Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Batwoman - Tell Me the Truth


Batwoman continues to fumble around its First Season with a slightly-better-than-average episode that puts Kate (Ruby Rose) and Sophie's (Meagan Tandy) relationship front and center and deals with Sophie suspecting Kate is Batwoman. The later is taken care of with the coincidental sudden appearance of another of Kate's old flames Julia Pennyworth (Christina Wolfe). I like Julia, and I don't begrudge the show using a time honored technique to get around an alter-ego discovery. That said, the episode largely wastes both Wolfe and her character by making Julia nothing more than a convenient plot point when her skills, and knowledge of both Kate's past and present activities, could have been put to far greater use over multiple episodes. The episode handles Sophie a bit better, although by mostly going over ground already covered in previous episodes. The final scene between Sophie and Kate, and Sophie's confession to her husband about the past relationship, seems to move the show away from further exploring their feelings for each other... at least for now.

That's enough for the episode to dive-into, but that doesn't prevent the writers from throwing several more logs on the fire including a cliche of a restaurant owner loosing his cool at Kate holding another woman's hands (in a not very romantic way), Alice (Rachel Skarsten) fucking with Jacob Kane's (Dougray Scott) dissolving marriage, Mary (Nicole Kang) freaking out, and an assassin (Garfield Wilson) in Gotham taking out a series of targets in order to get his hands on Batman-killing tech. The Rifle is about as impressive as his moniker, but it is worth noting him namedropping his boss likely foreshadows the eventual appearance of another comic character with ties to the Kane family. There are several individual pieces that work well-enough here, and the episode cleans up its timeline issues (at least for one week), but the show's inability to stay focused remains a problem as does the need to shoehorn every character into an episode, regardless if they are necessary to the plot.

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