Francis Dulmacher

The Dollmaker
Full name	Francis Dulmacher
Alias	The Dollmaker
Affiliation	Trident Intercontinental Shipping
Occupation	Doctor
Status	Alive
First	"Everyone Has a Cobblepot"
Appeared in	2 episodes (see below)
Portrayed by	Colm Feore

"What happens when I replace your eyes? Your heart? Your face? When do you stop being you and become something new? That's what fascinates me."

—The Dollmaker to Fish Mooney^[src]

Francis Dulmacher, also known as The Dollmaker, is a doctor and the mastermind behind the abductions of people in order to harvest their organs for the purpose of selling them and for usage in his experiments. From overseas, he ran a human trafficking ring in Gotham City that extended elsewhere.

Biography

The Dollmaker sent two of his lackeys, Patti and Doug, to Gotham City, posing as members of the Homeless Outreach Program, in order to kidnap children off the streets and send them overseas to his facility via Trident Intercontinental Shipping. However, his child trafficking attempt failed when GCPD Detectives Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock intervened.

When Fish Mooney tried to flee Gotham City from an enraged Carmine Falcone, her boat was raided by the Dollmaker's henchmen and she was taken hostage and transported to his facility, in order for her organs to be used in his organ trade business, along with several other prisoners. Mooney soon organized the prisoners and began leading them to acts of defiance against the Dollmaker's staff. The unnamed office manager of the facility was put under strict orders to take care of Mooney and to extract her eyes for business purposes. Mooney prevented this by ripping out her own left eye and destroying it.

Impressed with Mooney, the Dollmaker met with her in person and surgically replaced her missing eye. When Fish Mooney asked for the position of the Dollmaker's right-hand woman, explaining her experience as an organized crime boss, the Dollmaker tested her by telling her to get the prisoners under control and to lessen their defiance to a more manageable level. He even showed Mooney what happened to anyone who failed him while still being of use, showing her the former office manager having been disassembled and reassembled with different female parts. When Fish Mooney passed this test, he gave her the job, but warned her that there is no way to escape his facility because it is located on a remote island.

Dollmaker got suspicious of Mooney when he uncovered evidence that she was planning a breakout. When some of the tougher prisoners made their escape, Mooney was confronted outside of the prison by Dollmaker, who planned to punish Mooney. Before he could do that, other prisoners broke free, beating the Dollmaker into semi-consciousness in the process.

Legacy

"Look, I've been here before. All you mad scientist types say the same kinds of stuff."

—Fish Mooney to Ethel Peabody^[src]

There were no known further abductions from the Dollmaker's crew after Fish Mooney's escape. Most of the Dollmaker's escaped victims returned with Mooney to Gotham City and united with her in her turf war against the Falcone crime family. However, they were all slaughtered by Penguin, who ultimately claimed Gotham's gangs and became the city's kingpin of organised crime. During her captivity at Indian Hill for scientific purposes under Professor Strange, Mooney noted the similarities with her experience held captive by the Dollmaker and exasperated how they had the same justifications for their actions.

Abilities

• Expert surgeon: Francis Dulmacher is a doctor who exhibits master surgical skills.
• Genius level intellect: Dulmacher possesses a far above average intelligence.
• Resurrective capabilities: Dulmacher claims to have the means to revive the dead.

Appearances

Season 1

• "Selina Kyle" (mentioned)
• "Red Hood" (mentioned)
• "Everyone Has a Cobblepot"
• "Beasts of Prey"

Season 2

• "Wrath of the Villains: Transference" (Indirect mention)

Trivia

• In DC Comics, at least three supervillains have used the alias "Dollmaker". Francis Dulmacher is based on the supervillain Barton Mathis, who debuted in Detective Comics (vol. 2) #1 as part of The New 52 relaunch and was created by Tony S. Daniel and Ryan Winn. As on the show, his Modus Operandi is creating dolls from human flesh and illegal organ trafficking. He is most famous for cutting off the Joker's face, which led to the Death of the Family crossover event.
  • The official DC Comics blog notes that, in the comics, "As a child, young Mathis watches his cannibalistic father gunned down by a young Jim Gordon. We have to wonder whether this Dulmacher has any children?", hinting that Dulmacher could be developed on the show as the father of Barton Mathis.
• Michael Eklund, who portrayed Barton Mathis in Arrow, appears in Gotham as Carmine Falcone's torturer Bob.
• The character's surname "Dulmacher" seems to be a European variation of the alias "Dollmaker".
• Both Francis Dulmacher and his comics counterpart share heavy similarities to the real life criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed horrific surgical experiments on captives during the Holocaust without anesthesia. Some of these included sowing multiple human beings together without consent, transfusing blood from one biological twin to another, extracting healthy body parts, sowing flesh to people, and other procedures that often resulted in death. He has notably served as the inspiration for various mad scientists in fiction, such as Josef Heiter in The Human Centipede (First Sequence).