The November 17 episode of TV’s hottest new waiting game, Gotham, introduces Nicholas D’Agosto as assistant district attorney Harvey Dent. And like every resident of this Gotham, it seems like Dent has a big future ahead of him, one in which he’ll either die a hero or live long enough to see himself become a villain—probably some time after the second season. “I become a regular in season two,” D’Agosto told reporters during a conference call about his Gotham debut. “So you’ll see a lot more of me in season two, which we all hope happens.”
Yes, in line with the series’ rich sense of dramatic irony, the audience knows that Harvey Dent will eventually become the hideously scarred supervillain known as Two-Face, but the actor playing Harvey doesn’t know how long he has until he’s regularly not playing Two-Face. D’Agosto is due to appear in the show’s next two episodes, and he’ll come back later in the first season—but it’s all unknowns beyond that, because Fox has yet to order a second season of Gotham.
And so the network introduces another new series based on popular DC Comics properties and delayed gratification, one The A.V. Club will call D’Agosto. Tune in every week to see a new chapter in the origin story of the actor who will be Harvey Dent, provided that the proper series of events unfolds: A second-season order; the contractual offer to be a series regular; the gruesome murder of somebody’s parents, presumably. D’Agosto: He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Maybe somewhere down the line, but not right at this second.