'Batwoman' boss reveals how Joker's plan in Season 3 finale was homage to Tim Burton's 'Batman'

You wanna get nuts?! LET'S GET NUTS!!! The Season 3 finale of Batwoman certainly went a little nuts Wednesday evening, pulling out all the villainous stops (and dancing with the Devil in the pale moonlight) with a direct homage to the beloved Batman film from 1989.

In particular, showrunner/executive producer Caroline Dries wanted to draw a parallel between the show's take on the Joker — Ryan Wilder's half-brother, Marquis Jet (played by Nick Creegan) — and Jack Nicholson's iconic performance as the Clown Prince of Crime in the Tim Burton movie.

“We knew [Marquis] was going to do something dirty [and] Joker-esque, and we wanted it to be on a grand scale and do it to innocent citizens of Gotham, a la the Joker from [Tim Burton’s] Batman,” Dries said during an interview with TVLine, referring to Jet's master plan to drop deadly acid bombs from a blimp hovering above the city. This is a callback to Nicholson's eternally-smiling/cackling antagonist, who planned to poison Gothamites on a massive scale with toxic gas pumped into giant parade balloons.

“We didn’t exactly know what we would do and how to make something look grand scale on our timeline and in our budget," Dries continued. "The blimp ultimately turned out to be the super cool — working within the canon — notion that really felt finale-esque."

Naturally, Jet is ultimately foiled and returned to his regular mental state by way of another shock from the Joker buzzer that warped his mind all those years ago when he was still a child. "What was most important by the end of the season is that Ryan has a true, genuine victory," Dries explained. "[After wanting nothing to do with her family at the beginning of the season], here she is in the finale literally trying to pull her brother out of this shell of who Marquis is, begging him to give her her brother back. I really wanted Ryan to have a victory here, and that’s why it was important that she succeeded, and that he lived. I think there are more stories to tell with Marquis, whether he’s good or bad or whatever happens with this Joy Buzzer tomorrow. How it affects him, we’ll find out if we get a Season 4."

The show has yet to be renewed for a fourth season by The CW, but if last night's episode ends up becoming the series finale, Dries is happy with what she and her talented production team have been able to accomplish narratively. "It feels like we’ve answered enough questions and then also created one big question," she concluded. "That was important to me because the show and each of these individual characters are so important to me that I wanted to give them their due finale moment."