Batwoman S01E14-15 Review: The Joker's Daughter

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 14: Grinning from Ear to Ear; Episode 15: Off With Her Head

Episode 14: Grinning from Ear to Ear

After the Nocturna bit last episode, episode 14 also stars a villain-of-the-week, in the form of Duela Dent, known better to comic book fans as "Joker's Daughter" or "Harlequin"... except it's kind of an adaptation in name only? I know and respect that Batwoman is going to mainly use villains that fought Batwoman exclusively, or lesser-known Bat-family antagonists like Nocturna or Executioner, but at the same time I really thought that when Duela Dent showed up here, we're going to at least have a brief nod to the bigger Bat-family universe, y'know? And while I do appreciate shining the light on lesser villains, after the rather hectic pace of the post-Crisis episodes, having two in a row focusing on minor villains while the Alice/Kate storyline is put on hold ends up, I think, being a bit less than positive for the season as a whole.

That said, though, for a Gotham City flavoured villain of the week episode, it's a pretty solid one. Duela Dent is introduced as a girl who self-mutilates and is angry that her family would force her to accept 'normalcy' via plastic surgery. It's kind of an all right basis for a character, I suppose, but Duela never really exhibits much of a personality beyond her rantings that she wants to be 'normal' and her normal isn't the same as other people's normal. It's honestly kind of disappointing, even if they're not going the Two-Face's-daughter route, I really wished that there was just a bit more to connect her to the greater world around her. Instead, she's just some maniac psychopath that's hunting down social media influencers because we have to be topical. The actual hunt for Duela in the episode is... it's all right? It's no more or less interesting than Nocturna last episode, and it's just kind of there.

I guess the whole thing with Duela is to tie and clue Kate and Alice in to the existence of Gotham City's most amoral plastic surgeon, a.k.a. the alter-ego of August Cartwright, which is all fine and dandy. Also, Alice ends up convincing Duela to cut off her entire face and give it to her for some face-mask-swapping action which I really do feel is just kind of an eye-roll to me. Meanwhile, because August is a father-of-the-year, he's stuck Mouse strapped to a chair with fear gas shoved into his face. Okay, then.

I'm not sure why I'm a bit more down with this episode because I didn't have any problems with the Nocturna one. I guess part of it is my disappointment at how far Duela Dent is as far as adapting a character goes? Or maybe it's the B-plot of Sophie and Batwoman having some flirt-flirt-no-wait-don't-flirt moment which is just frustrating and going nowhere. I get that some people tune in for the relationship drama, but this one was kind of clunky all season long.
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Episode 15: Off With Her Head
"Off With Her Head" goes straight back into the Kate/Alice bit after two episodes of distraction and villains of the week, and it's a huge part of Batwoman's first season of basically exploring the relationship between the two sisters, and it takes a pretty fun approach of taking a villain with a sympathetic backstory (and also happens to be family to our main character) and basically going back and forth on whether she's redeemable. Alice jumps back and forth between giving us a sob story about her frankly pretty terrifying abduction and then goes off to do some hideous crime, and then does a surprisingly decent thing when she saves Mary one point or something. Most of Kate's drama, on the other hand, revolves more about whether she should be a good superhero or a good sister, and the whole alternate-universe Beth thing is yet another layer of complexity. The way that this has been explored is... interesting, and while not always consistent, Alice is far, far more interesting as an antagonist than someone like, oh, Thinker or Ricardo Diaz.

That said, though, what Alice goes through in this episode's flashback sequence (and after Arrow, it's so dang interesting to have the flashbacks be fully centered around the main antagonist's origin instead of the protagonist's). One of my complaints about "An Un-Birthday Present" is how unneccessary the flashback sequence there is. I mean, it sure adds to our loathing of August that he kills kittens, and makes us understand the adopted-sibling bond between Mouse and Alice, but those aren't things that are exclusive to the flashback, and we did already get those from other previous flashbacks.

Here, though, Alice's flashbacks play back and forth with present-day Alice getting dosed by fear gas by an insane Mouse, and we learn the important part where young Beth isn't just a desperate, kidnapped little girl but rather someone that, to quote Oliver Queen, "had to be someone else, had to be... something else". In other words, this episode's flashbacks is where little Beth Kane drops most of the decent things about her and embraces the villainous mantle of what she would be -- Alice. That said, the evil old grandma, the 'Queen of Hearts', is... she's just kind of there. She's abusive, she pours hot tea on little Beth's hands and she clearly wants to take the pretty ruby necklace that Beth has, but I don't quite think that she's that much worse than August? Of course, in Beth's desperation to look for creamer or whatever, she finds out that August had kept the severed head of her mom in a fridge, and from the dialogue in the episode it's hinted pretty heavily that August's mom wants Gabi Kane's face for her own.

This causes young Beth to snap, and while oxygen tanks certainly do not work that way, it's a gloriously over-the-top moment when young Beth (or young Alice, I should say?) rips off the oxygen tank and proceed to turn it into a flamethrower to murder the Queen of Hearts.

In the present day, though, Batwoman has came across August Cartwright, bound next to the Bat-signal after Alice confronted him last episode. And while Alice spends the episode looking for Mouse (and getting dosed with fear gas because Mouse was over-reacting), Batwoman, in the guise of Kate, brings in her father Jacob to deal with August. Jacob heads off to save Alice from the fear gas and ends up in a genuinely heartwarming reunion (it's just kind of a shame that unlike the other 'dad' figures in CW shows, I don't quite care as much about Jacob Kane as I do, say, Joe West, Peter Gambi or J'onn J'onzz). But as Kate learns about aspects of Alice/Beth's backstory, particularly the mom-head bit, Kate, too, snaps, attacking the bound August Cartwright and choking him, causing a wound that was inflicted upon August earlier in the episode to burst open and killing the fucker. And that after Kate spends a good chunk of the episode convincing Jacob to not kill August, too!

And this sure is an explosive end to the episode, where our hero, Batwoman, straight-up kills a dude! Sure, August Cartwright is... he's utter scum, and even worse than that, he doesn't even think what he did is wrong, trying to deflect blame to his mother for turning Beth into the evil Alice (Kate and Jacob are quick to tell him that it's August's fault for kidnapping Beth that she was exposed to the Queen of Hearts at all), blaming Alice for corrupting Mouse (which, by the way, he left with a lethal dose of fear gas throughout this episode) and generally having such a smarmy holier-than-thou attitude that makes all of his evil deeds seem worse in comparison. The show does a great job at making August Cartwright be numero uno for a person that deserves death. But if you know anything about Batman (and none of that BvS crap) is that a huge part of the Bat-family's code is that they never kill. And it's definitely going to be interesting to see how Kate Kane is going to deal with this.

The episode was rocky, and perhaps I was a bit more impressed with the flashback than I am the present-day storyline, but the sudden twist at the end was pretty great, and I do wish that it'll be handled with a bit more of a slower pace to let us drink in what happened compared to the alter-universe Beth Kane. Good stuff.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Duela Dent, often operating under the moniker of "The Joker's Daughter", is an enigmatic villain who fought the first Robin multiple times, and across her first story she claimed to be the daughter of various Batman villains like the Catwoman, Scarecrow, Penguin and Riddler, before it's revealed that Duela Dent is, in fact, the daughter of Two-Face. Duela would later join some incarnations of the Teen Titans, using the pseudonym "Harlequin" and keeping the clown-themed gimmick. Duela Dent's subsequent appearances in the comics, however, is extremely inconsistent particularly in regards to her age and her allegiance. During the events of Countdown to Final Crisis, Duela Dent is killed by the Monitor, and it's revealed that the inconsistencies regarding Duela Dent's portrayal is because she's originally a version of Joker from another Earth who ended up being retained during the creation of Earth-Prime.
• Duela Dent's face being cut off at the end of the episode seems to be a reference to the darker'n'grittier New 52 reboot version of her, who's a psychotic woman who found Joker's sliced-off face and ends up getting an obsession to truly become the Joker's daughter. 
• Duela Dent's uncle is mentioned to be a "beloved A.D.A.", a very likely reference to Harvey Dent, a.k.a. Two-Face, who was a D.A. prior to becoming Two-Face. 
• The whole scars-that-resemble-a-smile bit, of course, is a reference to the Joker, particularly the Dark Knight version of the character that has a smile permanently etched to his face thanks to scars.
• Scarecrow's fear toxin makes a reappearance once more in episode 14. Scarecrow's fear toxin first made an appearance in Batwoman during the Elseworlds crossover. Scarecrow's alter-ego, Jonathan Crane, is also mentioned in episode 15 as a former colleague of August Cartwright.