Batwoman: Midseason Premiere Review

Warning: this review contains full spoilers for Batwoman: Season 1, Episode 10. If you need a refresher on where we left off before Crisis on Infinite Earths, here's our review for Season 1, Episode 8. We'll be checking in with all the Arrowverse shows this week to see how they're moving forward from the events of Crisis, so check back for reviews of Supergirl, Black Lightning, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow this week. [poilib element="accentDivider"] For all its struggles early on, Batwoman ended in a pretty good place in its midseason finale in December. The events of "A Mad Tea Party" ushered in a new wave of darkness in Gotham City, leading to the murder of Catherine Hamilton, the framing of Jacob Kane, and a major falling-out between Kate and her stepsister Mary. Couple that with the critical character arc Kate underwent during Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Batwoman has all the momentum it needs coming into 2020. Whether the series is going to take advantage of that momentum is another matter. The events of Crisis altered the fabric of the Arrowverse in ways we're only going to understand over time, but this episode suggests Batwoman's status quo hasn't been significantly altered. In fact, other than Vesper Fairchild's reference to Oliver Queen's death, the first half of the episode is basically a straightforward continuation of Episode 8, with few references to all the cosmic shenanigans that just went down. Batwoman has been pretty isolated from the rest of the Arrowverse to date, and it would be nice to see that start to change. At least the ending suggests the aftereffects of Crisis will start coming into play going forward (more on that later). [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=batwoman-how-queer-everything-is-today-photos&captions=true"] For the most part, "How Queer Everything Is Today!" sets about picking up the pieces of the damage caused by Alice last year. Jacob is wallowing in jail with the same criminals he put away. Sophie is trying to lead the Crows while the GCPD presses its advantage. And Kate is trying to simultaneously patch up her relationship with Mary and finally bring Alice to justice. But despite picking up right where things left off in December, Episode 10 struggles to start of the second half of Season 1 with the right sense of urgency. The doom and gloom of Episode 8 has mostly faded. This is most evident with Kate herself. The rage and sense of betrayal she feels is downplayed in favor of scenes of her enjoying her new gadgets or fretting about how she's being depicted in the Gotham tabloid scene. Even when Kate actually confronts her sister, we never get a true sense of the hatred that's been festering for weeks. Instead, Episode 10 plays like business as usual in the majority of its scenes. There is the "Jacob in jail" subplot to spice things up. Unfortunately, as much as the murder of Catherine has managed to shake up the Kane family dynamic, this episode is also an uncomfortable reminder that we've seen this plot twist play out in more than one Arrowverse series already. On The Flash, both Barry Allen and his father dealt with being wrongfully imprisoned. Half of Arrow's seventh season explored Ollie's time locked behind bars. Batwoman needs to find some way of distinguishing Jacob's ordeal from those stories. The series has already struggled enough in terms of trying to establish its own identity. The main Terrier storyline this week is generally pretty uneven. The idea of Terrier as a villain turns out to be more compelling than the reality. There's always potential in a hacker mastermind with the key to unlocking everyone's most deeply held secrets. Revealing that villain as nothing more than a socially ostracized high schooler quickly undercuts that story and removes most of the tension. Instead, Terrier's brief rise and fall becomes little more than another excuse for Alice to ham it up. The series has hinted Alice is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the current threat to Gotham, but it would be nice to see more progress on that front. Still, as clunky as this episode is in terms of trying to use Terrier/Parker Torres as a mirror for Kate's own fears and insecurities, ultimately the character does serve a valuable purpose. One of Kate's more noteworthy qualities is the fact that she, unlike Oliver Queen, doesn't really want to become "someone else" when she wears a mask. Her whole life is built around her integrity and refusal to pretend to be someone she's not. For Kate, having a secret identity goes against the grain of who she is. That's one thing this episode gets right as it explores Kate's need to redirect the narrative and be open about who she is. In most superhero shows, a hero giving a one-on-one interview to come out of the closet would seem silly and out of place. But here, it makes sense. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/18/crisis-on-infinite-earths-crossover-review"] As for that ending, the show may have finally found a way of making the sister dynamic more interesting and unpredictable through the addition of Beth 2.0. The obvious assumption is that this Beth is from one of the alternate Earths that existed pre-Crisis. My working theory (at least until one of these shows establishes otherwise), is that all parallel universe doppelgangers were squeezed into one composite person when the Earths merged, and this Beth is an example where that process didn't happen. There are other, slightly less outlandish possibilities as well. This could be an impostor trying to mess with Kate's head. It could be that Alice has found a way to slip in and out of Crow custody and taken on her old identity. But the Crisis theory seems the most dramatically rich option. What does Kate do when she's finally reunited with the person she's been searching for her entire adult life? Can she separate this Beth from the damage done by the other Beth? How does Alice react to seeing a better, happier version of herself? Maybe this series can still use the fallout of Crisis to its advantage.