Batwoman Season 2 Review Part 2 — Alice, Mary, Luke, and Villains

And we’re back and rolling on with this review. I already gave my thoughts on the messy transfer of the role of Batwoman from Kate Kane to Ryan Wilder. But what about everyone else on the show? What were Batwoman’s support team Mary & Luke up to? What was the big bad of season 1 Alice up to? And was she still taking up too much of the shows time? What about the new villains of the season? Well I’m going to tell you what they were all about and how I felt about them. If you’re wondering what about Sophie & Jacob and the Crows, well they’re going to get their separate part.

Luke Fox

I’m going to get Luke out of the way first, mostly because A) he doesn’t really have that much to talk about and B) most of it is going to be covered in Part 3. So yeah, Luke didn’t actually have all that much going on personally until the end of Season 2. Mostly Luke’s story for the first half of the season is holding out hope for Kate’s survival and being hostile towards Ryan as a replacement for Kate (Considering her introduction to him and her overall skill level I can’t really blame him).

During the second half of the season however Luke kind of just floats around for a long while, not really doing anything out of being mission control. He does get one plot where he gets to team up with Stephanie Brown, daughter of the villain Cluemaster. But she’s gone after one episode and never mentioned again.

Luke does finally get a plot towards the end of the season and, well it involves being gunned down by one of the Crows. So yeah, things get real bad fast there and I’m going to talk about most of what happens in the Crows section. But for here, I’ll go over what happens with Luke in the aftermath. So Luke ends up nearing dying and while he’s dying he ends up in a Purgatory like place where the spirit of his father stands off in the distance. Whenever Luke tries to approach him he’s stopped by a phantasm of Bruce Wayne who tells him that if he goes to his dad that he’ll die. The bulk of the episode is then Bruce trying to convince Luke to stay alive while Luke talks about his despair over the thought having to go living as a person of color in America and that he really just wants to be reunited with his dad. Luke ends up choosing his dad but gets resurrected by Mary and Ryan using the Desert Rose. Luke then spends a lot of his time afterwards in a haze and stalking the Crow that shot him Tarkaroff.

So, I have strong mixed feelings on this plot. The handling of the shooting wasn’t great, nor was the aftermath. However I did think that Luke’s story itself was pretty good, probably some of the best stuff of the season (And there really wasn’t a lot of good stuff here). It gave him some character development that he had been missing all season (Just wish that he didn’t have to get shot for it to happen).

Anyway at the end of the season while dealing with Kate’s Circe takeover Luke discovers a Batsuit that his father made for him based on some schematics Luke made as a kid. He ends up using the suit to save the life of Mary and get some revenge on Tarkaroff.

So this bit, I’ve been expecting Luke to end up as a superhero at some or other because that’s what he is in the comics and the Arrowverse shows just can’t help themselves and have to have everyone in their casts as superheroes. I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to it since these shows tend to struggle a lot the more heroes they pile on. (Look forward to Mary becoming Flamebird and Sophie becoming whatever in the future)

But yes, Luke as Batwing, I don’t really hate it but it’s not great. In the comics the Batwing suit is basically the Iron Man suit with a Batman paint job. And here it seems to be along the same lines without some of the more expensive CGI bells and whistles. Considering the last time the arrowverse did an Iron Man (The Atom) it ended with the suit being destroyed because it was too expensive to animate.

I don’t know what the future holds for Luke but I would hope it involves less misery because I could do without that. Also I could do with a different looking Batwing suit because holy shit, if you think the Batwoman suit is ugly.

Mary Kane

So what was Mary up to during this season? Doing a mix of her own things and inheriting some story lines from Kate, though it leans more into the latter than the former.

Unlike Luke, Mary quickly latched onto the idea that Kate was dead and because of this she was way more accepting of Ryan taking over as Batwoman. This included supporting Ryan by giving her a job at the Hold Up and moving into Kate’s apartment with her. Both of these things were requirements of Ryan’s parole. And yes, in the wake of Kate’s death Mary inherited the Hold Up and the apartment.

They didn’t really spend a lot of time on Mary running the Hold Up though because she still had her secret back alley clinic to run. Which is the focus of Mary’s personal story arc in the first half of the season, albeit in a confusing way. You see, in spite of being a back alley clinic run by an unlicensed practitioner apparently Mary’s clinic is an every medical need clinic, including things like cancer treatments and MRI’s. Things that are horribly expensive to run and shouldn’t be done in the dirty basement room that is Mary’s entire clinic. Now I know that Mary’s a billionaire and could probably afford this but still, this kind of thing would draw attention to her.

And this brings me to the next part of this, Jacob finding out about the Clinic. He learns about it when a criminal takes the two of them hostage and brings them to the Clinic, where Mary’s forced to admit the truth about what she’s been doing. After the situation is resolved Jacob shuts the clinic down because Mary is an unlicensed physician practicing medicine in a back alley clinic.

Mary retorts that she’s helping people who can’t afford the hospital bills and would otherwise slip through the cracks. We’re meant to side with Mary here but thing is, Jacob’s right. Mary’s not a licensed physician, and if something goes wrong she’s super fucked, and no amount of money is fixing that. Jacob ends up covering Mary’s ass later on by creating fake documents for the Clinic but Mary rejects them, until like the next episode where she takes them and sort of acknowledges that Jacob was right, in a way that doesn’t really acknowledge that he was right? The whole thing comes across like the writers realizing that Jacob was the one in the right and but they didn’t want Mary to look bad.

Speaking of Jacob one of Mary’s other inherited Kate story lines was Kate’s familial issues, and you’ll all be happy to know that Mary’s character beat of nobody in her family caring about her being intact. So yes, with Kate gone the show decided to spend sometime on Mary’s woefully undeveloped relationship with Jacob, sort of. Mostly they just spent a lot of time having Jacob doing a bad thing and having Mary express dismay that he did this bad thing and how he doesn’t particularly care about her and Jacob, doesn’t disagree with this. The most Jacob ever really gets to saying that he cares about Mary is during his goodbye speech to her where he does the same “I’m suddenly proud of you even though I treated you terribly, feel sympathy for me!” speech that Catherine gave Mary when she was dying.

Oh and of course Kate still doesn’t care about Mary, Mary brought out no feelings from Kate during her brainwashing fuckery. And then when Kate got her memories back she got no goodbye from her during her departure. Mary even acknowledges during the brainwashing fuckery that Beth would have a better shot at helping her than she does and nothing happens that proves her wrong. So yeah, for all the big changes on this show, somethings never changed.

Beth/Alice & Safiyah

During season 1, Alice was both the best and worst thing going on on this show because while she had some of the best story lines she was also overexposed and got involved with damned near every plot on the show when she really didn’t need to. Did this change for season 2? Yes and no. On one hand Alice was still heavily involved in everything and was the one driving most of the plot at points. On the other hand she was mostly of on her own adventures and only sometimes intersected with the rest of the cast.

The big thing of course was her feud with Safiyah. So Safiyah as previously mentioned, is the ruler of Coryana, a criminal(?) nation located in the Mediterranean Sea. Or at least that’s what it was in the comics, this version is pretty undefined. Anyway, sometime after escaping her captivity Beth ended up on the island somehow. There she caught the eye of Safiyah, who fell in love with her. Unfortunately for Safiyah the feeling wasn’t mutual and Alice ended up falling in love with Ocean, a young man who was like a brother to Safiyah. Safiyah got insanely jealous and paid off Enigma, the lady with super brainwashing powers, to erase each other from their minds and then kicked them both off the island.

In the present day of the show Safiyah appeared to have had all of Alice’s gang killed for stealing the Desert Rose (The super cure all plant that only grows on Coryana) and making several attempts on Alice’s life via her head assassin Tatiana. Safiyah then kidnaps Alice and tells her that she’s the one who blew up Kate’s plane and that she’s holding her prisoner, but she’ll set her free if Alice kills Ocean. Alice goes along with this until she meets Ocean and realizes that she knows him, at which point they team up to fake his death. But then of course Ryan blows his cover and Safiyah forces Alice to kill Ocean right in front of her, which she does. Safiyah then reveals that she never had Kate and that this was all to twist the knife and make Alice feel worse. And Alice burns down all the Desert Roses because Safiyah as we’ll learn, doesn’t actually know Alice as well as she thinks. (We also find out that the Safiyah made the damn Originals paralyzing daggers from The Vampire Diaries and that Ocean wasn’t dead because he was stabbed with one)

Fast forward to later in the season and Ocean’s back to kill Alice for trying to kill him, but Alice happened to be interrogating Enigma at the time and Enigma flips off their brainwashing to make an escape, at which point they become lovers again. Safiyah then makes a return even later in the season to reveal that she had told Black Mask about Kate’s flight and kidnaps Alice to get revenge for the destroying the Desert Roses. And then Ryan buys her freedom but as they’re leaving Safiyah basically says that she was having Ocean killed while Alice was her captive. Alice rushes to his hiding spot to find him dead and kills his killer Tatiana who was still down there. Later as she’s burying Ocean Safiyah shows up and says that she pretty much did all she did in order to get Alice back with her. Alice then stabs her with her Originals Dagger and leaves her to drown in the ocean I guess.

Got all that? Okay lets go! I’ll get Ocean out of the way first because I don’t have much to say there. I didn’t like Ocean, he came across as a belligerent asshole most of the time and was pretty emotionally abusive to Alice, including murdering Enigma while Alice was trying to save Kate with his reasoning basically being “Her or me”. Though the show didn’t frame his actions that way and we were supposed to think their relationship was good. But I’m not sad he’s dead.

Tatiana, Safiyah’s goon is also someone I don’t have a lot to say about. She’s only really notable for the mid season finale when it turns out that she was the one behind the original assassination attempts on Alice because she loved Safiyah and was jealous that Safiyah loved Alice. She gets Originals Daggered for this and disappeared until she shows up to kill Ocean and get killed herself. All I have to say about her is that her actress is one of the worst ones seen in a while. Oh and her comic counterpart was and the show version cast a white actress and this is the second time this show has done this.

So now Safiyah, Safiyah’s character motivations make no sense. In theory everything she does is about getting Alice to come back to her. But she goes about it in ways that wouldn’t help that goal at all. The Ocean stuff would be the big one since she starts things off by sending Alice to kill him but then when they’re on the island she fakes his death. But then she decides to have him killed at the end of the season.

And of course her wanting Alice back doesn’t really gel with her actions through out the season. If she simply wanted revenge that would make sense but somehow this was supposed to drive Alice back into her arms even though she had done nothing but antagonize her all season. I don’t know, Safiyah’s return at the end of the season just felt like they brought her back solely to wrap up her story line regardless if it made any sense.

But all this is just to talk about Alice’s story so lets get back to her. One thing I didn’t mention is that Safiyah insinuates that she had Enigma imprint the Alice persona into Beth. Nothing really confirms or denies this and when Enigma flips the brainwashing off Alice doesn’t really change personalitywise and she goes on to kill more people. But this leads into one of Beth’s stories for the season, the battle for her soul.

It’s a weird story line in that its a holdover from season one where Kate and Jacob tried to redeem her and failed. Except this time nobody is trying to redeem Beth except for Beth some of the time as nobody else really cares and some like Ryan reject her redemption because she’s done nothing to deserve redemption. It comes to a head at the end of the season when Alice confronts Ryan about her hostility towards her and claims that she’s changed and suffered only for Ryan to point out that whatever Alice has gone through she’s still killed a lot of people and deserves punishment for this.

I actually like this because it does hold Alice accountable for her actions and doesn’t let her off the hook for all the bad things shes done, unlike some other shows that did this without actually redeeming her (Looking at you Charmedboot). At the end of the season Alice gets arrested and locked up in Arkham, with both Jacob and Kate saying that she can be redeemed and become Beth again, but only if she works towards it.

I will say that going into this season I wasn’t looking forward to seeing more Alice and I had been wondering how season 1 would have ended for Alice originally if Covid hadn’t happened. I don’t know what the answer is but I doubt she wouldn’t have left since the Coryana stuff would have still needed to happen. But I’m glad with how this turned out, she still had some good material without being overexposed this time.

Now, that being said, she’s still going to be around for season 3 because as we learn at the end of the season, she knows who Ryan’s birth mother is. So who knows, maybe she’ll wear out her welcome again.

Black Mask and the False Face Society

So finish this off by talking about the Big Bad of the season, Roman Sionis AKA Black Mask. He’s technically not introduced until the second half of the season but his gang, the False Face Society function as thugs for Ryan to fight as early as the start of the season. Roman is a successful cosmetics mogul who also wants to create anarchy and destroy The Crows, The Cops, The Government and Batwoman.

The reason why is basically the same across the board, revenge for his daughters incarceration and death. Before the series starts Roman’s daughter Circe was sexually assaulted by a man and she killed him in retaliation. She was then sent to Arkham where she got trampled to death during a riot indirectly caused by Batwoman (And Green Arrow and The Flash because this riot took place during Elseworlds, a crossover that occurred before the show even aired). Swearing revenge, Roman created the False Face Society to tear it all down and rebuild it with him in charge.

How did he go about doing this? In ways that made no sense. The first is that he had a drug by the name of Snakebite created by Ocean (That’s what he was doing after his banishment) and Angelique, Ryan’s ex-girlfriend. What does Snakebite do? It rewrites the users memories so that their greatest failure never happens. How does this help Roman? I don’t know, it never really seems to help any of his plans along at any point other then making money (Which he already has) and in fact it ruins them in one big area as Mary creates a special variant from it that cures Kate’s brainwashing. The only plan where it sort of helps is when he manages to get Jacob hooked on it for a while which I guess takes Jacob out of the Crows for a while but he never really capitalizes on it in anyway. And he want to destroy the Crows and they do get shut down but nothing he does contributes to that and he even gets annoyed because the Crows get shut down in a way that doesn’t get him or anyone else justice for the Crows actions (Feelings I share, see you in part 3). Ultimately he gets his revenge on Jacob by having him arrested by crooked cops for the crime of helping Alice evade arrest, something he is guilty of, but it’s such a weak conclusion to their conflict.

Other plans include The Candy Lady, a woman who kidnapped homeless kids and crushed their spirits until they believed that they were worth nothing and then were forced to join the False Face Society. Ryan was a victim of hers and managed to escape. This plans mostly just a recruitment plan and doesn’t really do much other than to explain where most of the False Facers came from.

And of course we had the “replace Circe with Kate” plan. Which I guess is one of his better thought out plans because he gets to have his revenge on Kate and get his daughter back in a way. Grant you he was missing some key components like ate not looking like his daughter but I guess he was lucky he had Alice and her super Mission Impossible face powers. I think a big part of it was that this had nothing to do with his master plan and he just wanted his daughter back, in some form.

So we then come to the end of the season and Roman’s endgame, which turned out to be having Circe steal Batman’s trophy’s from the Batcave and use them to make more supervillains as part of a plan to unleash chaos on the city. He gets thwarted by the people rejecting him and fighting back against his minions and then gets his face melted to his mask by Alice to see him off.

In the end I did like Black Mask as he was an interesting enough villain and was played by a fun actor. I did kind of like the contrast between him and Ryan as both wanted to take down the Crows because they had been wronged by them, but both went about it in very different ways. I do think their actual conflict was a bit underdeveloped because a lot of Ryan’s screen time was devoted to other things but it was there.

Conclusion

This year was a mixed bag for the supporting cast. I miss Mary having a life as an Instagram star as it gave her a bigger connection to the world and we never really spend time in the Clinic unless it’s to develop the plot. I hope now that Luke is a superhero that that doesn’t become all he does. He’s kind of already the guy who doesn’t leave the cave, I hope that he gets to go out and do more. Alice can stay in her cell and provide minimal additions to plot as I think she’s coming to the end of her purpose in the plot.

As for the Villains, please do better. More Black Mask, less Safiyah, which is contradictory because I’d rather this show used the actual Batwoman villains instead of relying on Batman villains, but apparently we’re getting Poison Ivy and all of the trophies have been released into the wild so I guess there’ll be more. Woo….

Anyway, join next time as I wrap this massive beast of a review up with Part 3, where we get into the heavy stuff and talk about the police brutality. But first, here’s the miscellaneous section which will be mostly dedicated to supporting characters that didn’t warrant their own section.

Miscellaneous

• Julia Pennyworth: After being set up as a major character going forward and as a romance option for Sophie they quickly scuttled that with Sophie being mad and then leaving to track down Kate. She apparently found her but got got by Enigma who erased her mind and sent her back to Gotham. She then recovered her memory, tried to confront Enigma, got got again and sent off to Germany. She’s lucky that Jacob also left this season because she only has the second worst exit this season.
• Enigma: There’s not really much to say about Enigma in spite of being important to both major villains plots. She had a cane with a tranquilizer hidden in it and she was the Riddler’s daughter (Sigh) and that’s about it. Nothing really stood out about her.
• Victor Zsasz: So this one was only a villain of the week and Batman villain again. But I just wanted to call out Alex Morf who played him for delivering a very fun performance that felt way better than the kind of performances you usually get on a CW show. Also I’m guessing that because Birds of Prey didn’t do to well money wise is reason Zsasz and Black Mask were suddenly back on the table.
• Grey Spider: Another one I wanted to call out because he’s only the fourth Batwoman villain to appear on the show. As a character he was fine but he was yet another example of a character being tied to Kate as they were friends back in high school and she protected him from bullying. I wanted to bring him up in Part 1 because he’s part of the Kate problem but didn’t know where to put him. It would have been so easy to have had him as a friend of Ryan or Mary.
• Hamiliton Dynamics: So for whatever reason Catherine’s company suddenly became a thing for a couple of episodes again. They haven’t been a thing since Catherine died and yet here they showed up long enough to establish that Mary had sold her shares and that they were still doing bad things. A worthy addition, truly.
• Jordan Moore: So turns out that Sophie has a sister who’s existence and personality contradicts a lot of Sophie’s backstory. Namely that she knew that Sophie was gay and that’s she’s a political activist. Anyway she adds nothing and only show up for a couple of episodes to introduce the community outreach group she’s a part of. Said group is only around for one plot of the week.
• Stephanie Brown: Not a character I was expecting since she’s far down the importance list for DC but then again so is Batwoman at this point. I don’t know if she’ll be back or not or if she’ll be Spoiler when she does.
• Bruce Wayne: Still missing and Kate’s off to look for him. I’ll be shocked if he’s ever allowed to actually show up.
• Fucking Originals Daggers, the CW really is just eating itself whole.