Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Batwoman’ On The CW, Where Ruby Rose Dons A Modified Bat Suit And Fights Crime In Gotham

It’s surprising that, with so many superhero characters on our TVs right now, that none of them are in the LGBTQ+ community. Even in the comics, gay superheroes were rare, mostly in smaller titles, until Batwoman and Kate Kane were reintroduced in 2009. Ten years later, Greg Berlanti has finally gotten around to creating a series around Batwoman, with Ruby Rose playing the title hero. Read on for more…

BATWOMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we see a woman diving into an icy lake, we hear a voice over saying, “Trust me; this isn’t the story I expected to be telling.”

The Gist: The woman is Kate Kane (Ruby Rose), who was sent to a shaman far away from Gotham by her father, Jacob Kane (Dougray Scott), to train for a job with his Crows Private Security force. Three years after Batman left Gotham under unknown circumstances, Crows has taken over as the main protectors of Gotham; it’s a paramilitary force of elite former military specialists, and one of its best officers is Sophie Moore (Meagan Tandy).

During a ceremony where the Bat signal is turned off for good, the Alice in Wonderland gang, led by the revenge-seeking Alice (Rachel Skarsten), disrupt the ceremony and kidnap Sophie, all to prove that Crows can’t protect Gotham. Kate gets a call from her stepsister, Mary Hamilton (Nicole Kang), that Sophie is in danger, prompting Kate to return to Gotham.

Kate’s memories of Batman aren’t great; fifteen years prior, when Kate was a kid, he walked away from the teetering car her sister and mother were in after an accident, leaving them to fall off a bridge to their deaths. But her memories of Sophie are warm and sunny; they were in a secret relationship when they were in the academy together; the academy frowns on same-sex relationships. When they were found out, Kate was booted out, but Sophie stayed. She had to deny their relationship because “I don’t have the luxury of being offended” by the school not wanting her because of who she loves.

To try to figure out where Sophie is, Kate goes to the abandoned Wayne Enterprises building, where she and her sister Beth used to hang out in Bruce Wayne’s office — Bruce is her cousin. She gets caught by Lucas Fox (Camrus Johnson), Wayne’s trusted tech guy, but she overpowers him and finds footage of where Sophie might be. When she brings the footage to her father, though, he doesn’t trust her to lead the team to get her. She goes herself and gets snagged by Alice, who tells her that Jacob never wanted Kate in Crows, and thinks Sophie is the daughter he never had.

Kate goes back to Wayne Enterprises, and eventually finds the Batcave, where she realizes for the first time that her cousin Bruce was Batman. Luke tells her how much regret he had over how he left Kate’s mom and sister, thinking the cables he used to hold the car wouldn’t give way. Kate sees the Batsuit and the tools Batman used and gets an idea; if her father won’t let her protect Gotham and rescue Sophie as part of Crows, she can take the baton from her cousin… after Luke makes adjustments to the suit.

After rescuing Sophie and making all of Gotham think Batman is back, Kate goes back to the scene and finds a clue about who Alice really is.

Our Take: We certainly like the idea of Batwoman, which comes from Greg Berlanti’s DC superhero factory and has Caroline Dries (The Vampire Diaries) as its showrunner. There aren’t any LGBTQ+ superheroes on TV, especially on network TV, and Kate Kane’s sexuality is a significant part of Batwoman’s origin story. The reason why she didn’t enter the military was because the academy had such a regressive attitude towards same-sex relationships, and it seems like there’s a bit of a push and pull with her father because she didn’t turn out the way he might have wanted (though that might be more of her perception than reality).

We also like Ruby Rose, who came to most people’s attention on Season 3 of Orange Is The New Black. She plays Kate as tough and brooding as any of the other DC superheroes on our flat screens. Given some time to explore Kate’s character and her full transformation into Batwoman, we have a feeling that Rose will make one of the more compelling superhero characters on TV.

But the pilot is so intent on getting Kate in the Batsuit that it feels sped through and disjointed. We don’t get a good feel for her relationship with her father or stepmother, Catherine Hamilton-Kane (Elizabeth Anweis), and we also don’t quite get an idea of how much Gotham fell into disarray after Batman left. We’re confident in Berlanti and Dries that they’ll get to those details eventually. But the pilot was so jammed with info that Kate’s character felt a bit flat and incomplete. Why does she feel that her father is so overprotective? Is her sexuality a factor? Just how significant was the relationship with Sophie? And why was Kate so adamant about joining Crows Security?

On Berlanti’s streaming shows that feature DC characters, he and his writers take their time to explore their heroes’ origin stories in the first few episodes. Perhaps the demands of network TV have required Kate’s origin to be compressed. But it does both Batwoman and Ruby Rose a disservice.

Sex and Skin: When Kate, in the Batsuit, grabs Sophie and crashes through the floor of the under-construction building where Alice was holed up, threatening to blow up a “movies in the park” event, they land on a bed. Kate caresses Sophie’s face, and Sophie looks at Kate with a vague sense of intimacy and familiarity, even though she has no idea who this Bat-suited woman is.

Parting Shot: Like we said, we find out who Alice really is. Let’s just say that Alice wants to get Kate on her side creating crime instead of fighting it.

Sleeper Star: We liked Nicole Kang as Mary, whom at first seems like someone who would just be an annoyance to Kate. But then we see her run her underground clinic, and we know that she will join Luke as the inevitable “crew” it seems like all of the DC characters have.

Most Pilot-y Line: “If you’re Bruce’s cousin, you know that no one’s heard from him in almost three years,” Luke says to Kate after he captures her breaking into Bruce Wayne’s office. Why didn’t Kate say, “Hey, Batman’s been gone for three years, too!”? That’s always been the worst part of some of these superhero stories, going back decades: At some point, you’d think writers would have some characters put two and two together?

Our Call: STREAM IT, mainly because we like seeing Rose kicking butt in and out of her Batsuit. And it feels like, as we dive into Kate’s story a bit more, the show will get some depth. But this is definitely one of the shallowest Berlanti superhero pilots we’ve seen.

Your Call:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Batwoman On CWTV.com