Batwoman S01E17-18 Review: Sins of the Past

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 17: A Narrow Escape; Episode 18: If You Believe in Me, I Believe in You

Episode 17: A Narrow Escape
It's going to be interesting to talk about Batwoman. Like the other CW shows, its season ended mid-way due to the Coronavirus outbreak, and after a brief hiatus, the remaining episodes that were filmed were aired, with any lingering plot threads saved until filming is safe to resume. Unlike Flash or Supergirl, however... the second season of Batwoman will have major shake-ups due to news that the show has lost her lead, Ruby Rose... and that's going to be interesting moving forward on whether the character Kate Kane would simply be recasted, if we'd have a MCU-James-Rhodes-style "actor's changed, deal with it" mentality, or if they would do something else and work it into the story. After all, Batwoman is a show that coincidentally features a villain whose penchant is in making hyper-realistic faces for disguises. It'd be interesting, anyway.

Still, none of these episodes were filmed with that knowledge in mind, and "A Narrow Escape" feels like a bit of a filler episode. Honestly, with hindsight, they probably should've ended the season on episode 16, which was basically a perfect stopping point for the season, with a huge climactic send-off for Alice and Mouse, while also still promising more from them. These four episodes are definitely going to be kind of interesting to look at, because, unlike Supergirl or The Flash, this show actually had a great, natural stopping point. Oh well.

The episode itself was pretty serviceable, with most of it dealing with Kate basically trying to avoid dealing -- and later forced to deal with the fact that she is Batwoman, yet she's taken a life. She even spends the first half of this episode MIA and hiding out in a drunken mess for a couple of days... except in superhero life, there's no break days. A new villain called the Detonator is terrorizing Gotham City, using a modus operandi lifted straight out of Heath Ledger's Joker, strapping supposedly 'good' people like policemen and doctors onto a bomb, and the only way to defuse the bomb is to cause an explosion that will claim the lives of several others. Of course right as Kate is angsting about the morality of killing -- even a single life -- in comes a villain that plays a sadistic game that involves choosing to kill.

Surprisingly, though, while Kate does have a couple of great moments in this episode, particularly when she decides to take up the mantle and fight again (her going woozy at the sight of the bat insignia is a bit too much though), she's almost a secondary character in this episode. Yeah, she gets a badass moment tracking down the Detonator. Yeah, the moment when she finally sucks it up after Mary gives her a good motivational speech and tells her that she knows about Kate = Batwoman all along was amazing and kind of cathartic... but this episode really is a huge, huge deal for Luke Fox, a character who hasn't really been prominent beyond being the tech-sidekick. The murder of Luke's father is a huge conspiracy and mystery that the pre-hiatus episodes set up for us, and I am just genuinely surprised that it's actually tied up in this episode, making this whole episode far, far more eventful.

Sure, the first half of the episode set this up as basically a typical superhero episode. And while that might sound dismissive, it's not meant to be -- it's a good watch, it just follows a lot of the expected beats. Crazy villain leaves a super-specific clue on his bullets, there's a bit of a red herring when Batwoman goes after the first Detonator's son, not realizing that this one is just someone mimicking an old Gotham lunatic, and the whole aforementioned Kate performance anxiety drama.

But once Luke Fox discovers that the Detonator is actually corrupt Crows agent Miguel Robles, and also the true killer of Lucius Fox. And after the pretty traumatic experience that Luke got after meeting the fall guy that got murdered, you can forgive Luke for throwing all caution to the wind and going off to put a bullet in the Detonator's head himself, morality be damned. This leads to a very, very great moment as Luke walks in just as Detonator callously mocks 'who's asking? His kid?' to Batwoman's questioning of his complicity in killing Lucius Fox. And the argument between Luke and Kate is great, genuinely being pretty well done and leading to a very natural part of the conversation when Kate just blurts out that, no, she, too, has killed someone who did a lot of harm to her family, and she feels absolutely terrible because of it. It's a great bonding moment for them, and hey, the Detonator's eventually brought to justice.

As usual, there are a bunch of B-plots. There's a brief bit with a Batwoman copycat who I don't think is a character we recognize, and the various sources tell me that she's literally just a rando who's trying to basically strike fear with the real Batwoman's absence. There's, of course, the great Mary moment when she tells Kate that she knows all along and damn it woman get your shit together.... which I thought would be a lot more dramatic and involve "secrets are bad zomg!!" CW-angst that would take up at least like three episodes, and I do appreciate that it's cut short. Also, I completely forgot until re-reading the synopsis that Jacob Kane was held hostage and there was this whole sub-plot with Julia and Sophie rescuing him or something.

And, of course, there's always Alice and Mouse in Arkham Asylum. After a brief electroshock session and a re-introduction to Tommy Elliot -- who's obsessed with the delusion that Bruce Wayne is his best buddy forever... was he this insane the first time we met him? A psychopath, sure, but insane? Oh, and via Detonator, we learn that Elliot was the one who hired the Detonator to kill Lucius Fox. Anyway, Alice and Mouse basically decide to use Arkham as their fortress for a while, and kills a doctor for Mouse to take over the identity of. Okay, sure.

Incidentally, and I know it's probably a personal gripe, but I am not the biggest fan, or a fan at all, at the implication that Batman went into retirement because he broke his code and killed the Joker. I do appreciate that the script and the words Luke says are ambiguous enough so that they could go back on it if they want to, but I've never been a fan of adaptations that make Batman a killer. At least this Batman was apparently so broken by the decision that he buggered off for five years in angsty exile. I dunno.

Ultimately, it's not the perfect episode, but one that feels pretty eventful and had all the large thematic ties (Alice B-plot notwithstanding) end up tying to each other and to the larger Detonator/Tommy Elliot connection and some sort of conspiracy revolving around it. Not a perfect episode for sure, but one that I really do like a lot.
____________________________

Episode 18: If You Believe in Me, I'll Believe in You

Meanwhile, this one is the big Mary episode, and I do find it interesting that despite all the build-up in previous episodes hinting more towards a huge conflict where Mary finally finds evidence that Kate is Batwoman and is hiding it from her all along, and gets super-angry towards her stepsister. Maybe it's me still having the huge Supergirl/Lena fallout in mind. But hey, having Mary's big moment be Mary actually joining the Bat squad is a far more entertaining hour of television!

The concept of the episode is one that these ensemble-cast superhero shows like a lot. One of the civilian friends wants to help out and is super-enthusiastic about it, but the hero is reluctant of putting someone close to them in the line of fire. It's pretty simple stuff, really, and of course while investigating the plotline of the week -- reclaiming Lucius Fox's journal from the hands of one of Elliot's goons, Johnny Sabatino -- Batwoman fails and gets captured, and it's up to Mary and her unique skill-set to infiltrate Sabatino's club and figure out where Batwoman is and rescue her. There's of course a fair amount of logic hoops (even in-universe) that the episode does to make this work, like why the criminals don't unmask or kill Batwoman prior to auctioning her, but it's a typical superhero fiction logic hoop so I won't be nitpicking too much. The ultimate end result is a pretty fun episode, which is nice. I really don't have much to say here, I do enjoy Mary's character so seeing her do a bit more is definitely appreciated. It doesn't go quite into the zaniness that other CW shows can be, but it's a neatly different tone from the more dour cast -- Mary does play up the socialite part of her character, but how she manages to get in the club and into the mafia meeting makes sense -- befriending Sabatino's cousin because she helped her out in her illegal clinic, and claiming to want to buy Batwoman's suit as what's essentially corporate espionage is good cover.

The rest of the episode, meanwhile, builds up on the characters introduced earlier in the season and sort of crafts this neat network of nice callbacks. After learning about Lucius Fox's notebook, Alice and Mouse end up pressing Tommy Elliot for it, and threatens to use Mouse's newfound doctor persona to declare him to be 'sane to stand on trial'. It's what leads Elliot to contact his buddy Sabatino, who's holding the journal for him. Sabatino, being a gangster, decides to betray Elliot, so Alice lets Magpie out to steal the journal for her. We also get Tommy's demands for his help, which is a 'new face' like what Mouse has, leading to him being wrapped in bandages while some schmuck is given Tommy's face and hung to fake his death. Alice is holding Tommy's new face hostage, which means we'll be seeing Tommy running around in Hush regalia for at least a couple more episodes. Tommy is absolutely fun in this episode, by the way, hamming it up with some glorious lines .

Magpie mostly serves as the third act fight against Batwoman, because once Mary activates the go-go-gadget exploding money suitcase and springs her sister, the takedown of the mafioso is instantaneous. (Also, Julia totally snaps some poor lady gangster's neck) But then Magpie's presence ends up tying in to yet another returning character -- Reagan the bartender showing up was initially something that I thought was just going to be a neat little reuse of a minor character that I wasn't really sure what the show is doing with, but the twist that Reagan is actually Magpie's sister and essentially slept with Kate to steal Lucius Fox's journal is pretty good. So does Magpie know that Kate is Batwoman, then? Or did Alice cook up a story of how Batwoman's working for Kate? Regardless, I do agree with Luke -- that was a dumb move on Kate's part.

I do think that the Alice/Mouse/Hush storyline does classify as one of the main plots of this episode, but there are still a bunch of B-plots running around. There's Sophie and Julia flirting with each other a lot, particularly with Julia being recruited into the Crows or something. I mean... sure? Sophie is still kind of one of the less interesting characters in the show and mostly just being the token-cooperative-cop in the way that Jim Gordon is. Maaaaaybe the love-triangle will be interesting and not be annoying? Knowing CW's track record, I don't have high hopes, but okay, sure. Far more interesting is the implication that Julia seems to be working for someone else to get the journal. Whether this is someone nefarious and Julia's secretly a villain, or if she's like, working for Bruce or Alfred or someone that's good, we'll see.

Ultimately not an episode that was as tense as "A Narrow Escape" and one that serves more as a set-up episode, but the Mary segments of the episode was real fun, and everything else -- Hush, the notebook, Magpie, Reagan, Julia -- really do make for a great example of good serialized superhero shows. We'll see if this show can keep it up next season!

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Detonator is a minor Batman villain that was part of the Seven Men of Death, a faction of killers within the League of Assassins summoned by Talia al Ghul and fought Batman, Robin and Azrael to reclaim an item called the Suit of Sorrows. The Detonator is the explosives expert of the group. 
• Johnny Sabatino in the comics is a criminal working for Arnold Wesker, the Ventriloquist. Sabatino is also the husband of Peyton Riley, although the two had a loveless marriage due to it being an arranged marriage to bring peace between two crime families. Sabatino was an abusive man, and attempted to murder his own wife at one point, riddling her with bullets but failing to kill her. Seeing her survival as a sign, and hearing voices from the Ventriloquist's puppet Scarface (Arnold Wesker had recently been murdered), Peyton ended up adopting (or being adopted by) Scarface and became the second Ventriloquist. 
• As mentioned above, the plotline of forcing people to choose between two different bombs is famously the plot of the Joker in The Dark Knight, where he attempted to prove that all people are as twisted and fucked-up as he is. 
• Apparently Batman killed the Joker in this continuity, or at least Luke thinks so, which is why he broke down and retired. A vaguely similar concept is popularized by The Dark Knight Returns, although in that series Batman came out of retirement and subsequently killed the Joker. A similar scene also happened in the concurrently running Titans series, albeit it's in a 'worst timeline' nightmare. 
• The idea of a cowl (or, well, a wig) lined with electricity is actually something that Batman himself employs in multiple occasions in the comics, including perhaps most famously in The Dark Knight. 
• In the comics, Batwoman's cape is actually easily detached to prevent this exact scenario from happening, as seen in Batwoman: Elegy. 
• Hush's obsession with faces, and with Bruce Wayne in general, is taken from his reinvention in the New 52 continuity. 
• Tommy Elliot also faked his death in his original debut to prevent suspicion from coming on to him and allowing him to operate as his alter-ego. His bandage-wrapped face, of course, is taken from his supervillain alter-ego, Hush.