Batwoman S01E19-20 Review: Sibling Rivalry

Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 19: A Secret Kept From All The Rest; Episode 20: O, Mouse

Episode 19: A Secret Kept From All The Rest
So as we barrel into the final two episodes of the first season of Batwoman, the combination of the abrupt ending and the knowledge that leading actress Ruby Rose would leave the show come next season does make me really think that Batwoman would probably be better served, in hindsight, to end its first season right at the very natural spot of Kate having put Alice in jail, with the cliffhanger being the fact that she now has to wrestle with the guilt of killing Cartwright and also 'betraying' her sister to land her in Arkham Asylum. Oh well, hindsight, I guess.

Anyway, this episode is still a very solid one with the pieces that have been established all over the board. With Magpie having stolen Lucius Fox's encrypted journal with all the WayneTech and Bat-Tech secrets, the unholy trinity of Alice, Mouse and Hush are completely puzzled as to how to figure it out. Hush really doesn't have any stakes in the whole thing, but Alice is holding his face hostage and he is forced to run around with the very cool-looking bandage-head-mask, abducting cryptographers who are, obviously, unable to crack the code when Alice and Mouse basically demands immediate results while they are strapped to an electric chair. There's definitely a sense of Batman-villain-esque dark comedy here, which I do appreciate.

The episode itself is pretty straightforward, where Batwoman and her team are investigating a string of serial killings, while Team Alice is trying their best to decode the journal. It's mostly relatively general superhero stuff until the climax, although the episode does manage to build up a bunch of B-plots running around in the background. On the side of the bad guys, in addition to Hush being inserted into the Alice/Mouse dynamic (he's exasperated with the fact that they're killing off everyone very quickly while also not happy that they're holding his face hostage), we get a not-insignificant amount of scenes from Mouse that show that he's not quite as happy with Alice's obsession with exacting revenge on Batwoman when they have essentially carved a peaceful life where they can rule in Arkham Asylum without interference.

On the good guys' side, after Batwoman rescues Parker Torres (another welcome reuse of this season's guest stars), we get a couple of scenes where poor Mary is basically not very pleased that there's a different smart girl that Kate has apparently confided her identity in, and she's basically being allowed into the Batcave without much preamble. This one is more comedic (Mary and Parker have pretty great chemistry in their interactions) and doesn't lead into anything huge in the next episode, but it's still interesting to note that despite Mary's inclusion into the Bat-Team last episode, she's still feeling just a mite on the fringes. There's also the Sophie/Kate/Julia love triangle thing, which I really don't really care about, but I do appreciate Mary and Parker's peanuts' gallery commentary so much more than anything that the actual love triangle brings to the show.

More significant is the break-up between Kate and Luke, with Luke being (very rightfully) angry that the journal that his father died to protect got stolen because Kate was careless while sleeping with a random bartender. We get a brief Reagan confrontation, but of course, the Kate/Luke friction is the larger focus of the episode. There are a lot of parts in the episode where Kate could've called Luke and didn't... which ends up proving to be their downfall when Hush kidnaps both Luke and Julia and holds them hostage. Luke being Luke, he of course ends up finding a way to decrypt the journal, but finding out that it's a way to break through the bat-suit, elects to die to protect Kate's secrets. The good guys being the good guys, when Batwoman shows up, she elects to give Alice the magic glasses that will translate Lucius Fox's journal as opposed to letting Luke and Julia die.

And I think the two confrontations between the good guy and bad guy teams are meant to parallel each other. Luke and Kate have a legitimate beef, so do Alice and Mouse, but where Kate and Luke are prepared to lay their lives down for the other if needed be, Alice is significantly more selfish -- constantly pushing Mouse's needs aside and eventually tossing Mouse's doctor flesh-mask into the burning Arkham Asylum in their escape, quite literally burning the save haven that Mouse has so desperately wished they have. The core of the Kate/Luke dynamic is that "there's no Batwoman without Luke Fox", and while the same might be true for the Alice/Mouse dynamic, it's clear that one Kane sibling respects her partner more than the other.

That's not the only things that take place in this episode, though, and I do appreciate Batwoman episodes for being pretty chock-full of content. There's the constant foreshadowing of Safiyah Sohail, next season's villain, and apparently she's the person that Julia was working for in the previous episode, albeit it's a way to get her off of Kate's trail, not aware of what the journal contains. I feel like this little storyline of Julia's maybe-treachery is very much muted, because there really wasn't a point in the season where I believed that she was actually a traitor. Meanwhile, Jacob Kane declares war on Batwoman, basically blaming her on the huge breakout in Arkham Asylum. That's a thing that happens, I guess, and that's part of the Batman or Bat-family formula where sometimes the police just really dislike these vigilante-types. It's not a terrible plotline per se, it just kind of feels somewhat tacked-on. Oh, and the contents of Luke's journal involves something about Kryptonite, which next episode will sort of tackle.

Ultimately, though, a very solid episode. It doesn't really do anything super-spectacular, and the moral of the episode is something that's pretty much expected for any of these superhero ensemble shows, but I do appreciate the pacing of the show in that it's able to move the main plot points along while not making the episode feel throwaway. (Also, Alice being a total dick to Hush when he fails, particularly the mop bit, is the highlight of the episode).

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Episode 20: O, Mouse!
I'm not sure how many more episodes Batwoman had intended to have after this episode, but... well, 'O, Mouse' really doesn't serve as a particularly satisfying one. Sure, it ended at a huge impactful moment, at least on the bad guys' side, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I really did feel like the show has had a far better ending with the episode where Alice got shoved in a jail cell. I dunno. That's not to say that we didn't get any good episodes afterwards, because there are certainly a lot of highlights in the post-hiatus episodes, but... I dunno, this is just such an off point to finish a season.

One of the biggest weaknesses of 'O, Mouse' as a season finale (as opposed to the previous episode, for example) is that the A-plot is so... underwhelming. The acting is pretty good all around, but Batwoman hunting around for a random Arkham escapee, Tim "Titan" Teslow, some dude who can't feel pain, is just so bland. There's an attempt at making the villain be somewhat relevant by dragging in a sub-plot about the abusive nature of competitive sports, but ultimately Teslow is such a one-note villain. It's basically a way to get Batwoman and Mary to try and attempt to get Jacob Kane to work alongside them, but turns out that, hey, Jacob Kane's an asshole and ended up using the whole exercise as an excuse to ambush and attack Batwoman.

What I do praise, though, is the acting involved here. There's a very great moment of Mary, nearly in tears but standing up to her father, talking about how if even the Crows' leader's own daughter doesn't believe in the Crows, how could the rest of Gotham? Because as much as Jacob Kane wants to think that he's the law, the rest of Gotham City (and all the audience members) don't really think the Crows are worth jack shit. And with the fact that the past couple of episodes have established that anyone that's not Jacob and Sophie are essentially corrupt in one way or another, Jacob's just being an idiot about it all. Kate also gets a really great moment at the end of the episode where she actually thinks that this attempt at working with Jacob would work, and it's not hard to see this as an allegory for coming out to your family about your 'secret life'. Between the cold-blooded murder of Teslow and their betrayal of Batwoman, though, the Crows have basically set themselves up to be as huge a villain as Alice or Safiyah will be next season.

Meanwhile, while it mostly takes place in the background, Luke finding a way to crush Bruce's shard of Kryptonite into powder is kind of interesting? It does lead to a neat moment where Batwoman reveals that she, too, has her own shard of Kryptonite given to her from Supergirl during the crisis (apparently that blank photo frame was supposed to contain a picture of Batwoman and Supergirl together that the cast and crew are unable to get ready due to the rushed shooting of this episode) and that's the one shard of Kryptonite that she's not willing to destroy. That's neat.

And then, of course, there's the bad guy squad storyline. Hush is mostly off-screen in this episode, with most of the focus centering on Alice and Mouse, with Mouse hammering home his refusal to help Alice on her obsession with vengeance on Kate and just want to escape (with Safiyah's ever-looming presence being a factor that scares poor Mouse). And this eventually leads to the rather shocking scene where Alice and Mouse do this ritual to burn themselves of their attachments to the past... before Alice reveals that she has poisoned Mouse, someone who's essentially her brother and the one who had been her rock while the fought through the trauma of being held captive by a lunatic. It's perhaps testament to Alice's utterly insane logic, that if she can't have Mouse than no one else can... but at the same time there's also a huge moment of sorrow and regret to the whole scene. It's sudden and definitely in-character for both of them, but at the same time the moment also feels just kind of subdued. I do appreciate that this has been building up in the background of all the Arkham episodes, though, so there's definitely a fair amount of buildup to this.

In addition to the Kryptonite stuff and the vague foreshadowings of Safiyah, Alice now has made good on her promise to Hush, giving him the face of Bruce Wayne, which is definitely fun! It's kind of obvious for anyone who knows anything about Hush and sees that he's about to undergo some plastic surgery face-swap, but still. Ultimately, though, while this episode does promise a bunch of new shake-ups in the status quo, I feel like it's sort of just kind of there. It's a good standalone episode, and I can't be too hard since it's not the original intent of the show writers and circumstances dictate otherwise, but ultimately I kind of feel like this is kind of a lukewarm spot to leave what has otherwise been a pretty fantastic superhero season. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• I'm not sure if it's just a funky Easter Egg or if it's going to be relevant in the future of the show, but if you pause the episode on the translated page of Lucius's journal, you can read about the Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul, about Talia al Ghul, the Suit of Sorrows and the Order of St. Dumas.
• This whole line is taken from the Wikipedia page for 'Batsuit', so I'm not sure if the whole talk about Suit of Sorrows and Ra's al Ghul's resurrection is canon in Batwoman, particularly since Ra's and Talia have already shown up in other CW-verse shows. 
• Hush's outfit is basically taken verbatim from his first appearance in Batman: Hush. 
• Kryptonite! It's, of course, the only material that can harm Kryptonians, and in the comics, Batman is famous for having a Kryptonite ring as a countermeasure in case Superman ever went bad. In the CW universe, Supergirl gave Batwoman a shard of Krypyonite during the Crisis of Infinite Earths crossover.
• Hush having the face of Bruce Wayne thanks to plastic surgery happened during the "Heart of Hush" storyline, when Bruce Wayne was dead after the events of Batman: R.I.P., and has been more or less the defining characteristic of Hush in a lot of subsequent portrayals.  
• Commissioner Loeb and his very icy relationship with Batman is name-dropped by Vesper Fairchild. Loeb, of course, was the corrupt police chief in Gotham before Batman outed him and allowed Jim Gordon to rise in his place. 
• Safiyah Sohail is the primary villain of Batwoman: Rebirth, a former lover of Kate Kane who runs the pirate nation of Coryana.