beats along the way. I’ve got a healthy stack of post-87 Batman graphic novels, plus nearly all of the 175-ish Catwoman monthlies along with tie-ins, one- shots, spin-offs, limited series and so on. Plenty of fuel for the fire!

Anyway, time for some one-paragraph outlines – some of these are designed for later seasons, so they won’t all be fits for earlier seasons:

• Counterfeit – Selina tries to switch priceless paintings for forgeries, only to find the paintings on display are already fakes. Montoya’s already on the trail of the art thieves, so can Selina intercept them and claim her prize, or will she have to learn to paint pretty damn quick to keep her employer happy?

• Contest – challenged by a rival thief to steal a dozen high-risk, high-reward prizes in one night, can Selina beat her arrogant opponent to the punch or will the GCPD get wise to the gameplan and intercept her?

• Commission – Gordon gets his promotion to Commissioner, but it comes at a price as the former commissioner’s corruption is revealed, and a good chunk of the precinct get sent home as Gordon’s case is .

• Cops – Montoya brings down two crooked cops roughing up an East End business, crossing paths with Selina whilst tracking them down and also finding some evidence linking them men to her own partner, Harvey Bullock. Is he clean and undercover or starting to get actually dirty?

• Copycat – a rival cat burglar is on the loose in Gotham and Selina is taking the flak for their heists. After a run-in, Selina discovers it’s a fellow escapee from the orphanage of her youth, wanting to become Selina’s partner. Her instincts scream ‘bad idea’, so will Selina go along for the ride or turn her would-be ally in?

• Clinical – Dr. Thompkins’ clinic comes under attack from all sides. Stolen supplies, menaced staff, and finally a bomb threat. Selina knows it’s Black Mask trying to smoke her out, but what if the bomb is real? (It is)

31 • Clean – After a slip on a mission due to her attempted withdrawal throwing her off her game, Holly is forced to detox by Selina. The two spend a long, painful night together as Selina pushes her protégé to her limits.

• Capture (1) – After a rooftop chase (still wanted for Gordon’s attempted murder), Selina gets arrested at long last.

• Cell (2) – Selina is interrogated first by Montoya and then psychologist Dr. Harleen Quinzel, while her allies start a daring plan to bust her out of jail. But will Selina want to be released, given her obvious recent turn towards a near mental breakdown?

• Contract – Deathstroke, a high-class assassin, arrives in Gotham with a mission to terminate Selina, her erratic behaviour of late having pissed off one person too many. With Desthstroke pursuing her across the city, can Selina escape before the sights fall on her at last?

And now, some one-word titles – see what they inspire in you:

• Catscratch • Care • Cancellation • Correctional • Climbdown • Catch-22 • Criminal • Confession • Control • Counterweight • Crisis • Counterbalance • Critical • Curfew • Condition • Cinematic • Calling • Children • Chosen • Cold • City • Collect • Click • Candid • Chains • Caught • Chase • Clueless

Season Summary

We’ll put our girls in a bad place, give them the means to escape/improve their respective situations and then let them move on. That covers pretty much every aspect of what’s going on, but to break it down in more detail:

SELINA

• Forced to work for Stan at the brothel, seducing prospective clients to find information about new scores, then rushing out to pull the job off that night before they wake up. Also training under the Armless Master in combat, stealth, etiquette and other essential skills for a high-class thief. • Takes Holly under her wing for several reasons (an ally on the inside, sympathy) and gradually brings her into the fold to help plan and execute her cons, heists and raids. • Rivalry with Kai at the dojo, then out in the field as she crosses paths with Hellhound and realizes he’s trying to recreate the ritual she foiled when they first met – and is killing to do so. • Runs into the Batman when she raids a WayneTech exhibition to get some new tools of the trade, and encounters Bruce Wayne at a society function she’s casing.

32 • Also encounters Montoya, who starts to peg her as a suspect for Hellhound’s killings due to her presence at various crime scenes. • She manages to defeat Hellhound in combat and leave him for the police, before saving Holly from Stan. After shopping him to the GCPD, she moves herself and Holly out into the East End away from the brothel to start over.

HOLLY

• A young teenage hooker and junkie who remembers Selina from a night when they met several years ago. After Selina saves her from an overdose she becomes a devoted sidekick, following Selina everywhere, and soon ends up watching Selina on a raid. • When Selina is almost busted but Holly’s intervention saves her neck, she agrees to let Holly into her world and starts including her on the cons and heists she pulls. • Determined to clean up her act, Holly starts using less and enrols at night school, where she befriends young genius Barbara Gordon, and also takes a second job working at Dr. Leslie Thompkins’ free clinic in the East End. • Holly’s momentum starts to unravel after her interference in a con almost gets Selina nabbed by Montoya, after which she begins using again. • When she’s forced to use her friendship with Barbara to gain access to police files, landing Barbara in big trouble, that friendship is terminated and Holly grows more despondent, stealing drugs from Leslie’s clinic and stashing them to feed her habit. • When Stan twigs that Selina is planning on leaving the brothel, he forces Holly to overdose again and makes it look like she used her own stash from the clinic, but after saving Holly’s life (again), Selina susses out the true story, gives Stan a beating and moves herself and Holly out into the East End.

MONTOYA

• Fresh-faced young rookie Montoya is assigned grizzled veteran Harvey Bullock for her partner, the duo forming a chalk & cheese partnership that’s as effective as it is abrasive for them both. • Montoya proves a tough cookie on the street, busting perps with aplomb while the more seasoned Bullock is content to sit back and let her do the legwork. • After a run-in with Selina following the case file Gordon assignes to her, she decides that bringing down the newly-dubbed ‘Catwoman’ will be the bust that makes her career, but as Hellhound’s killing spree intensifies, her focus shifts towards bringing him down instead. • She struggles to deal with the corruption and politics in the GCPD, forming a friendship with Cpt. Gordon as he sees someone he can trust in her. When she discovers evidence of Harvey’s corruption (despite helping Gordon’s anti-corruption group Harvey still has some black spots), she also tries to deal with this knowledge as she knows Harvey can be a great cop when he wants to be. • After a breakthrough in the case courtesy of Selina, Montoya and Bullock are able to take down Hellhound. Following the arrest, both Montoya and Bullock are hand-picked by Gordon to serve in the newly-formed Gotham PD Major Crimes Unit. • Montoya finds herself with an opportunity to expose Harvey’s corruption, but she chooses to keep quiet.

33 Future Seasons

Again, all very nebulous at the moment, but to help point you in the right direction:

SEASON TWO

Selina – Now established in an East End loft, Selina is free to plan more ambitious capers and act without Stan’s involvement. With Gotham in the grip of fear generated by the Holiday Killer, Selina is free to act with relative impunity as both the GCPD and Batman tie themselves in knots over the crime spree. However, when Holly’s blossoming hacking skills lead her to uncover a possible link in her past to the Falcone crime family, Selina is determined to learn more and starts investigating in between heists. This brings her into more regular contact with Batman and the GCPD, as well as clashes with the growing rogues gallery of villains surfacing on the Gotham streets. She has brushes with Batman’s new sidekick Robin, and agrees to do an exclusive interview with young reporter Vicki Vale that cements her burgeoning reputation. Ultimately, when the Holiday Killer is captured Selina still has little to go on, so decides to take an extra-curricular trip to Rome to look for the answers herself.

Holly – Off the drugs and determined to keep a clean sheet, Holly sinks herself into aiding Selina on her capers better than before, picking up more of the skills Selina learned from the Armless Master. Having developed competent IT skills through her friendship with Barbara, Holly immerses herself in the new world of technology with a view to making Selina a better criminal, befriending a fellow hacker only to find out down the line it’s Barbara herself. Holly also finds herself drawn to Karon, proprietor of a coffee shop she frequents, and by season’s end the friendship has blossomed into a relationship. Holly asks for her old job at the free clinic back, and the forgiving Dr. Thompkins agrees to take her on again.

Montoya – Now a ranked detective within the Major Crimes Unit, Montoya’s tenacity is exactly the kind of thing newly-appointed Lieutenant Jim Gordon wants from his squad, and she plays a major role in the team’s investigation into the Holiday Killer. Suspicious of Gordon’s rooftop visits, she spies on a meeting between Gordon and Batman which piques her curiosity, and as she starts her own dossier she starts to spot patterns of colourful villains emerging since the Batman’s first known appearances. Her relationship with Bullock remains as firm and unusual as ever, but his growing slip into corruption makes her fear she’ll one day have to testify against her own partner. We also discover that Montoya has been having a secret romance with Kate Kane for some time, but is sure to keep it hidden from her colleagues.

SEASON THREE • Crime lord Roman Sionis is reborn as psychopath Black Mask after an accident, and targets Catwoman and her allies as an obstacle to his plans to turn the East End into his own territory and private playground. • Barbara Gordon becomes Batgirl and by year end Dick Grayson quits as Robin, moving to Bludhaven to become Nightwing.

SEASON FOUR • Selina’s war with Black Mask intensifies as he tears through the East End, leaving her sister Maggie catatonic, Leslie’s clinic in ruins and gangs ripping the district up into chunks of territory. • Barbara is paralysed and Jason Todd, the new Robin, is killed, both by Joker.

34

SEASON FIVE • Crime lord Bane breaks Batman’s back and forces him to leave Gotham to recover, appointing Jean-Paul Valley his interim successor. As Azrael, Valley descends into righteous madness, terrorising Gotham and forcing Selina to work with the Bat-family against this dangerous new opponent. Batman’s return and deposition of Azrael also sees Selina given honorary ally status.

SEASON SIX • The Clench, a modified strain of ebola, sweeps through Gotham, and once that’s cleared Ra’s Al Ghul is revealed as the mastermind, narrowly prevented from unleashing a second catastrophe. • An earthquake of colossal magnitude tears Gotham to pieces.

SEASON SEVEN • Gotham becomes No Man’s Land, isolated from the outside world and falling into anarchy as citizens and cops struggle to keep order, villains run and Batman draws in his allies to prevent President Lex Luthor from annexing the city. • Cassandra Cain debuts as the new Batgirl. Jim Gordon is shot and Catwoman becomes the prime suspect (may happen earlier).

SEASON EIGHT • Catwoman is on the run, but her increasingly erratic behaviour has even her closest allies questioning whether or not she really did shoot Gordon. After burning all of her bridges, she’s seemingly killed in an explosive shootout with assassin for hire Deathstroke.

Looking over this, I already want to condense the events here down into six seasons at the most, so we’ll tackle that down the line.

After the Deathstroke Incident, we’ve got the option of jumping forward a few years, installing Holly as Catwoman and doing something new with Selina entirely. Time will tell!

Spin-Spin ---offsoffs

At present, the one and only idea I have for a spin-off is a Batgirl standalone series, which I think could be a hell of a lot of fun and a great alternative to Nine Lives as well as a companion piece.

We’d have two seasons of Barbara Gordon before the Joker puts her in a wheelchair, then two/three seasons with Cassandra Cain fitting into the role, before she quits and is replaced by Stephanie Brown, currently starring in the Batgirl monthly (which you need to check out – it’s what would happen if Buffy joined the Batman family. It’s ace). With DC about to reboot its many titles and put Barbara Gordon back as Batgirl, it seems Steph Brown’s about to get kicked out which is a travesty we cannot allow to happen. She must live on!

This would also allow us to feature the Batman family more prominently, so their background presence in Nine Lives could remain that way and not step on Selina’s toes, as well as giving us a way to tackle some big Bat-storylines from a more unique perspective.

35 For the Batman history buffs, Barbara debuted as Batgirl back in the late 1960s, but it was a horribly sexist character despite the writer’s attempts to make her more rounded (arf). Barbara was already semi-retired when the Joker paralysed her, and we went without for many years until Cassandra Cain, daughter of an assassin, trained by , became the new Batgirl during the No Man’s Land story arc. Cassandra was trained in body language and took a long time to be able to speak, but eventually outgrew the suit and left to find her own path. Stephanie Brown – daughter of second rate villain , briefly the only female Robin but more commonly the vigilante Spoiler, and presumed dead after Dr. Thompkins faked her death in the War Games arc (whew) – took over following Batman’s ‘death’ during Final Crisis and is the current Batgirl.

Season One would run parallel to Nine Lives Season Three, but the majority of the Batgirl: Year One storyline will be taking place during NL Season Two, though we may save Barbara’s public debut (i.e. her fight against Killer at the GCPD Policeman’s Ball) for the Batgirl . Again – time will tell.

36 ACTION

How will we be handling our action sequences? Good question. As someone more used to writing supernatural-based action, with magic bolts fwipping all over the shop, vampires knocking the stuffing out of werewolves and occasional interdimensional beings butting heads to determine the fate of the universe, for Nine Lives I want to dial things right back a lot.

Selina starts the first season as a fairly accomplished cat burglar – she’s athletic, stealthy and can handle herself in a fight. However, when she first encounters Hellhound he kicks her ass, and after her fall from the Robinson Park towers both her confidence and her body have been wounded. She’ll take time to recover from that, and the training she receives under Sensai is how that happens.

So when Selina’s out and about, she’s always in motion – jumping, running, sliding, whatever she needs to do to get in and out as quick as possible. Sometimes she needs to be patient, lie still for as long as it takes, but this is a skill I want her to learn during S1 – her impetuousness is what lead to her near- capture in 1x01. We could push this into a more parkour -based set of moves, something free-flowing and suited to urban environments, but it’s got to be something she gets gradually better at as the years roll on. I don’t want Selina to be awesome straight away – half the fun is in watching her journey.

In fights, she’s someone who learned how to stick up for herself on the streets and in juvenile homes – fast and dirty. She doesn’t possess any graceful, measured fighting moves – it’s all quick punches and kicks, then run for the hills. Thieves don’t stand and fight. This is something else she’ll learn, until by season’s end she can defeat Hellhound in a straight fight. She’ll still have a lot to learn – Hellhound’s only a low level villain, after all – but again, it’s no fun for the audience if she starts off too tough. The Zeiss arc I really want to do will be a particular highlight there – and any excuse to pair up Selina with Ted ‘Wildcat’ Grant can’t be missed either!

The same kind of rules apply to Holly and Montoya – Holly is much further back along the curve in terms of agility and fighting skills, but by the time of Selina’s ‘death’ she needs to be tough enough to feasibly take over as Catwoman, so we need to start working on her early on. Montoya is already pretty rough and tumble, but needs to develop a cooler head over time as well as adjusting her style to be able to face genuine supervillains as well as street-level perps.

Because I’m deliberately shifting the focus away from the more fantastical elements of the DCU, I’m trying not to have superpowers and magic feature too heavily in the battles either. I’d rather see people get out of trouble using their brains, fists and feet rather than rely on some mystical McGuffin. That’ll make us, the writers, have to work harder, but hey – that’s our job.

When we do roll out the metahumans and superpowers, keep one foot in the real world. The more restrained we keep things in early seasons, the better grounded any increases in scope and scale will feel later on.

37 SUMMARY

That’s the show, then. An action-adventure show with fingers in various pies – cons, trickery, thievery, procedural, fantasy, drama and more. We’ve got three strong leading ladies to build our seasons and stories around, a largely untapped corner of the Batman sandbox to play in, and as we don’t need to be too straitjacketed by DCU continuity, an incredible amount of creative freedom.

I want to give our characters room to grow, and I want the audience to follow them along that journey. One of the main reasons Stargate SG-1 was such a success was that the audience were discovering new things along with the characters all the time. Advances in knowledge and technology were made at a realistic pace, so that each new development logically followed what went before. Apply that same logic here – Selina, Holly and Montoya all have a long way to go and we want to see them get there step by step.

So go forth and conquer, my loyal peons – we’ve got a lot of work to do…

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