Gotham's Erin Richards on Barbara's Evil Turn: 'Darkness Was Always In Her' 

‘s Season 2 premiere alone did not make this crystal clear, Erin Richards has found that it is oh-so-good to be oh-so-bad.

“This season is so much funner for me,” the Welsh actress raves of Barbara Kean’s full-on embracing of her wicked side in the wake of her parents’ tragic death and her acrimonious split from fiance Jim Gordon (played by Ben McKenzie). “I’m having loads more to do!”

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‘s plan for the onetime socialite to head down this path? “I think they either were going to kill me

this! She and Jim were close in terms of they were going to get married, so something needed to happen, for Jim. And I’m glad they went this direction.”

Richards acknowledges that the Fox drama took “a pretty swift turn” with Barbara, who in short order segued from a rekindled affair Major Crimes detective Renee Montoya into a torrid alliance with serial slayer Jason Lennon aka The Ogre. “But that darkness that you saw at the end of the first [season] was always in her,” she posits.

What’s more, Richards has herself undergone a similar turnabout, in her own life.

“I haven’t killed my parents,” she says with a(n extremely reassuring) laugh, “but I’ve had an experience where within one year I’ve changed completely as a person, and that had more to do with meditation and all that kind of stuff. So I

that that is possible, in that you can be pretending to be someone — which is totally fine, it’s what everybody does. We’re always told, ‘You should have a husband and a family and a house and a car,

,’ and that’s what Barbara was doing. And suddenly Lennon came and showed her, ‘

. You can be totally free. You don’t need those things.’ And that’s how I feel, as Erin. I feel free in the world.”

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But whereas Jason Lennon firmly nudged Barbara in this direction, her role in her parents’ brutal murder — coupled with Season 2 newcomer Theo Galavan (James Frain) recruiting her as one of his band of “Maniax” — has cemented her place among Gotham villainy. “Once you kill your parents, you cannot go any darker or lower,” the actress notes. “So she just got let out into the world, like, ‘There you go! You can now go and do absolutely anything you want, because you already did the worst thing.\'”

Of course, as seen in the season premiere, Barbara — like

proper psychopath — “thinks she’s fine. She’s

crazy!” her portrayer reminds with a smile. “She just got some scores to settle. She’s got ‘issues,’ as she says.” As such, she

believe that she and Jim can be together again some day, some way, in some dark place.

“She definitely loves Jim, and she definitely wants him back. But I think it’s more like she wants to bring him into the darkness of where she is,” says Richards. “She sees who he really is, so she’s kind of angered that he’s playing this ‘role’ [of do-right lawman], like, ‘No, I know who you

are, so I’m going to get you back and we’ll go into this dark place together.”

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But how far will Barbara go in the name of that objective? After all, in this week’s episode, she stands idly by as her ex-fiance gets the bloody hell beaten out of him (while even worse fates are visited upon those he works with).

“She doesn’t want him dead. Yet,” Richards says. “But as for lines that she won’t cross…. Mmm, I don’t think killing is out of the question!”

, or for any other show? Email insideline@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.

Yeah — the odds of this Barbara Kean being Oracle’s mom just hit zero, lol. So,will that mean that James will have an affair with his brother’s wife like he did in the Post Crisis canon of the 80’s and 90’s? Leslie Thompkins is not going to be Oracle’s mom, heh.

Speaking of which, what’s the age difference between Batman and Oracle? How soon does James have to father Barbara Gordon before that window closes? And will that determine the duration of his relationship with Leslie?

It’s possible that Oracle isn’t Jim’s biological daughter (in this universe). I could see him adopting Barbara’s daughter, if she had one, so that she wouldn’t end up as one of the street kids that he’s seen around Gotham after the system failed them. There’s no way that he would name any daughter of his “Barbara” at this point, so she’d have to get the name another way. It’s not comic book canon, but the show has already deviated from comic book history for these characters. The only question is whether or not is in keeping with the spirit of the source material.

Any deviation is ultimately relative, really. In the 80’s, Barbara Gordon was 100% Jim’s niece, the daughter of his brother and his wife. This was due to Frank Miller forgetting that she was Jim’s daughter. So from then on she became his niece. It wasn’t until long, long after that that Devin Grayson in a comic called Gotham Knights retconned it so that Barbara was Jim’s biological daughter after all, the result of an affair with his sister in law.

Gotham can really go in any direction at this time. She can be his niece, and only his niece, or he can be his daughter as a result of that affair. What we can be sure of now she won’t be is the daughter of James Gordon and Barbara Kean, heh.

Barbara Keane is one HOT naughty girl and she’ll be more naughtier than ever throughout the season.

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