Making her official debut following her appearance on last year’s Elseworlds crossover event, Ruby Rose playing Kate Kane/Batwoman had a surprisingly fun pilot episode. After the poorly received trailers were released, I have to admit my hopes were not extremely high and I was pleasantly surprised.
The show starts out with Kate going through some unorthodox training techniques, which we later find out is her way of getting good enough to join “The Crows”, her father’s elite security force. We quickly learn that Batman has disappeared and the Gotham government, having left the Bat signal on for three years, have finally decided it’s time to move on. A villain named Alice has different ideas and interrupts the festivities, killing a couple of police officers and kidnapping a Crow in the process. As it turns out kidnapped Crow is Kate’s former love interest.
The show moves quickly and easily between flashback, filling in backstory of Kate’s time in the military academy as well as the loss of her mother and sister in an accident. The flashbacks are not over done, though some of the choices in framing and color, especially with the appearance of Batman is off putting.
Kate makes some dumb choices, which I’m going to chalk up to following her heart instead of her head, though they were slightly frustrating and the results rather predictable. It feels like it’s done to move the plot forward and to give some clues as to Alice’s true identity, but I thought they could have done that differently.
The fight scenes are choreographed and performed well. There is a scene, after Kate discovers the Bat cave despite Luke Fox’s (Lucius’s son?) best(?) efforts to stop her, in which she tells him to “fix the suit” so that if fits a woman.
The only reason I really have a problem with this scene is that I don’r recall him stating that he is more than a security guard, though I may have step away for a moment.
Similar to it’s Arrowverse counterpart, Supergirl, the show has a number of strong female characters. Kate’s step-sister and step-mother both appear to be more complicated characters than they seem in the opening moments of the show. And the potential tension that could play out with her love interest (as long as they do not go the way of Arrow, with too much angst) could prove interesting. I think I’ll keep watching.
