Batwoman S01E10-11 Review: Down the Rabbit Hole

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 10: How Queer Everything Is Today; Episode 11: An Unbirthday Present

We're still reviewing most of the CW shows, or at least while I try to catch up with them. Batwoman had a pretty solid first eight episodes that ended in a pretty cool quasi-mid-season finale (is there a better way to say "one-thirds-of-a-season" without sounding awkward?) with the situation that befell the Kane-Hamilton family. I'm still not entirely sure about having the Kate/Alice storyline dominate the series to thoroughly, but I can't deny that the two actresses playing Kate and Alice have great chemistry together and Rachel Skarsten does the best job of eating the scenery that I can't even be mad.

Episode 10, "How Queer Everything is Today", is... it's underwhelming? Obviously, a pro-LGBT message is something that's right up Batwoman's alley, and anyone watching this show is very much likely to support said view. But the way that this episode handles it is with the clumsiness of a sledgehammer to the face, and that does take me out of the episode a bit.

A huge chunk of the episode deals with Kate's angst that, thanks to a bit of an inconvenient photograph, Gotham City starts shipping Batwoman with a hot cop dude, officer Slam Bradley, and Kate is angry that the city's seeing her as a straight person instead of the lesbian she is. Coincidentally, this week's villain-of-the-week is a CW original, Parker "Terrier" Torres, a teenage super-hacker whose motivation for hacking trains and threatening to spill the mayor's credit card is because she's frustrated because she can't come out as gay and, verbatim, talks about how the superheroes she sees on television ain't representative of her. Which is... certainly a bit too on-the-nose.

That said, some parts of the episode works well. The whole train sequence with Batwoman using her new Bat-bike's grappling hook is as sweet as it is physics-wise unrealistic, and the build-up and mystery surrounding the Terrier is at least a neat enough break from Alice while she ends up being mostly in the background, at least until she takes over as the main antagonist at the end of the episode.

Alice, meanwhile, butts heads a fair bit with Mouse, a dynamic which we've had a bit of foreshadowing in the first arc of Batwoman. While mostly supportive of his 'sister' Alice, Mouse is developing a severe case of sibling envy towards Alice's reactions towards Kate. Alice is wholly convinced that Kate is going to join her little crazy family after the events of the "Tea Party" two episodes ago, but Kate ends up (obviously, for us sane folk) not appreciating the fact that Alice has gotten rid of the oh-so-evil Catherine Hamilton that has 'ruined' their family. And Mouse, seeing how Alice's read on Kate has absolutely backfired, has put his feet down and is trying to make Alice see -- in their own twisted Wonderland logic. Alice ends up kidnapping Parker Torres and trying to get her to reveal Batwoman's secret identity to the world, but of course Parker isn't a snitch, and instead calls in the GCPD for help instead. Parker ends up seemingly built up as a potential sidekick at some point down the line. Okay, then.

The confrontation between Kate and Alice is a much-needed one after the gigantic cliffhanger of episode 8. After the wham-bam rapid pacing of the events of Alice's master plan, and giving our main characters time to process, Kate has finally basically accepted Alice not as someone to redeem, but as someone to take down... and, ironically, it's basically the same for Alice with the roles reversed. We also get the much-needed Kate/Mary bonding segment, which I do like. Mary gets a brief B-plot in this episode where she's throwing herself wholeheartedly into dealing with basically moving on and taking time to grieve about the absolutely shitty situation she finds herself in.

And then after what seems to be a relatively low-stakes episode where we put Kate and Alice in the right mindsets to finally have a proper good old-fashioned superhero-vs-supervillain showdown... Beth shows up, and, as we'll discover later on, it's not Alice dressed up as Beth, but rather a Beth from a different Earth that got shunted into Earth-Prime because, uh... god damn it Oliver Queen? It's a mighty interesting plot twist and one that seems to be a lot more impactful. (Also, of course Kate's first reaction is to attack her).

Overall, though, it's a decent, if on-the-nose, episode.
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We follow this up with "An Un-Birthday Present", following up on the huge revelation that Beth Kane just showed up in Kate's office, seemingly bereft of any knowledge of her time as Alice... and, of course, while it took our main cast a while to realize who and how Beth and Alice are co-existing, they quickly handwave through the weirdness of the whole multiverse thing by having our characters either already understand the multiverse, or, in Beth's case, already suspecting the existence of a multiverse. Or something. I'm actually glad that Kate's very first instinct was to think that this is yet another one of Alice's many sick jokes, attacking Beth and being confused before figuring things out. It did take a bit of a while for Kate, Luke and Mary (I like that Mary is included) to figure things out and get Beth back before anything happens to her, but I did like the process.

This episode is mostly another Kate-vs-Alice storyline, but with the additional wrinkle that none of the villains realize that there's a new player that looks like Alice is running around. With Alice being captured after the events of the next episode, Mouse goes around kidnapping the children of the mayor as a threat for the Crows to release Alice. For the most part, this is a device to get Alice talking with Sophie and for her to deliver yet another flashback story of how fucked-up Alice's childhood was when she was being raised by August Cartwright, who keeps adding to the "fuck this guy" list by killing the little kitty that little Alice and little Mouse adopted. It's another event that ends up turning Beth from a traumatized girl who finds solace in Alice in Wonderland escapism into, well, the crazy psycho that is Alice.

While all of this is going on, of course, Team Kate ends up befriending Beth and it's so surreal seeing Rachel Skarsten as a completely sane and likable person. There's an interesting layer of guilt-trip going on here when Beth reveals that the car crash did happen in her alternate Earth, but in Beth's Earth, Kate saved her from falling over with the car and their mother, which, of course, adds yet another layer of guilt-hero-complex for poor Kate. And cutting back and forth between the cheery reunion between Kate and Beth to the creepy backstory segment given by Alice really hammers home just how, well, basically for want of a nail, the two Beth Kanes ended up as such differing people.

Mouse also manages to kidnap Kate before she has a chance to suit up, and there's a running bit where the mayor and the GCPD chief apparently refuses to open up the bat-signal because summoning a gay superhero is "too political", despite there being lives on the line, which is kind of ridiculous but also the exact kind of thing that I would believe is the stupid decisions that American politicians would take. Beth ends up getting Luke and Mary to help disguise her as Alice, but apparently just looking the part and spouting random Lewis Carroll quotes isn't enough to fool Mouse, because Mouse and Alice has a bit of a code-word thing going on. Of course, Kate ends up saving both the hostages and Beth, although there was certainly a moment there where I thought that the show's going to kill off Beth almost immediately with her being trapped in a car, which would be exceedingly cruel. I don't think that both Beth and Alice will be hanging around the show together for far too long, though killing her off after half an episode of bonding is pretty dang cruel.

Alice, of course, manages to escape on her own by asking Sophie to bring her the Alice in Wonderland book, and she uses the fishing string that Mouse gave her to repair the book as a weapon to escape. Of course, as all the main characters basically return back to their respective families, both Beth and Alice double over from a splitting headache, which might seem that we're going to have some doppelganger angst in subsequent episodes. It's certainly not the direction that I thought Batwoman would take, or that the show would have such a huge tie-in to the concepts introduced in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but eh.

Ultimately, though, it's an interesting twist to the Kate/Alice storyline, and I do really like that we're still milking that story and not focusing headlong on the far less interesting "let's exonerate Jacob Kane from the false charges" bit, which continues to plod on as the B-plot in both these episodes. It's still kind of rough going, but episode 11 was pretty dang solid.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The "Scarecrow Incident" is mentioned a couple of times, particularly in episode 10. While Scarecrow is certainly a classic Batman enemy and one that's been referenced in Batwoman during the Elseworlds crossover, the specific incident involving a train station seems to specifically reference Batman Begins.
• An article made by Kara Danvers, a.k.a. Supergirl, shows up as a brief cameo in episode 10, writing the story of how Batwoman came out as lesbian. They're all one big happy Earth-sharing family in Earth-Prime!
• Also, Oliver Queen's death is mentioned on Vesper Fairchild's radio channel. 
• Officer Samuel "Slam" Bradley is actually a character from the comics, a character that first appeared in Detective Comics #1 before Detective Comics ended up being taken over by its breakout star Batman two years later. Like what his comic title implies, Slam Bradley is a gung-ho detective that's able to beat up people as well as being a competent detective. Slam Bradley's stories would be relegated as a backup strip when Batman's popularity took over the title, and he would be formally inducted into the DC superhero continuity in the '80's as a minor guest star in Superman titles, and would make sporadic appearances in Batman and Catwoman titles. 
• Slam is compared to both Captain America and Chris Evans multiple times in the episode, indicating that apparently the MCU movies exists in the Arrowverse. 
• The Terrier is original to Batwoman.