Batwoman S01E01 Review: Protector of Gotham

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

Batwoman is... it's a show that has garnered a lot of press even before it started. And as someone who blissfully ignored and wasn't even aware of the massive flame wars on youtube trailers and comic-book fan sites until five minutes before writing this review, I never really saw Batwoman as an attempt to shoehorn SJW-politics into superheroes, or gender-flipping Batman, or anything of that sort. In fact, watching through the first pilot episode of Batwoman, my reaction was more of "well, this is actually a pretty decent adaptation of the 52-era reboot of Batwoman!" And with Gotham over, it certainly does help to sort of fill in the Batman-TV-shaped hole in my heart.

The pilot episode for Batwoman is, surprisingly enough, an origin story for the character as she returns from her training all over the world back to Gotham City, in a time where Batman has mysteriously vanished for a couple of years. We learn a bunch about Kate Kane throughout the episode, and while her relationship to Bruce Wayne -- he's her cousin -- is brought up a couple of times throughout the episode, unlike Supergirl or Titans, Batwoman is allowed from the get-go to essentially tell her own story instead of being bogged down under the shadow of a bigger hero. There's a neat balance of having Kate Kane become the new defender of Gotham, while also at the same time she also treats the legacy that Bruce has left behind with respect.

The pilot episode essentially isn't super complex. Kate returns from training with strange mentors when her ex-girlfriend Sophie Moore is attacked and abducted during a ceremony in which the Bat-Signal was supposed to be shut down, in a crime perpetrated by a crazy woman calling herself Alice and quoting Lewis Carol's work. While originally training to find a spot in her father's crime-fighting organization the Crows, Kate ends up basically being pushed away by her father from any operation to find Sophie, in a combination of some father-doesn't-really-see-her-daughter-as-competent and Jacob Kane being pretty overprotective.

And the second act of the episode sort of... sets up Kate Kane's little investigation, as she initially goes on her own crusade, breaking into Wayne Industries and meeting nerdy ol' Luke Fox, meeting Alice herself and inexplicably being spared by her, and eventually discovering the Batcave after pressing a button placed underneath a display of Martha Wayne's pearl necklace. We also get to see Kate's backstor, where her mother and sister were presumed killed when Batman was going off to save a school bus, when Batman's bat-line failed to hold the car and caused it to plummet. It's an interesting dynamic of Kate respecting Bruce a lot but hating Batman, but very quickly comes to terms when she realizes the whole story... and ends up deciding to gang-press Luke Fox into helping her root out Alice and save Sophia. Donning a modified version of Batman's suit, Kate finally ends up fighting Alice and her men as Batwoman. Kate herself... has a neat personality? She's pretty low-key and subdued throughout much of the episode, being laser-focused at recovering her friend while also having enough of a sense of humour to do the odd sarcastic jab or two. Her personality is still sort of there, kinda-dour-but-not-gloomy.

A fair amount of the pilot's plot beats feel pretty expected. We get to see Kate Kane being a badass, we get to see the kooky sidekick, we get to see her backstory (including being kicked out of military school for being gay -- the LGBT part of the show is prominent without being too in-your-face about it) and we get to see her fight both outside of the suit and inside of it. As Batwoman, she eventually rescues Sophie and we get a cool sequence of her picking off Alice's men one by one before rescuing Sophie. Alice's plot is pretty standard fare for the psychotic Bat-villains of Gotham City, forcing Jacob Kane to either choose the life of his beloved subordinate (who's about to be thrown off a building), or do something about it and Alice will detonate the van full of bombs in the park. I'm not 100% sure what Alice's motivations are, but it's a pilot episode and I will settle for 'crazy Bat-villain'. (Also Sophie is married to a man at the end of the episode, but at this point I'm just 100% done in terms of love triangles in CW shows)

Of course, the enigmatic Alice's true identity quickly becomes apparent to the audience. Alice let off Kate Kane, and seems to know a lot about the 'daughter that her dad wants'. Plus, Luke Fox notes just how long Bruce had looked for Beth's body and never found it. Eventually, after a certain necklace's gemstone ends up (rather conveniently) appearing in the hilt of Alice's dagger, Kate suspects that Alice might be Beth... while the audience gets straight-up confirmation that, yes, crazy ol' Alice is Beth, who survived the fall and now plots to essentially take over Gotham City with her sister. A lot of this doesn't really fully make sense, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt since we're still in the pilot stage. I just appreciate that they didn't stretch out this revelation for like the entire season or whatever.

Ultimately... the pilot episode's a pretty uneven but interesting one. A lot of it, I feel, stems from the fact that the show doesn't seem to find a right balance on not treating the audience like idiots (like, y'all know what Gotham City's all about, right?) and also delivering massive expositions. There are also some parts of the pilot episode that felt a bit iffy -- Sophie being noted as "the daughter that Jacob Kane always wants" felt like a random detail out of nowhere. Ultimately, though, it's a neat show that feels like a pretty great Batwoman adaptation. It's not without its faults, but I did like what I saw.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We've talked about Batwoman's origins when she first debuted in the Arrowverse's Elseworlds crossover, so I won't repeat myself here. Again, her association as Bruce Wayne's cousin is original to CW, although the storyline of her returning to a Gotham City where Batman is MIA for a couple of years is taken from the 52 storyline, in which Batman and most of his sidekicks are missing after the events of Infinite Crisis. 52 is the first storyline in which the modern-day Batwoman debuted. 
• Alice, a.k.a. Elizabeth Kane, is a major character from the Batwoman stories, and her origin story is relatively similar to how it's being approached here. She was Katherine Kane's twin sister, lost and presumably killed during her childhood, and eventually rising up as a member of an organization called the Religion of Crime. 
• Kate's step-sister Mary Hamilton-Kane is based on Mary Elizabeth "Bette" Kane, a.k.a. Flamebird, from the comics. Traditionally Katherine's cousin, Bette Kane was originally introduced as the Golden Age Bat-Girl (a more comedic, clingy girlfriend type character more than a proper vigilante in a lot of her earlier stories), but was retconned out of existence during Crisis on Infinite Earths, in favour of making Barbara Gordon the only Batgirl. Bette Kane was re-introduced as the vigilante Flamebird (and later Hawkfire), originally starting off as a Teen Titans supporting character before becoming a Batwoman sidekick.
• Jacob Kane and Catherine Hamilton are Katherine's father and stepmother in the comics. I don't think Catherine Hamilton ever does much, but Jacob Kane's role as a more military-minded father that has problems with his daughter is relatively faithful to the couple of Batwoman comics I've read. 
• Luke Fox is presumably Lucas Fox (or sometimes Lucius Fox Jr), son of Batman's classic ally Lucius Fox, better known in New 52 era stories as the superhero Batwing. 
• Crows Security takes its name from the Murder of Crows, a group of special operations soldiers who are friends with Jacob and trained Kate in the comics. 
• Sophie Moore was Batwoman's first girlfriend in the rebooted comics, but was very much a one-note minor character. Here she gets a significantly expanded role. 
• Vesper Fairchild, whose radio show is played a couple times in the episode, is one of Bruce Wayne's many, many love interests. In the comics, she is also a radio host, and was Bruce's love interest in the late 90's and early 00's, but perhaps the most famous arc about her was her death in the Bruce Wayne: Fugitive storyline, where Bruce Wayne was imprisoned for being suspected in murdering her, leading to Batman abandoning the Bruce Wayne persona. 
• The "Welcome to Gotham" sign that was turned into "Hell comes to Gotham" with graffiti is a neat little homage to a very memorable defacing of a similar sign in the No Man's Land comics. At least that's what I remember it from, anyway. 
• The Wayne Towers' Batcave is clearly based on Batwoman's HQ in the comics, being an octagonal room with a tree in the center.
• The password to Wayne Industries' computers is apparently Alfred, a nod to the Waynes' faithful butler. 
• Bruce Wayne's canon in-universe birthday in the comics is indeed February 19th. 
• The movie in the park is, of course, The Mark of Zorro, the fateful movie that Bruce Wayne and his family watched as they went home that fateful night.