Barbara Kean

Barbara Kean is Jim Gordon's ex-fiancée and one of the major antagonists in the series Gotham. Originally appearing as an understanding, supportive, and strong woman, as the series went on she developed her own character outside of Jim.

At the end of the first season it is revealed that she is truly mentally unstable, and after an encounter with the dangerous serial killer, The Ogre, where he tortured, and brainwashed her. It causes her to completely lose her grip on sanity. She is sent to Arkham Asylum but is busted out by Theo Galavan who plans for her to become a member of the Maniax. After Jerome's death, Barbara became the quaternary antagonist of the second season, though she eventually got out of the screen on episode 8 where she fell from the top of the Gotham Cathedral, barely surviving.

She was portrayed by Erin Richards.

## Personality

Though a kind and sympathetic woman, Barbara undergoes a string of tragedies that destroy her completely and turned into a deranged psychopath. Initially supportive of her fiancé, Jim Gordon after being kidnapped by Falcone and Zsasz, begins suffering from an acute stress reaction and severe anxiety. She ends their engagement and falls into her former addictive and self-destructive ways such as alcohol and sex with her old flame, Renee Montoya and seeing Jim with Lee causes Barbara to relapse completely towards drugs. However, the encounter with the serial killer, the Ogre destroys her mind completely. The brainwashing and trauma she suffered from him led to her willingly killing her parents and later in a homicidal craze attacks Lee in her apartment, presumably because she was now dating Gordon.During her rehabilitation within Arkahm Asylum, Barbara seemed more stable than before but grew a ditsy and childlike personality which is on account of her insanity. In spite of that, Barbara does not view herself as crazy and when stated by Gordon that she was "sick", she rebuffed that she was "free" (a similar statement that Jerome made during the GCPD massacre where he claimed that the Maniax were also "free [from the prison of sanity]". Part of her new-founded mental illness is her over-romanticised delusions of the world and her opinions between Jim and herself. Viewing the two of them as star-crossed lovers tangled in an endless dance and kept apart because of fate, Barbara truly believes that Gordon is in love with her and her opinions of Lee is that she is an evil woman who stole Jim from her clutches, ignoring that it was Barbara who left him and no matter how much he would reject her, holds onto these beliefs completely.As revealed through her nightmare, Barbara is in a constant state of humiliation, dejection and pain from her embarrassment over discovering that Jim was in a new relationship. Despite her supposed love for him, Barbara, on some level also hates him for what she percieves as a form of abandonment. She planned to kill him in the church that they picked out together, wearing her bridal gown and abducting the minister who was supposed to marry them, and Lee. She got along reasonably well with the Maniax despite not interacting fully with all of them. She acknowledged Richard Sionis' crush and might have reciprocated it in Arkham Asylum but still found his death funny enough to smirk at and also flirted with Aaron Helzinger for protection in Arkham. Jerome socialised with Barbara in the asylum, granted her a phone call to Jim in captivity and the two of them were able to pull the charity ball hostage job together although this could simply be because they were the only two left. With the Galavans, Barbara had a playful and sexual relationship with Theo and Tabitha. The two may have actually cared about each other and Theo not only shared the details of his backstory and plan with her and allowed her to carry out her wish of killing Jim Gordon.Although being prone to bouts of slight dimwit-ness, Barbara has shown to be intelligent and manipulative in her own way. She was not above using her femininity to get what she wanted such as manipulating Helzinger to get protection in Arkham and luring Jim Gordon away from the GCPD so the massacre could commence. It's unknown if she was the one who plotted the ambush to kidnap Gordon but she nonetheless acted the part well enough to fool a seasoned detective. She was also able to escape the Asylum by feinting remorse over her actions (although at the time Hugo Strange was wilfully letting insane patients leave) and in the most famous display of such intelligence, pretended to betray Gordon in the Lady's house to help Gordon get information on the Waynes' killer.

## Trivia

* Barbara is based off Barbara Gordon Sr., the first wife of Jim Gordon. However unlike this incarnation she wasn't a villain. In the comic continuity Barbara and Jim had a daughter who went on to become Batgirl.
* This version of Barbara takes some elements from Harley Quinn - the girlfriend of the Joker in the comics - as she is seen parcipitating alongside Jerome Valeska (the proto-Joker) during his sadistic games in the season 2 third episode "The Last Laugh" and even knocks out Theo Galavan with a hammer.
* Barbara being a psychopath may be taken from her comic counterpart's son James Gordon, Jr., who is a supervillain.
* Her plot against Oswald Cobblepot in season 3 and wish to takeover the criminal underworld makes her similar to that of Fish Mooney, one of the primary antagonists of the first season. Fish herself planned to overthrow former crime boss Carmine Falcone and cement her status as Queen of Gotham City's criminal underworld (although she ended up failing, having been killed by Oswald himself).