In its second week, Batwoman wastes almost no time getting us into the bat-action. I say almost because we have to deal with another opening flashback and narration before the episode starts proper. I admit, knowing Kate’s writing these thoughts to Bruce Wayne makes the narration more palatable. Context helps a lot. Though I’m not sure he’s the one you want to be asking about sanity. And either way, the monotone delivery doesn’t make it an easy listen. The flashbacks remain obnoxious. They’re largely unneeded and the bright, overexposed and choppy visual style hurts to watch.
Then, we see Batwoman beating up bad guys and dark alleys and everything’s OK. It’s really all I wanted from any Bat-family series. For now, she’s just looking for Alice, who she’s figured out is her twin, Beth. As Luke Fox points out though, the vigilante work has a side effect. The people of Gotham think she’s Batman. She’s giving them hope the way the old bat did. She brushes it off for now, but we know how this works. Eventually she’ll rise up and be the hero Gotham needs. We’ve seen this story so many times before, but there’s a reason for that. It’s a good one.
Rachel Skarsten as Alice — Photo: Jeffery Garland/The CW
Speaking of Alice, she gets a long villain monologue scene that she really should have had in the premiere. She’s turning out to be a great villain. She plays unhinged very well, while giving her character a believable motivation. The good guys on this series are generally still a little too flat for me, but superhero stories are really all about the villains. So far, this first season has an impressively strong one.
It makes for a confrontation that’s exactly as tense as you want it to be. Despite refusing to believe that Alice is Beth, Colonel Kane figures she’s at least using events from Beth’s life. When the Crows track one of her rabbits to a suburban neighborhood, he deduces that they must be at their old house. To his credit, that’s where Alice’s big villain monologue took place. Partly thanks to Kate though, the Crows are too late. By the time the get to the house, Alice and her Rabbits have cleared out, leaving a gruesome tea party scene with the bodies of the couple who lived there.
Dougray Scott as Jacob Kane — Photo: Sergei Bachlakov/The CW
Kate, meanwhile, got a message to Alice. Figuring out that the Rabbit she injured the night before would be at her step sister’s secret clinic, Kate uses him to get a message to Alice. A codeword to meet at their favorite childhood place. It works, Alice shows up. We got a fantastic villain-hero scene, the kind where you can never really be sure which way the villain will take things. In the same breath, she confirms being Kate’s sister and casts doubt. Her explanation is filled with rhymes and poetic imagery and Alice and Wonderland quotes, so you can never quite tell what’s true. It’s a fun back-and-fourth that again asserts what a fun villain she is. Better than that, she’s also Kate’s weak spot. This is the episode where the hero messes up badly, and we can totally understand why she does.
She’s so desperate to have her sister back that she doesn’t realize how much Alice is manipulating her. Sophie tells Colonel Kane where Kate and Alice are, and the Crows show up. Kate convinces them to arrest, rather than kill Alice, and Alice quotes the book again. This time, a story about three sisters, along with a reminder that she doesn’t like to share. Kate puts it together quickly. She sent someone to kill Kate’s stepsister, Mary. She shows up as Batwoman just in time to save her, capturing the henchman. Before she can assure Mary she’s safe though, she sees on the news that a bomb exploded on the bridge under the prison transport van Alice was in. Just like her cousin, Kate doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She races to the scene of the explosion, dives underwater, and uses Batman’s old rebreather to stop Alice from drowning.
Meagan Tandy as Sophie Moore — Photo: Sergei Bachlakov/The CW
Kate takes an L here, and that’s appropriate for the second episode of a series. If this was a movie, this would be the end of the second act. Things are at a low point, but it’s what inspires Kate to become a hero. This is how she decides to be the Batwoman the rest of the CW-verse met in ‘Elseworlds‘ last year. By the end of the episode, everyone’s mad at her. A policeman shoots the gas tank of a sunken squad car and the explosion blows both Kate and Alice back. She narrowly avoids an awkward run-in with the police thanks to a quick remote defibrillation from Luke. That’s as good as it gets for her. By the end of the episode, everyone’s mad at her. Mary basically gives her an ultimatum, her dad threatens to arrest her for aiding and abetting a terrorist, and Sophie tells her in no uncertain terms that there’s nothing between them.
Though there was no triumphant ending, the action remained strong throughout. The fight scenes, the underwater explosion, it all made for exciting superhero TV that mostly made up for the show’s shortcomings. Greg Berlanti and co. know how to make good-looking comic book television. The flashbacks still suck and they keep sucking throughout the episode. They don’t have the emotional weight that the show wants them too. It feels like they’re only here because Arrow had them. Only Arrow’s revealed twists and turns in Oliver’s journey. And even then, they still got old by Season Four. Here, the flashbacks rehash what we already know. I just hope the show either uses them to better effect or drops them altogether.
Ruby Rose as Kate Kane/Batwoman — Photo: Katie Yu/The CW
One more tick in the good… well, at least interesting column, is the show ended with another mystery. Alice, we learned didn’t know about the gas attack on Kate and Sophie in the Crow parking garage. Kate thought it was Alice trying to get her knife back. Instead, right at the end, we learn it was Mary’s mother, Catherine, who hired the attackers. We don’t have even the slightest hint as to why yet, but it looks like we’ve found this series’s version of Malcolm Merlyn. She’s not as charismatic as John Barrowman, but who is? Can’t hold that against her. The annoying things about Batwoman’s pilot remained annoying here. Even if having the context of the narration improves it ever so slightly, I’d still rather it wasn’t here. Still, the story took meaningful steps forward, and we got a tight, action-packed episode with some character growth as a bonus. It’s enough to keep me coming back for more.
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