'Batwoman' Is Back And Its New Batwoman Is Better

Batwoman has returned for season 2 on The CW, and so begins what is easily the strangest experiment of this new winter season of television. Last year, actress Ruby Rose left the series after just one season, reportedly because of long filming requirements, mostly at night.

That left Batwoman in a rather strange spot, given that she played Kate Kane who was…Batwoman, but the team looked at it as a creative challenge that does in fact seem to be playing out pretty well so far.

The show has not recast Kate Kane, but integrated her absence into the main storyline of the season. We see her plane go down, batsuit inside, but her body is not found, and now everyone’s looking for her.

A local woman living in her van, Ryan Wilder, finds the batsuit, and with a tragic origin story of her own (her mother was killed by Alice’s Wonderland gang) decides to wear it and give fighting crime a shot.

Wilder is played by Javicia Leslie, fulfilling the show’s stated requirement that Batwoman and the actress that plays her be LGBTQ. Not to speak ill of the departed, but the main problem with Batwoman kind of…always was Ruby Rose’s strangely flat performance as Kate Kane, and so far, Leslie’s Ryan Wilder seems like a more interesting, more energetic version of the character, even if they had to invent her out of thin air. It easily seems like this was the right call instead of trying to re-cast Kate.

What I do have to wonder about is the end result of this “where’s Kate?” storyline, given that Rose has…left the show. I assume that maybe they could get her back for an episode that more fully wraps up her role, but it is sort of a strange plot device when you know to what extent it was driven by external events.

I was looking forward to the fake Bruce Wayne being a villain for this season, but by the end of the episode his mask is knocked off and the charade is already broken. Supposedly Black Mask is going to be a major villainous presence this season on the show.

The episode ends with Wilder giving the suit back and pretty much refusing to be Batwoman, not that anyone explicitly asked her yet. She doesn’t think she’s up to the task, but obviously that will change. One significant development over the course of the episode is that Widler ends up getting shot by a shard of Kryptonite, which seems to be infecting her bloodstream. I’ve watched enough Smallville to know that such a thing can give you actual superpowers, so I wonder if that’s the direction we’re moving into. Though Batwoman having literal superpowers would sort of defeat the purpose of the character, so maybe it’s just like, Kryptonite blood poisoning, which will make her return to the team to help her get fixed.

The CW’s Arrowverse has felt like it’s winding down in many ways. Arrow is dead, The Flash is running out of ideas, Legends of Tomorrow keeps cutting cast members and Supergirl and Black Lightning are over after one more season. But there is a new Superman show coming soon, and rumors that the CW might just renew all its existing shows, including Batwoman, for another season already, as it is prone to do, so who knows.

Regardless, I think Leslie is a great replacement for Rose even after one episode here, and the show just got a lot more interesting than it would have been had Kate Kane returned again. I’m certainly going to keep up with it now, and will report on how this evolves over time.

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