You can see them getting smaller as they pull away

I’m not sure what it is exactly — maybe it’s the Harlow reference, maybe it’s that dish outside the window filling with rain — but something about Tom Waits’ “Time” makes me think of Selina Kyle.

To be clear, that song is not about Catwoman. Not at all. Unless you decide that it is, in which case you won’t have to change much of anything about it to hear it that way.

The song is from Waits’ Rain Dogs album, nearly all of which seems like it could take place in Batman’s Gotham — in a New York that’s not quite New York, but also more so. It is a place, as Waits said, of “beautiful train wrecks.”

Gotham is also, of course, both the name and the setting for a TV show that returns next week for a second season. The first season was flawed and uneven and tonally erratic, but still enjoyable. The cast was pretty terrific, and the writing was good enough to keep viewers wondering what happens next. But the main attraction, of course, was the setting — Gotham itself, Batman’s world before Batman.

I didn’t keep up with the show through the whole first season. And then I didn’t go back and catch up as I had vaguely planned to do. But this wasn’t entirely due to the show’s failings or to belabored tangents with some of its more annoying characters and plotlines. Partly, I think, I was squeamish about where this story was headed — about where it maybe had to be headed.

And that has to do with those beautiful train wrecks Tom Waits describes. Generally speaking, I think the show could use a bit more of a Tom Waits vibe. But, at the same time, I’m not sure I want to see that.

Gotham has introduced us to a very young Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. We meet them as children, and the young actors — David Mazouz and Camren Bicondova — bring something sweetly innocent to their roles. Young Bruce and young Selina have been through a lot. They’re both orphans, already, and not pretending. But their innocence seems to give them resilience and, at this point in the story, they seem hurt, but not yet irreparably damaged.

Yet we know that we’re watching a “prequel,” and we know what the future holds for these children. We know that this innocence can’t last and that these people will be damaged, driven to lives of shadows and masks, whips and fists.

The Selina Kyle of Gotham is a wide-eyed street urchin like something out of Dickens. In a Dickens novel, all such good-hearted urchins get rescued eventually by good-hearted rich men. Young Selina has already found her wealthy hero, but this isn’t a Dickens novel and we know that’s not where her story is headed. We know that Selina is doomed to become one of Waits’ beautiful wrecks.

What’s going to happen to this kid? Bad things. Painful things. Things that steal away the cheery innocence of this young Selina and that leave her damaged and damaging.

If Gotham endures as a popular TV show, it could run for years and we could end up watching Bruce and Selina (and Mazouz and Bicondova) growing up in real time. But this wouldn’t be like Boyhood or like the Harry Potter movies (which arguably did the Boyhood thing before Richard Linklater started his project). This would be a coming-of-age story that didn’t end up in a happier place.

Here’s the last verse of that Tom Waits song:

Well, things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl
The boys just dive right off the cars
And splash into the street
And when she’s on a roll she pulls a razor
From her boot and a thousand
Pigeons fall around her feet
So put a candle in the window
And a kiss upon his lips
Till the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart
And pay the fiddler off till I come back again

Again, that wasn’t written about Catwoman, but if it had been, it’d be right on the money. This isn’t the Catwoman of Gotham, not yet. That show, so far, has only introduced us to a young girl. And watching that young girl turn into that woman with a razor in her boot will likely be unpleasant.

I’m not idly speculating here, because I’m already trying to deal with a similar story arc elsewhere. I’ve been watching George R.R. Martin do terrible things to Arya Stark for four years now, and while her story has me completely hooked, I don’t relish the thought of spending another several years watching the creators of Gotham do the same sort of thing to poor Selina Kyle.

On the other hand, it’s also possible to imagine a happier ending to this story. Part of the problem for characters like Selina and Bruce is that their stories are serialized. That means their stories never end, and stories that never end cannot ever arrive at a happy ending.

But we have an idea how their story might end. The final moments of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises showed us Bruce and Selina, unmasked and toasting a clean slate and a new beginning:

There’s absolutely nothing Tom Waits-ish or Gotham-ish about that image of a woman relaxing in some European piazza, but she looks happy. And I’m happy for her.