Batwoman Season 2 Review Part 3: Sophie, Jacob, and The Crows

Alright, I’m just going to tell you right off the bat. This ones going to be about the heavy stuff. We’ve covered the bizarre saga of the main character transfer in Part 1 and dealt with the supporting cast in Part 2. Now it’s time deal with the only thing left in the story, The Crows and their associated characters. Oh and also the fact that this show decided to a police brutality and corruption story arc this season. Was it any good let’s find out!

The Story thus far

A good place to start with all this is how Batwoman portrayed the police in season 1, as well as how the police and other law enforcement are portrayed in the other Arrowverse shows. I’ll start with what the Crows actually are within the show. They are a private police corporation or PPC, founded by Jacob Kane and bankrolled by Catherine Kane. In the wake of Gabrielle & Beth’s deaths he created them to crack down on crime and because he blamed Batman for letting them die. By the time the show starts they are an international organization and have largely replaced Gotham’s Police Department as the cities primary law enforcement organization. Gotham PD still exists but by and large is on the peripheral of whats happening on the show.

So when the show starts we of course had the Wonderland gang targeting the Crows as part of Alice’s revenge but we also had the character of Charles Dodgson, one of Wondergangers and Alice’s second in command. Dodgson had infiltrated the Crows because he had his own personal vendetta against them. What was that vendetta? Who knows! He never actually said other than the fact that Crows were corrupt and he was quickly caught and arrested and besides a return appearance in the middle of the season where he tries to kill Jacob in prison that was the end of him.

His accusations of corruption do pay off though as while he was in prison Jacob gets saved from Dodgson by another prisoner, Reggie Harris, who says he was falsely imprisoned by the Crows (He was accused of killing Luke’s dad Lucius) and uses the save to basically look into his case. Jacob does and discovers that yeah, Reggie was in fact framed by the Crows. While looking into frame up Jacob is almost assassinated with the implication that orders came from on high. He and the Bat Team, who were doing their own investigation at this point, continue to investigate and discover… That it was just one guy who was working for Tommy Eliot, one of the seasons antagonists.

With that, lets pause for a second to talk about law enforcement in the Arrowverse. It’s kind of a given that shows about superheroes catching criminals would have to have some sort involvement with law enforcement since the superheroes themselves are not (usually) officers of the law. So you know, they can’t be the ones to actually arrest the people. A limitation of the genre and a whole can of worms I don’t feel like unraveling, I just wanted to acknowledge it before we got going.

So first off, it needs to be said that law enforcement in the Arrowverse is utterly useless. They apparently cannot function without the various vigilantes in the world helping them out. There’s also the fact that apparently most of them are portrayed as corrupt and on the payroll of various villains, and generally the only good ones are the main characters in the cast.

The exact relationship with law enforcement depends on what show we’re talking about. I have long since stopped watching The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow so I can’t really comment on their overall relationships with law enforcement.

But as for the rest, Arrow had a long complicated relationship with Star City PD, Argus, and the FBI. With SCPD the Green Arrow went from being hunted by them to basically working alongside to going back to being hunted by them because they wanted to clean up their image as failures (They failed) to working alongside them in an official capacity. Argus was controlled by the corrupt Amanda Waller until she was killed and then it became a more heroic organization and proceeded to not be particularly helpful. The FBI meanwhile showed up to catch the Green Arrow for being a vigilante/being better at their jobs then they were, they only succeeded when Ollie turned himself in in return for them protecting his family from that seasons big bad. They failed and Team Arrow ended up having to save themselves.

Meanwhile over on Supergirl, the title character worked with the DEO, which is a lot of things but they’re basically ICE but for extraterrestrial aliens. And yes, the fact that Kara, an alien was helping the DEO didn’t really get called out until way later than it should have. But then again, for the first three seasons nearly every alien on the show was super evil.

Until season 4 that is when Supergirl decided to tell a story an about racism and anti-immigration. While the primary antagonist for that season was a hate group the DEO really started amping the ICE parallels and ended up being at odds with the Supergirl and her friends. However they never fully broke things off with the DEO and by the end of the season everyone was back working for the DEO again. They all did finally break off from the DEO next season but it took supervillain Lex Luthor running it for it to happen and then it got destroyed by that seasons big bads so whatever. There was never any real confrontation between the Super Friends and the DEO at any real point over what they were doing and helping them do and in the end it was all just swept under the rug.

And then we have Black Lightning which, oh boy. So on one hand this show was the most critical of law enforcement, with the Freeland PD being called out for its actions throughout the show and of course the A.S.A. the government agency that caused nearly all of the shows problems by experimenting on and killing and imprisoning Freeland’s population to further their plans.

On the other hand the show had a bad case of good cop as during the first few seasons we had Henderson, Black Lightning’s cop friend who during season 1 managed to out the corrupt cops from the PD and took over for good. And apparently he was all that was keeping the cops good because after he’s killed off at the end of season 3 it goes back to being a corrupt force again. Season 4 introduces Detective Shakur who’s supposed to be a friend of Henderson and acts as Black Lightning’s new ally in the police force. But he does nothing to stop the corruption in the force besides weak protests against their increasing brutality. Oh and as an added bonus, there’s a scene where he arrests a minion of one of the shows crime lords and the man is on the ground saying he can’t breathe and Shakur responds with a fat joke and this is supposed a heroic moment (Shakur and the minion are both PoC by the way). Nothing that happened on any of the other shows I mentioned and all the stuff I’m about to bring up on Batwoman is as tone deaf and horrific as that moment was.

Anyway the reason I’m bringing all this up is to set the stage for how Batwoman Season 2 went about it’s police corruption and brutality. Namely that going in I didn’t expect much out of the show. As shown above the Arrowverse shows are really reluctant to drop their law enforcement connections. Only Supergirl really did it, but even then they still went about it in a way that didn’t really solve the problem of the DEO or the aftermath of its destruction. It’s headquarters just blew up and I guess that was the end of it.

And going into season 2 from season 1 Batwoman hadn’t really done much to deviate from the pattern. All the talk about the Crows being corrupt had kind not gone anywhere as they just quickly swept the conspiracy under the rug and everything went back to normal. And I guess there was the whole bit at the end of season 1 where Jacob Kane gunned down a criminal and tried to do the same to Batwoman. It didn’t really get any time to develop because that was the premature end of the season and they kind of dropped it besides an “Oh crap” moment from Jacob when he realizes he almost killed his daughter. But yeah make note of that for later. And as a final note, whatever the plan was originally before Covid and before Ruby Rose’s departure, I don’t believe for a minute that they were going to do a police brutality story with the Crows for season 2.

Alright then, with that we’re all caught up. Let’s begin on Batwoman Season 2 proper.

ACAB (All Crows Are Bastards)

Yes, this was an actual line spoken on the show. It’s spoken by Ryan early in the season and delivered in a way that was probably supposed to be cool and badass but, it’s not. Honestly it makes for a decent representation of this shows treatment of police brutality, giving the subject only a surface level treatment and appropriating a police brutality term for its own purposes. And while luckily things get a bit deeper then that and not at all flippant like this was, it’s not a great start to things.

But a start it is so lets begin and recap the Crows plot line. We jump right into Ryan’s introduction when she recaps her backstory to her parole officer (and the audience) about being a foster kid who saw her foster mother get murdered in front of her and then later she got arrested by some Crows who planted drugs on her (remember this for later). She also relates how having a criminal record is keeping her from finding work and a place to live.

Then shortly after Ryan becomes Batwoman a crowd of people come together to demand that Batwoman return. The Crows then show up and begin attacking the crowd and then attack Batwoman on Jacob Kane’s orders before a swarm of poisoned bats attack the crowd at Alice’s behest.

We get the All Crows Are Bastards line when Ryan meets up with Jacob to make a temporary alliance with him to track down a painting to Coryana as part of the seasons main plot. This alliance comes to an end when during a sting, a thief, Grey Fox, steals the painting and is then run down by some Crows, who take the painting back and leave for dead. This angers Ryan and she breaks off the alliance.

Skipping ahead to after the Coryana story we had the Crows focusing on the False Face society. Jacob gets dosed with some Snakebite, the False Faces nice memory drug, and proceeds to have nothing to do with this story until near the end of it. Before this happens though Jacob takes Sophie off the case because of her conflicting loyalties and puts another Agent, Tavaroff, in charge of hunting both the False Face’s and Batwoman.

During his investigation Tavaroff manages to ruin several of Ryan’s schemes and nearly discovers who she is when he gets his hands on some of her blood. He’s thwarted when Sophie helps erase Ryan’s criminal record to cover her tracks. Also Sophie by this point knows about Ryan being Batwoman.

This all culminates with a bad batch of Snakebite basically turning people into zombies. At the same time this is happening, Ryan, Luke, and Sophie all get arrested by the GCPD because of a benefit being held at the Hold Up for a Community Center that Ryan and Mary were helping fund. We got a discussion between the three of them on their individual point of views on the police before they were all released and they went to deal with the “zombies”. Sophie goes and gets the Crows to help deal with the situation while Ryan tries to deliver an antidote to the infected people. But then Tavaroff against Sophies orders, guns down all the “zombies” in a church which prompts Sophie to quit the Crows.

Later that night, while Luke is stopping a man from stealing his car, Tavaroff shows up and guns down Luke. Tavaroff apparently frames Luke for some crimes to justify his actions in case Luke survives. During this time Jacob finally becomes involved in this plot again when he’s confronted with just how corrupt the Crows are and he tries to shut them down and arrest Tavaroff. Tavaroff then tries to murder Jacob with a Snakebite overdose, but is saved by Ryan. He proceeds with Tavaroff’s arrest and shutting down the Crows.

Alright, that’s your plot recap of the Crows story arc. Let’s break it down.

Sophie the (Bad) Good Cop

So lets talk about Sophie, and her problematic story arc. Sophie through out this season and the last one has been the shows token good cop. The agent of justice who’s willing to go above and beyond to do the right thing and the first one to call out the Crows on their darker actions. And it’s all bullshit.

The problem with Sophie is the problem with all good cop characters in that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how much good she does because at the end of the day she’s the only one doing it. Now that does end up being Sophie’s story leading up to her leaving the Crows but its pretty weak in its delivery because of two things. First, Sophie’s the second in command of the Crows, and two, her season long story of fighting for the Crows.

To the first point Sophie since the start of the show has been Jacobs second in command. She’s the one calling the shots most of the time if he’s not doing it and is heading up most of their operations and investigations. Which is to say that the Crows being as corrupt as they are shouldn't have been a surprise. And from what we see, to a degree its not as she apparently knew what kind of person Tavaroff was before he started gunning people down, but not on the level that you would expect from the second in command of the organization.

She should have known something was wrong. With how big the organization is and how wide spread the Crows corruption accusations have been, she should have something was rotten and the fact she doesn’t paints a really bad picture of her when she’s supposed to be this good cop and excellent investigator.

But again, she did apparently know to some degree, which leads to the second thing, her fighting for the Crows. Up until she quit the Crows right before they were shut down Sophie was always going to bat for the Crows, insisting that they could be saved. There’s the conversation in prison with Ryan and Luke where she reveals her greater motivation for wanting to save the Crows, that as a woman and a person of color she believed that she could save the system from within and be a role model to young girls. And then the church massacre happens an hour later and she decides to quit the Crows.

Now I don’t disagree with the decision to leave The Crows since in the grand scheme of things it was probably the only thing she could really do. But the the thing is they don’t show her doing anything else. They don’t show her trying to arrest Tavaroff and the other Crows with him, or trying to report him to HR and being rebuffed or anything. They reestablished that she was the one in charge earlier in the episode when Tavaroff tried to challenge her so its not like she wasn’t in a position where she couldn’t do anything. And even if they did show her trying to do any of these things it would have at least been better than what her just throwing up her hands and going “Well whatcha going to do?”

They spent so much of this season having Sophie fight for the Crows in spite of everything that was going on around her that it feels like a complete anti climax when she just quits and walks off. I don’t think she should have stayed with the Crows but you could have done so much more to demonstrate just how irredeemable the Crows are and forced Sophie to admit that.

I know why they didn’t do that though. Because if you really start examining just how corrupt the Crows are then you have examine Sophie’s role in the corruption and all the awful things that happened under her watch that she either didn’t notice or did nothing about. And they weren’t going to do that with a character that’s supposed to be heroic because then it’s a bit too hard to make them palatable again.

What’s up with Jacob Kane?

I’ll say one thing about Sophie, at least I understood where they were going with her. Can’t say the same for Jacob Kane and his bizarre story. Jacob as a character has been all over the place since the show started. He’s always been a hardass and another good cop, but also not to the level of Sophie’s good cop as he does a number of unsavory things through out the show. However the longer the show has gone on the less its been clear what his role on the show actually is.

Everything I said about Sophie and her being in a leadership position applies to him, even more so since he’s the head of the organization and its founder. So much had to run through him that its frankly unbelievable that he didn’t know about anything that the Crows had gotten up to. But no, he was as oblivious as Sophie was, and again more so as she at least was aware of some of what was going on.

And that’s not getting into the parts where he was actively part of the problem like the end of season one where he had the Crows gun down a criminal and then try to do the same thing to Batwoman. And then we had the early parts of season 2 where he just had the Crows do a number of violent things in the pursuit of finding Kate. And it all leads to nothing as he then get addicted to Snakebite and disappears from the Crows story until the episode where they’re disbanded.

So the Snakebite story was to get Jacob out of the way so the False Face Society could get on with their plans without Crow intervention but, the Crows are shit anyway so Jacob being around wouldn’t have affected anything. I guess it was also to try and discredit the Crows, but again, they didn’t need help in that department. So all that really happens with Jacob then is that he wanders around aimlessly and gets lectured by Mary for not caring about her.

This is again because they didn’t really know what to do with Jacob at this point in the show. As a character and whether or not he was a hero or villain. Character wise he had nothing to do with most of the characters, like he never even met Ryan once out of costume and never interacted with Luke at all. His interactions with Alice/Beth are reduced and while he gets to interact with Mary more, it’s again just them getting into fights. And again he missed out on almost all of the Crows corruption plot and just comes in at the tail end to go “Yeah this is bad, lets shut it down.” and that’s the end of it.

As far as the hero or villain stuff goes, this is just something the show could never really decide on. He had his big villain moments but every time they happened the show would then pull back from exploring that further. I never expected that they would really hold Sophie accountable for what happened under her leadership but I thought they might with Jacob because of his villainous actions. Especially since Dougray Scott, Jacob’s actor, left the show.

So, the way they got rid of Jacob was really weird, because it was basically holding him accountable his actions, just not any of the ones that were Crows related. So after Jacob shuts the Crows down he and Alice team up to grab Circe/Kate and try to fix her brainwashing. The False Face Society attacks them and Alice flees with Kate while Jacob holds them off. They overwhelm him and bring him to Black Mask who reveals that most of his minions were Gotham City Cops and that they’re arresting him for helping Alice get away with most of her crimes.

So it creates a weird situation where Jacob’s being arrested by crooked cops, but he’s guilty of the crimes he’s being accused of, something that he acknowledges as he decides to accept the punishment and go off to jail in Metropolis. And that’s how he leaves the show, doesn’t stick around to deal with the Kate plot or anything. Just makes two goodbye speeches to Mary and to the press about Alice.

And so if they were willing to do this, why not have him go to jail for crimes related to his leadership of the Crows instead of you know, being arrested by crooked cops for again, things he’s guilty of. And its not really great to have your villains be in the right about this when you’re having them be one of the main accusers of the Crows corruption while also having crooked cops on the payroll. Like it’s hypocrisy but the show never acknowledges it as such. The only real difference between the Crows and the GCPD is who signs their paychecks.

But anyway, circling back to Jacobs exit, I guess in the end they just wanted Jacob a heroic ending, going to jail for helping his murderous daughter get away with her crimes. But it’s just, they could have done so much more.

Luke’s Shooting And Tavaroff

Alright so this was the big climax of the Crows story arc. The final nail in the coffin for the Crows and as far as the story goes one of the best written part of the story. But here’s the thing, why did it happen?

Not the plot mind you, the actual shooting. A lot of TV shows this year decided to focus on police shootings and brutality stories, many of them having characters get gunned down on screen. But at a time when PoC are getting gunned down and brutalized, maybe putting such triggering content on your show isn’t the best idea.

I get that this is a story about police brutality but there ways of telling these kinds of stories without showing it on screen. Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19 were able to tell effective police brutality stories this year without showing onscreen violence and they’re not shows known for subtly.

I don’t know, maybe its just me, but maybe there was a better way to do this.

Anyway, lets talk about Tavaroff. With Sophie playing Good Cop, and Jacob not being around it was left to Tavaroff to act as the face of The Crows corruption. Tavaroff had apparently been around since season 1 but he wasn’t important until halfway through season 2, at which point he’s there for every moment or police brutality and corruption all the way up to shooting Luke.

He ends up getting away with shooting Luke as after his arrest and the Crows disbandment he ends up out on bail with the implication that he’s going to be found not guilty. Another unfortunate bit of realism with the number of cops not being punished for their actions. Luke ends up spiraling because of this and ends up stalking Tavaroff for a while.

Tavaroff as character isn’t much of one. He’s meant to be as unlikeable as possible and that’s about it. Story wise he’s there to be a threat and also trigger Luke’s transformation into Batwing at the end of the season.

So during the prison scene between Ryan, Sophie, and Luke we got all three of their opinions on the police situation. Ryan thinks they’re irredeemable, Sophie thinks they can be saved, and then you have Luke who falls somewhere in the middle. Luke agrees with Ryan that the system is broken but doesn’t think there’s anything to be done about it and that its best to just keep your head down and hope for the best, something he picked up growing up the only PoC child in a wealthy environment.

After the shooting, these feelings give way to a sense of powerlessness and despair that leads to his stalking of Tavaroff. He gets the chance to get his power back though when he finds the Batwing suit and gets revenge on Tavaroff who’s basically Bane by the end of the season.

There’s a time and a place to do a story like Luke’s. On one hand its a powerful moment that lets Luke regain his confidence. On the other hand, having him get gunned down at a time like this was maybe not the best way to start it. I don’t know, I guess it depends on how you see it.

Ryan’s Legal Troubles and Other Institutions

So to end things, lets talk legal journey and about all the other institutions that populated the story, mostly ones Ryan had to deal with. So at the start of the season Ryan has been recently released from jail on parole and is living in her van down by the river, unemployed and under threat of having her parole revoked if she doesn’t change this. Which she can’t because nobody will hire a felon. Her fortunes turn around of course once she becomes Batwoman and befriends Mary, who gives her a job and a place to live.

At the end of the season, Ryan gets arrested by GCPD after they plant drugs on her. Her parole officer helps her escape the station and she saves the day by defeating and freeing Kate from her brainwashing. She then gets completely freed from parole at the end of the season after delivering an impassioned speech to the parole board about how she hasn’t changed, she’s always been the good person she was before getting arrested by the Crows.

So I did like this plot but here’s the thing, in spite of it being a season long story it didn’t actually get all that much attention once Ryan gets her job and place to live. Outside of her frequent comments on the Crows her life wasn’t impacted all that much, even when she got arrested during the “zombie” episode. And I think a big part of that is that her parole officer disappeared for most of the season and when she came back she suddenly had a caring relationship with Ryan, something I did not get at all from her during her early appearances where she just treated Ryan like a job. If she had been around more and we had a developing relationship between Ryan and the parole officer, this might have come across better.

Also another small thing that bothered me was how Ryan was arrested as the show wasn’t consistent on what happened. As mentioned in the recap, she was arrested by the Crows after they planted drugs on her. Except no, we find out a couple of episodes later that that’s not what actually happened. It turns out that she was holding some drugs for her girlfriend Angelique and ran across some Crows who hit on her and when she turned them down they searched her and found the drugs. You would think that this would mean that she lied to her parole officer but they give no indication of that and it just comes across as the writers not being able to make up their minds about the situation. Also it doesn’t come up again when she’s arrested by the GCPD for some planted drugs, if nothing else for the irony of the situation.

Anyway through Ryan we did also get a look at some of the other systems besides the justice one. We get a brief look at the foster system which helped her when she ended up with her foster mother but hurt her when she was kidnapped by a trafficker and nobody but Angelique came to save her. And also Angelique never found someone like Ryan’s foster mom and ended up working for a gang later.

We had a brief look at a Community Center that Ryan and Mary were helping fund that got targeted by a for profit prison owner who was attacking places that were helping people of color. It was an interesting addition that sadly didn’t get all that much attention after it showed up and the two characters associated with it only showed up a couple of times. (Also they established during this plot that for profit prisons are bad but they never at any point did the same with the Crows, who are a PPC)

As you can see these weren’t big plots but the potential is there to tell these stories if they would give them more time.

In Conclusion

So I think the main thing here is where does the show go from here with the police, with the broken system, with everything they set up here. You got rid of the Crows yes but there’s a lot of damage that they caused, many people victimized and imprisoned by them. Will they address this in the future? Or will it be forgotten?

And while the Crows are gone the GCPD is still around. Are they going to get the treatment that the Crows did? Or will the show just throw up its hands and do nothing about it?

I’m afraid I already know the answer because for season 3 they’re introducing long time cop character Renee Montoya, who in the back story quit the GCPD over corruption and now runs the Freaks Division. There’s little information about the Freaks Division yet but from whats out there it sure sounds an awful lot like The Crows again, or what I thought they were going to do with the Crows.

I’ll admit, I never thought that they would get rid of the Crows, I thought that they were going to have Sophie take over the Crows and “reform” them so that they were now “good” but functionally unchanged, and this sounds a lot like what the Freaks Division is going to be.

So, in case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t like the shows police brutality story line. I thought that the whole thing was sloppily done and didn’t go hard enough on the topic. And I never thought it would because this is a show of simple solutions, and that’s why I’m tired of it.

But to end on a positive note, if people did like this season of Batwoman, if you did think the police brutality story was good and you got something out of it, I’m glad for you. Its just not a show for me anymore.

Miscellaneous

• I just want to note quick that we heard Ryan, Luke, Sophie, and even Black Mask’s point of view on the system throughout the season but we never heard Mary’s opinion at any point to my recollection. That’s kind of a disappointment as she’s a PoC with ties to police through Jacob. Would have liked to hear her point of view at some point.
• So I didn’t know that Dougray Scott was leaving before it happened so it made that final goodbye scene really confusing. Probably one of the worst exits I’ve ever seen on an Arrowverse show, and there’ve been many.
• Apparently Renee Montoya is going to be played by the same lady who played Renee Montoya on Gotham. That’s neat I suppose.