Batwoman Season 1 Review & The Future
I’ve been putting this off for a while now for several reasons. I got distracted by things, I had other things to work on, and also I was waiting to see where the news would end on the whole situation. You see this was supposed to originally be a season review like my Charmed Season 2 Review. But, then the news about Ruby Rose leaving the show came out and it all went downhill from there. So now this is going to be about my thoughts on Season 1, and also my thoughts on this shows future.
I’m going to do a few things different this time, namely I’m going to summarize the plot of season 1 first to better lay out my thoughts and then breakdown my thoughts Pro & Con style. And so without further ado let’s get into it. (Spoilers ahead, of course)
Plot Summary
Several years before the start of the series Kate, her twin sister Beth, and their mother were in a car accident caused by the Joker. Fortunately Batman was there to try and make the save but unfortunately he didn’t secure their car well enough and it fell off a bridge and into the river below. Kate managed to get out in time but Beth and their mom didn’t and they were presumed dead.
In the present Kate has followed in her father footsteps and joined the army. Unfortunately she was discharged when she is caught making out with her fellow cadet Sophie Moore and refusing to hide that she’s a lesbian. Sophie however is willing to lie and as such stay in the army. As such Kate has spent the last several years training to become a member of the Crows, an elite police for hire network run by Kate’s father Jacob. Jacob has also many years earlier remarried to one Catherine Hamilton, a business woman with a daughter of her own, Mary. Mary in the present day is an Instagram personality and socialite while secretly running a medical clinic in a poor end of town.
Another thing that’s happened since the accident is that Batman has gone missing for the last few years, as has his alter ego Bruce Wayne, whose departure has left his company Wayne Enterprises as basically a shell that’s only maintaining its real estate at this point. The Crows took advantage of his absence to establish themselves and show the world that Gotham City don’t need Batman. Oh yeah and Bruce is Kate’s cousin, this will be important in a bit.
And so on the night of the Crow performing a ceremony where they destroy the Batsignal the ceremony is attacked by Alice, an Alice in Wonderland inspired villain, and her gang of mask wearing minions. They kidnap Sophie, who since her time in the academy has come to work for the Crows as Jacobs second in command. This kidnapping prompts Mary to call Kate and let her know what happened, which in turn prompts Kate to come running back to Gotham City.
After a couple unsuccessful run ins with Alice, Kate goes to Wayne Enterprises to use their traffic camera technology to find Alice. While there she meets Luke Fox, the one in charge of managing what’s left of the company, and also discovers the Batcave and the fact that Bruce was Batman. She convinces Luke to help her out by making the Batsuit fit her and she sets out and frees Sophie.
In the process she discovers that Alice is her long lost sister Beth and decides to set out and bring her sister back to her while also fighting crime as Batwoman.
From there’s a lot that happens but I’m going to ignore most of the side stuff here and focus on the main plot. Kate attempts convince Beth give up being Alice while at the same time convincing her father that Beth is Alice. She fails at the former but eventually succeeds at the latter, though not without great struggle. This is mostly because Jacob adamantly against the possibility and also despises Batwoman, focusing a lot of his efforts on taking her down along with Alice. Also working against Kate is stepmother Catherine who as it turns out knowingly buried the knowledge that Beth was still alive in a misguided attempt to give Jacob and Kate peace.
Beth as it’s revealed was saved by one August Cartwright. A gifted plastic surgeon who was living out in the woods with his badly disfigured son Mouse. He tortured and held Beth prisoner for years until his apparent death. Mouse, who is like a brother to Beth and is gifted at mimicking voices runs the Wonderland Gang along with Alice. Cartwright taught Alice his plastic surgery skills which she uses to make Mission Impossible style disguises for Mouse as part of their various schemes.
It turns out that Alice somehow knew about Catherine’s crimes and blamed her family for not saving her and as such concocted an elaborate revenge scheme to take them down. This eventually climaxed with Catherine dead and her numerous crimes exposed to the world and Jacob framed for a murder.
More side stuff happens, Jacob eventually goes free but in the process discovers there may be corruption in the Crows and eventually discovers that one of the Crows murdered Luke Fox’s father Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s previous business manager. The reason behind the murder it turns out was to acquire Lucius’s journal which held many secrets including how to kill Batman.
Around this time several other things happen Mary finds out about Kate being Batwoman and eventually joins the team alongside Kate and Luke. August Cartwright meanwhile turns up alive and attempts to kill Alice. This fails and gets him caught by Kate, Jacob, and Alice. However before they can turn him in Kate kills him after he reveals that he desecrated her moms corpse. Alice is then tricked and arrested by Jacob and Kate. This makes her redouble her efforts to get revenge on her family, now with Kate as a target.
To this end she and Mouse, who had been caught earlier, take over Arkham Asylum by having Mouse impersonate the head doctor. They then recruit Tommy Elliot, a man obsessed with Bruce Wayne who Kate had caught earlier in the season as part of a plan to infiltrate Wayne Enterprises with Tommy wearing Bruce’s face. They also get a hold of Lucius’s journal in order to learn the secret of killing Batman, a secret which applicable to Batwoman since she’s wearing his suit.
They eventually get outed as controlling Arkham when they kidnap Luke to translate the journal and are forced flee. Mouse by this point is fed up with Alice’s obsession with killing Kate and decides to leave, only to have Alice murder him because she can’t stand the thought of him leaving. And that’s where that story line ends because the season was cut off by the Corona virus shutting production down.
Anyway on the Kate side of things Kate ends up incredibly shaken by her killing of Cartwright and quits being Batwoman for a little while. She resumes but then learns that her ex-girlfriend Reagan stole Lucius’s journal from her when they briefly hooked back up. Then she discovers that her other ex and ally to the team Julia Pennyworth was working to acquire the journal behind her back for a mysterious crime boss named Shafiyah. She then is betrayed by Jacob when as Batwoman they teamed up to take down an escaped convict only for Jacob to kill the convict and try to kill her in the process. The season ended with Kate quite upset over this.
Alright that’s the general plot summary. There was as I mentioned more then what’s above but that’s side stuff and I’ll cover most of it below in the pros and cons. Speaking of pros and cons lets begin.
Con: Changes from the Source Material that diminish the character
I’m not someone who minds changes from the source material, as long as they make sense, do whatever you want. In this case however, the changes they made from comic to TV were not for the better because they diminish Kate Kane/Batwoman as a character and her place in the world.
This might sound odd considering her superhero name is Batwoman but Kate Kane is not a character with heavy ties to Batman. In fact Kate’s road to becoming Batman had very little involvement from him in the grand scheme of things. In the comics Kate’s origin was mostly the same as in the summary with the key deference's of her, Beth, and her mom being kidnapped instead of being in a car accident. Their mom was executed by the kidnappers along with apparently Beth although this later turns out to be false. (Jacob knew the truth all along but lied to Kate to try and spare her the pain of not knowing Beth’s fate).
Kate’s still thrown out of West Point for being gay (Her origin was written when don’t ask, don’t tell was still a thing) But afterwards she just drifted through life without a purpose. Until one night while leaving a bar she’s mugged but fights the muggers off and discovers Batman there ready. Having not needed his help though he simply helps her up and departs. This encounter along with Kate seeing the Batsymbol in the sky inspires her to become a vigilante.
Her father Jacob discovers this fast and with some great reluctance agrees to help her by getting her some heavy duty training and helping make her gear. Kate completes her training and comes back to take up the mantle as Batwoman.
The reason I bring all this up it because changing the way Kate becomes Batwoman feels like it diminishes her as her own character and just makes her feel like a replacement Batman.
Instead of making her own suit and equipment she just gets it from the Batcave and has Luke make some adjustments. Instead of having her own secret hideout she’s using Bruce’s dusty old cave. Oh and I didn’t bring this up in the summary, she ends up sort of running Bruce’s company. Admittedly in the comics she doesn’t really have a job but still, it’s another tie to Bruce. For a long time being cousins and both having Bat in their names was their only connection.
This extends to other things as well like Kate’s choice of fighting style. Comics Kate’s training and gadgets focus a lot more on military training then Bruce’s Ninjitsu and as such she’s more then willing to use guns as part of her arsenal, and while she tries to avoid it if she has to, she’s willing to kill if it comes to it. In the show Kate pretty much just mimics Bruce in every way when she’s out as Batman. This is actually a plot point because early on before she modified the suit to include the wig people were just mistaking her for Batman.
Even Kate’s rogues gallery is largely just dropped or modified to be closer to Batman’s. In the comics Kate’s rogues gallery is very supernatural or military themed in design, whereas in the show, well they just don’t show up at all. While main villain Alice is still around, in the comics she was a crime cultist with an even heavier focus on the Alice in Wonderland motif. Here she largely just comes across as Lady Joker most of the time. And then there are some others who are just straight up Batman villains who are now in her rogue gallery like Hush (The aforementioned Tommy Elliot) and Magpie, a thief character who in the comics just steal random stuff like her namesake, who in the show has been changed to be more like Catwoman.
But the big one for me is the one that goes back to the very start, when Batman was there for the accident that killed Kate’s mom and lost Beth for years. By having Batman tied to nearly aspect of Kate’s backstory it doesn’t give Kate or the show a chance to escape his shadow. I mean goddamn, nearly every episode has Kate narrating stuff to him via letters and “What would Bruce do?” comes up as a dilemma a lot.
A lot of this feels like the people behind the show wanted to make a Batman show, weren’t allowed to, and instead made this. It’s a recurring thing with DC comic shows. They wanted to put Batman on Smallville, weren’t allowed to, and so went with the next closest thing Green Arrow instead. They wanted to make a Batman show, weren’t allowed to and we ended up with Arrow (Seriously, tonally that show would have made more sense as a Batman show). They wanted to do it again, couldn’t, and we got that bizarre Gotham show which was basically Batman without Batman.
And even if this was always supposed to be a Batwoman show, why make strip away most of what makes Kate her own character? To use the Batman aspects to lure his fans in? If you didn’t trust Batwoman to stand on her own merits why make the show at all?
There was one aspect of Kate’s character that stayed intact though and that brings me too:
Pro: The Queer Content is front and center
For those of you who don’t know, Kate Kane is gay. In fact as far as LGBTQIA+ comic characters go she’s probably one of the most high profile superheroes out there. There may be better known ones by this point she’s still probably one of the best known ones. And fortunately this show did not shy away from this at all.
Kate is very open about her sexuality and it does drive plot of several episodes. A homophobic encounter with a restaurant manager prompts Kate to open a Gay Bar in the same neighborhood and in another episode Kate whose sort of a public figure unmasks herself in order to talk down a lesbian teen whose life had gone to shit after being accidentally outed and was hacking the city in order to get money to skip town. Kate also as Batwoman came out to general public to serve as a role for people like the hacker teen.
On the relationship front Kate also gets a decent amount of focus all it doesn’t go too well for her. Her relationship with Sophie is kind of problematic (I’ll go into why in her entry) she does get a nice but unfortunately short lived (It lasts all of two episodes) relationship with a bartender named Reagan. They get back together later on but it turns out Reagan turned heel so that won’t be going anywhere.
Later in the season we meet Julia Pennyworth, the daughter of Bruce’s butler Alfred. She also an old friend of Luke’s and an ex of Kate’s. They stay that way for a while until late in the season when they tease getting back together, and then she and Sophie hook up.
As far as Sophie’s sexuality goes, a good portion of her story arc is her coming out and learning to accept her sexuality. She starts the series off closeted after the Academy incident and by the time Kate meets up with her in the present she’s married to a beard named Tyler. Tyler only lasts a few episodes before he finds out that Sophie and Kate were a couple, something Sophie lied to him about. They then separate to figure out their relationship and we never see him again.
Sophie eventually figures out that she’s attracted to Batwoman (Who she doesn’t know is Kate) and comes out to her conservative mother, who doesn’t take the reveal well. Her attraction and flirtation with Batwoman doesn’t really last long as Kate’s forced to break things off with her due to, well, complications dating a masked person without knowing who they are and also Sophie still figuring herself out.
Then of course Sophie and Julia get together. It’s not often that there’s a love triangle where everyone involved is interested everyone else involved in the triangle. I was actually quite interested in this development at the start although by the end I had decided that Sophie and Julia would be better off as the couple as neither has the baggage with each other that they do with Kate. I don’t know how this would have ended since the season got cut short and behind the scenes stuff but I do hope that this relationship continues going forward.
So yeah, I thought their handling of LGBTQIA content was pretty good. It wasn’t perfect obviously, and it did get pretty heavy handed at points. But I have some confidence in their handling of the subject.
Pro & Con: Sophie Moore (And I’ll throw Julia Pennyworth in here too)
Sophie’s a mixed bag of a character. On one hand as I said before I liked her story arc regarding her sexuality. On the other hand, there’s everything else.
To start off with, the show kind of positioned Sophie as an antagonist of sorts to Kate early on. By that I mean Kate would go to Sophie for help with something and Sophie would proceed to either rat her out or show up with a squad of Crows and disrupt Kate’s plans. This was usually in relation to Kate’s attempts to save her sister from herself but there were occasionally other things as well.
Now it makes sense, Sophie is the second in command of the Crows and she knew where her loyalties were. But did make it hard to root for her and Kate being a couple when they had Sophie always choose something that wasn’t Kate. Even going back to their academy days Sophie chose the Army over Kate.
They also did my least favorite romance trope of having her married to someone else and then teasing her and Kate getting together, AKA cheating. Not that it mattered anyway, said husband Tyler was gone from the show so fast that you wouldn’t have known he was ever there.
She does get better later on however as she starts to run into conflict with Crows boss Jacob over the issue of Batwoman operating in Gotham as well as the Crows corruption and starts taking things into her own hands. This gets her temporarily fired from the Crows and sees her team up with Julia Pennysworth. This leads to another problem.
The reason I slotted Julia here is besides the romance arc she’s pretty much here to set up the sequel hook for season 2 involving everyone wanting Lucius Fox’s journal and she does that by working with Sophie in her solo missions and later in the Crows.
So what’s the problem? Well, Sophie began to feel incredibly separated from the rest of the show as she had increasingly less interaction with the rest of the cast. Her interactions with Kate and Batwoman had largely stopped by this time and even Jacob’s story had moved in a direction away from hers. I don’t know where her story is going from here but hopefully it’s somewhere back with the rest of the main cast.
And speaking of separated.
Con: Catherine Hamilton-Kane (And lack of developed relationships)
Catherine’s story arc confuses and annoys me, of all the things I didn’t like about this show this was probably the one nearest to the top of the list.
Catherine is positioned as an ambiguously evil character at the start of the show, sharing her husbands dislike of Batman and developing a Batman killing gun. She also goes to some murderous lengths to cover up cover up of Beth’s survival like blowing up a bridge to try and kill Alice and having Kate and Sophie attacked because they had some evidence of Alice being Beth.
And, well that’s about it, because nine episodes into the season Catherine is killed when she’s poisoned during a press conference and dies in Mary’s arms to save Mary who was also poisoned. And that’s where her story line ends as nothing she or was doing at the time has any impact going forward. It makes it hard to care about anything Catherine did on the show because in the grand scheme of things it meant nothing.
To make matters worse there’s kind of a switch flip moment when after Catherine’s crimes are exposed to Jacob and Mary she suddenly changes from a ruthless businesswoman to a character that I can best describe as “Please be sympathetic towards me”. A good example of that would be her relationship with Mary which at the start of the show seemed frosty over Catherine not approving of Mary’s Instagram celebrity. Late in the show she’s suddenly turned around on it and also secretly knew about Mary’s underground clinic and is super proud of her for it. A development that feels like again “Please have sympathy for me, I’m dying.”
And then there’s the whole Beth situation. So as previously mentioned Catherine covered up Beth and Gabrielle’s potential survival in what was apparently an attempt at sparing Kate and Jacob pain.
So how does this affect the other characters? Well, Jacob, Mary, and Beth are of course quite unhappy about this, Beth engineering her revenge plot over this. How does it affect Kate though? Not that much really. In fact Kate doesn’t really seem to give a shit about this reveal at all. That’s probably because as far as can be told, Kate has no relationship with Catherine. She has little to no interaction with Catherine at any point during her short time on the show and considering how the whole Kate/Beth conflict is pretty much the central conflict of the show, this feels like a giant glaring problem.
A lack of developed relationships is kind of a big problem for this show in general. Jacob and Mary would be another one. While not as bad as Kate and Catherine they have a problem of their relationship not being well established, which creates a big problem later in the season when Mary uses her relationship with Jacob to set up a meeting with Batwoman. It’s hard to hear them talk about their relationship when they’ve barely interacted all season.
Then there’s Kate and Mary’s weird relationship. This ones far better developed then the former two but it’s come across in weird ways. It’s established at the start of the season that Mary feels that Kate doesn’t particularly care about her and while they try to make it seem like that’s not true, the rest of the show makes it seem like it is. Kate regularly ignores Mary and tends to not think about her at all. She regularly endangers her by bringing criminals to her clinic as Batwoman and also regularly leaving her out of the loop on things in spite of dragging her into things on the regular.
Eventually Mary figures out that Kate is Batwoman and decides to not tell her initially because she wants Kate to trust her enough to tell her on her own. But she eventually realizes that this is never going to happen and decides to tell her. I think this is a perfect example of how this show presents their relationship: Mary wanting to be closer to Kate and being disappointed when Kate wants nothing to do with her.
And circling it back to Catherine, this show missed out on a lot by killing her off when they did. By keeping her alive and antagonistic they could have positioned her as a hostile force to both Batwoman and Alice. With her (for whatever reason) dislike of Batman/Woman fueling the conflict of the former and her cover up of her crimes fueling the conflict of the latter.
I don’t know why they got rid of Catherine when they did or why they did very little with her when she was around. What I do know is that her minimal presence created a lot several problems that the show never really resolved.
Pro: Mary Hamilton-Kane & Luke Fox
This show usually tends to be dour and miserable in tone most of the time and that can be a drag. So I’m quite glad for the characters of Mary and Luke, Kate’s partners in crime.
On the surface she appears to a rich airheaded Instagram star Mary but she’s far more complex then this. She’s actually a cheerful and optimistic if sometimes snarky person who despite the writing of her relationship with Kate, as mentioned above, never gives up on her sister. She also runs a secret clinic in a poor part of town because she wants to help people who nobody is interested in helping.
She takes a while to find out that Kate is Batwoman but once she does she integrates onto the team pretty fast and manages to be very useful. Not just for her medical skills but she turns out to be quite good at research and how to find the criminal of the week. So yeah, good stuff.
On the other side of things we have Luke Fox. Luke is as previously mentioned the son of Lucius Fox who was Bruce Wayne’s business manager and the designer of all his equipment. In the present he’s in charge of looking after what’s left of Wayne Enterprises and the Batcave. After Kate borrows the Batsuit to save Sophie he gets roped into being her reluctant tech support and ally in the fight against Alice.
Personality wise Luke is quite the snarky straight man to Kate and Mary’s antics and generally keeps a level head about things. He also acts as Kate’s moral compass at points when she doubts her abilities and actions, offering her words of advice or comparing her actions to what Bruce did in the past as Batman (Something I wasn’t thrilled with but, whatever).
There is one sort of negative with Luke in that he’s kind of island separate from the rest of the cast. At the start of the series the only person he has a connection to is Julia, who doesn’t show up for a while, and as far as the rest of the characters go he only interacts with Kate, who he had never met prior to the start of the series. He does eventually meet and start interacting with Mary but that takes a while too and he doesn’t meet Alice until near the end of the season.
I say this is a sort of negative because on one hand he felt disconnected from what was going on with the show most of the time but on the other hand this meant he didn’t get dragged into most of the drama.
He also didn’t have his own story arc for a while until late in the season when revelations about how his father was murdered came out and he had to solve what actually happened. This did connect him to what was happening a bit more as the end result was the reveal of Lucius Fox’s journal.
I’m not sure exactly where both characters storylines are headed in the future but there are some hints. There seemed to be a hint of possibly hooking Luke and Mary up, which I wouldn’t be opposed to as they had some good chemistry. There’s also the possibility of them following in their comic book counterparts footsteps and become superhero’s themselves (Batwing for Luke and Flamebird for Mary). I’m not sure about this route since the CW shows tend to have problems with having multiple superheroes on one show but I guess we’ll see. Either way, I’m curious to see where they go with this in the future.
Con: Jacob Kane & The Crows
For whatever reason every Arrowverse show must have some big organization involved to some degree. For Arrow it was Argus, for Supergirl it was The DEO, for Black Lightning it was the ASA, and here for Batwoman it’s the Crows. The Crows are a private police force, founded by Jacob Kane for the purposes of replacing Batman and cleaning up Gotham’s streets, they did no such thing.
As far as their role in the show goes they’re sort of allies/sort of enemies to Batwoman. By that I mean they usually chase after the same villains Batwoman will be chasing after in any given episode while also chasing after her. They routinely fail at catching the villains of the week of course so they’re mostly just there to be a hindrance to Batwoman. And that is all they do.
The problem with the Crows is that in spite of being a major fixture on the show they don’t actually get much in the way of actual focus. One of the ongoing plot lines regarding the Crows was their supposed corruption and the fact that they weren’t actually making the city better. This accusation initially comes from Dodgeson, one of the Crows who is secretly a mole for Alice. He gets arrested early on and that doesn’t go anywhere and while Alice herself also makes those accusations they don’t really factor into her revenge at all.
Eventually late in the season there is sort of a payoff to this when it’s revealed that another agent named Miguel Robles was responsible for the murder of Lucius Fox and that he covered it up and pinned it on someone else. It turns out he did it at the behest of supervillain Tommy Elliot who wanted Lucius Fox’s Journal so he could kill Batman.
And that’s about it for the corruption story line, there was no followup for the rest of the season, at least in a way that indicated there would be more later on. I feel like this is a big wasted opportunity as while the show spends a decent amount of time on the effects Batwoman has on the city, they don’t really acknowledge whatever impact the Crows have had.
Because by the way things are set up the Crows only really protect the rich and powerful within the city and leave the rest to fend for themselves, only heading into the poor part of town when they’re hunting criminals. This combined with the fact that they have like a 95% failure rate when it comes to actually dealing with criminals on screen and there could have been an interesting discussion on their relationship to the public as the story rolls on along with how people view them vs how they view Batwoman.
Now it’s possible that they could have been headed that direction in the last few episodes but I guess we won’t know for a long time. Because you see Jacob had gone full vigilante killer in the final episode, declaring war on Batwoman and trying to kill her after betraying her and killing another criminal that they were trying to bring in alive. But again this was in the “finale” so who knows how that would have gone.
And now all this brings me to Jacob Kane, and how I don’t actually have a lot to say about him. On the one hand he was involved in some of the best material on this show whenever he got involved in the Kate/Alice story line and contributed heavily to it. His relationship to his daughters was one of the high points of the show. On the other hand, his involvement with the Crows was a bit lacking. At the start of the series he was championing the cause of Gotham not needing Batman alongside Catherine, and then when she died he kept it up for a while.
But from there things get kind of sidetracked. Jacob gets framed for Catherine’s murder and ends up in jail for a while. While there he’s saved from a beating by Reggie, the guy framed for Lucius Fox’s murder on the condition that he looks into Reggie’s case once he gets out. His doing so kick starts the Agent Robles plot line from above but aside from Robles trying to have him killed a few times to cover it up he isn’t really involved in that story that much. I mean hell, he wasn’t around for the resolution of it and doesn’t seem to have much of an interest in the fall out afterwards. Even before and after that Sophie was more involved in the Crows plot line then he was in spite of her being even less involved with them then she was.
And then there’s his sort of heel turn at the end of the season where he goes to war on Batwoman, basically amping up his attempts to take her out to murderous levels, as well as lying to both Mary and Batwoman to do it. I don’t know where this was headed, it’s an interesting route to go down but I don’t know where it would have ended.
Even with the post season changes that are coming I feel like the Crows need a bit of restructuring in how they portrayed on the show. And with them Jacob, and what kind of person he’s going to be in the future.
Pro & Con: Alice/Beth Kane
I’m very torn on this one. On one hand Beth’s story arc was one of the best on the show and her actress Rachel Skarsten was by miles the best of the bunch. On the other hand, this show over used her so much that could barely breathe.
In regards to the former point, Beth’s story of childhood horror, nearly dying alongside her mother and being raised by a monstrous individual with only her adoptive brother and Alice in Wonderland to keep her sane were some of the best stuff on the show. There were many great scenes of her interacting with Kate, Jacob, Mouse, and Mary, All of whom were both antagonist and sympathetic to her at various points.
And in general, they did a job of balancing Beth’s sympathetic traits with Alice’s malevolent desires and need for revenge. And that’s a hard line to walk because too much of the former and people forget they’re supposed to be booing the villain and too much of the latter and people may not want to spend much time with the character.
Now all this said, they over used her way too much. As in she had to be involved in the plot EVERY. GODDAMNED. WEEK.
This was fine during the weeks that were focused on her but there were many weeks where she wasn’t the focus and we still had to check in with her and grind whatever story was happening to a halt to find out whatever it was that was happening with her that week. Most of the time she ended up involved with the villain of the week plot, overtaking them completely and making it about her which would kill a lot of the drama involving the villains because once again she ended up the bigger threat.
And then there’s the issue of her season long story arc of revenge on her family. She pretty much succeeds in getting her revenge early on when she kills Catherine and pins the murder on Jacob, with her focus then shifting onto convincing Kate to give up being a hero and become a villain with her. There’s a few twists and turns there but that one ends with Kate turning on Alice and locking her in Arkham where Alice’s goal then shifts to trying to kill Kate in revenge for the betrayal.
The issue with that is again, so much time is devoted to seeing what Alice is up to that given week. Most of the arc involving Alice convincing Kate to join her involved the previously mentioned villain hijacking along with the appearance of a Beth from another universe (It was a Crisis on Infinite Earths thing, I’m not going into details) as well as the return of August Cartwright, her tormentor and Mouse’s father. While both of those yielded some very good story lines they again, took so much of the shows time.
And then we get to Arkham where Alice and Mouse almost immediately take over the place and begin sending out villains after Batwoman for the next several weeks. Which again takes up a lot of our focus.
Again, on their own I think most of the Alice/Beth was quite good, but at the end of the day there was just too damn much of it. And that’s not even getting into the stuff at the end of the season.
So the “finale” ended with Alice killing Mouse so she wouldn’t leave him and her then making Tommy Eliot, who she had begun working with, look like Bruce Wayne so he could get some Kryptonite to kill Batwoman. So that wasn’t supposed to be the end of course but I wonder where things were going to end with Beth had the season gone as long as it was originally supposed to.
Was she going to get defeated and locked back up? Was she going to get killed, or Was she going to flee town when it was all over? Either way I don’t know if she was going to continue to be a thing past season 1 or not, and if she was, how involved was she going to be. I especially don’t know now with the cast changes but if she is still going to be around in the long term then they need to reign her stuff in quite a bit.
Pro & Con: Kate Kane/Batwoman
So here we are, the big one. Our hero and series namesake. The driving force behind most of the what happens on the show. So what do I have to say about her? Not that much actually, most of what I thought about her got covered in the other sections and there’s very little left to talk about so instead I’m to talk about Ruby Rose.
Ruby Rose did not seem to be a particularly popular pick going into this series on account of some bad performances elsewhere. I personally had no opinion on her since the only things I saw her in prior to this were her guest spot on Dark Matter where she was fine and got to use her actual accent and John Wick 2 where she didn’t talk at all and was pretty much there to do action scenes, which she excelled at. So when this show got going and I got to see her in action, I thought she was fine.
I don’t think she put on a bad performance mind you, in fact she was pretty good at times, such as the aftermath of Kate’s murder of August Cartwright and her shock at the action. But most of the time she was at an okay level and was probably the least charismatic actor on the show, which is probably not something you want out of your lead actor.
So why am I bringing this up? Well, as you may have heard, Ruby Rose is leaving the show and Kate Kane is going with her. I feel like this is a big problem that needlessly screws up the show on many levels and doesn’t need to happen because here’s the thing, Ruby Rose is replaceable, Kate Kane is not.
While it’s true that replacing a lead character’s actor would be jarring, but with time people would get used to it and Ruby Rose has only had the role for one season of this show plus her guest spot in the Elseworlds crossover from the year before that. She’s not been in the role long enough to be synonymous with it. And then there’s the bigger issue of how getting rid of Kate Kane throws the entire show out of whack, which brings me to my next section.
Ryan Wilder & The Future of Batwoman
Ryan Wilder is the character intended to replace Kate Kane as Batwoman. She is to be played by Javicia Leslie and is described as “Nothing like Kate Kane” and “Likable, messy, a little goofy and untamed” which is a telling statement about how the people behind the show see Kate but I digress. She also apparently grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and worked as drug-runner and now lives in a van down by the river with her plant. That first bit is kind of a problematic background for the character, especially if they were always planning to cast a women of character. She’s also a lesbian so that’s good to hear.
Now, on it’s own, Ryan Wilder seems like a good character and I’m interested to see what what they do with her. However, there’s a lot of problems going into this that would have been solved by just recasting Kate Kane instead of replacing her.
The first and foremost is what happens to Kate herself. Considering how deeply central her refusal to abandon the fight has been, it would be weird to have her just up and abandon things although it would be in character for her to disappoint Mary one last time. There was a rumor going around shortly after the news broke that they were going to kill Kate off. It would be very shitty if they did do this as it’s another on the very long list of the “Bury Your Gays” Trope. The rumor got shot down fast but it still leaves the big question of how they’re going to get rid of Kate without making her awful in the process.
Part of this is that I’m unclear just how done Ruby Rose is, if she’s totally done or if she’s going to stick around long enough to wrap up the season 1 stuff or if she’ll be back for future guest spots. If it’s latter that’s kind of good but if it’s the former then things are really going to be messed up since that means that she’s going to be leaving Alice on the loose and leaving the Crows right as they’re getting blood thirsty.
There’s also the aforementioned bit about Kate being the center of the show. Every character and element is connected to her in someway, her father Jacob the head of the Crows, her step sister Mary, her biological sister Beth, her ex-girlfriends Sophie and Julia, and also her cousin Bruce Wayne aka Batman whose company and Batcave Kate is using with the help of Luke Fox.
So let’s start with Alice/Beth, assuming she isn’t dealt with right at the start of the next season. The big drive of their conflict by the end of the season was Alice wanting Kate dead. Now you could maybe just make the conflict that Alice just wants Batwoman dead in general or somehow doesn’t know that it’s not Kate under the cowl anymore but the conflict loses a lot of it’s edge by virtue of Ryan Wilder not having any connection with Alice. Same deal with Jacob and the Crows, they want Batwoman dead so that keeps that conflict going but again Ryan Wilder has no personal connection with Jacob so again the conflict loses its edge.
And then there’s the harder stuff to fit in like Mary. Ryan has no personal connection with her and no real way to meet her so that creates some problems. Likewise she has no connection to Bruce Wayne so she’d probably have no reaction to Thomas Elliot impersonating him, let alone any reason to be at Wayne Industries. And of course she doesn’t know Sophie or Julia either but that ones minor since it just means those two can just date without any love triangle shenanigans.
There is then of course the issue of Ryan’s personal life, Namely does she have one? It’s still a bit early so we may hear about casting for these later on but I do wonder if they’re going to give Ryan her own friends and family, and if they do, will they actually be a thing past Ryan’s introduction? Or will Ryan have no one and have to inherit Kate’s friends and family along with the title. It would be very shitty if it was the latter.
Then of course there’s the issue of how Van by the River dweller Ryan Wilder even becomes Batwoman. I can’t really see Kate handing off the cowl to some stranger so I’d guess Ryan would probably be inspired to become Batwoman on her own I.E. Kate’s comics origin.
That would probably be the best way of handling things, by having her on her own for a while before meeting Mary & Luke. If they tried to rush things and slot her into Kate’s position right away that would just be bad and probably feel like Ryan is even more of a replacement for Kate then she already is.
All this being said I feel like this could be a good change for the future. If they take their time to establish Ryan Wilder and her place in this universe this could be very good, not to mention the potential stories they can do about a Queer WOC. If they don’t take their time and just rush to fill the spot left by Kate then I don’t see this working out in the long run.
Conclusion
This kind of goes without saying but this show needs to make some changes, and well, with Ruby Rose departing they’re going to have to anyway. It kind of goes without saying that season 2 is going to have to be a soft reboot of the show to introduce Ryan Wilder and whatever new status quo she’s going to bring.
This also means that pretty much every problem I mentioned is going to have to be addressed since Kate is no longer there and they need to figure out where everything fits in the new version of the show. And I hope they do try to change things for the better, because in spite of all my issues with this show I do like it and I want it to be a good show.
Because here’s the thing, if they don’t change anything. If the only thing that changes is suddenly Ryan Wilder is there and everything trudges on like Kate’s departure affected nothing. Then Ruby Rose won’t be the only one who walks away from this show.
