Live Action: Batwoman on CW

October 13th, 2019

It’s been said before here on Okazu, but I always feel I must disclaim before I review any DC anything – I really don’t read Batman. I don’t really like Batman. I was a Marvel collector, my wife took care of DC. So you’ll excuse me if I haven’t been following Supergirl with it’s queer storylines (and queerbaiting.) I tried. I watched like three episodes and just couldn’t do it. I’ve attempted to watch Arrow and the Flash and all of them make me feel exactly as I did as a child when everyone loved some movie or music personality and I was like… okay, nice for you. I did try though, honestly! They just didn’t hook me. But I felt an obligation to at least try and watch CW’s newest series, Batwoman, if only to review it.

After one episode, I can say that I think, maybe, I might like it. ^_^

The opening plot is loosely pattered after Batwoman: Elegy, with some fairly significant and much-needed changes. When Elegy was written, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, was the law of the land in the United States. Kate’s story was a real story, the story of Lt. Dan Choi, a man whose illustrious military career was cut short merely for being gay. In the last decade DADT was overturned and so it makes no sense that they’d keep that same scenario. Instead, Kate is busted out of military academy for violating academy rules in a scene that makes the point that the real problem is homophobia. Kate, cut off from a military career, and by her father from the career she really wants in his high-tech security firm, is angry and rootless. On top of this base, the Alice storyline from Elegy has been ported, with modification.

Batman was unable to prevent Kate’s sister Beth’s death – and – has disappeared. Gotham is without a protector, crime is rising and suddenly a new villain is terrorizing the city, Lewis Caroll-quoting, Harley Quinn-esque, manic pixie nightmare girl, Alice.  Thankfully for my sanity, the hideously obvious BIG REVEAL doesn’t make it to the end of the first episode, thus fixing the most tedious bit of writing in Elegy. Now we can settle in and see what the story might actually do.

To quote YNN Reviewer, Chris LeBlanc, Ruby Rose’s hair is 80% of this episode – I am in absolute agreement with this. It’s not that I just like angry, violent lesbians with undercuts, it’s just that I want you to tell me the last time you saw a woman in an American television series with this haircut. Take your time, I’ll wait. I’ll wait a long time, because the answer is ‘never.’ I know Batwoman will be getting her scarlet tresses, and I’m okay with that, as long as Kate gets to keep her undercut.  ^_^ The cowl did look a bit weird without something to tie into the cape.

The acting in the first episode was…all right. Everyone felt like they were trying to get a feel for the characters and their relationships, which left me a bit like I was watching a really good read-through. Ruby Rose as Kate smoulders beautifully.  Meagan Tandy as Kate’s ex, now-married to a guy, Sophie is a wild card that can be played in a number of ways – in this first ep, she’s damseled because she’s the one character in the story Kate would put herself on the line for. Both Kate’s father and Lukas are unfortunately written and I hope to heck they fix them both, because blecch. Especially Luke. I need him to stop being clumsy dorky scared boy. One of those things would be fine, but you cannot convince me that Bruce is leaving his entire billion-dollar set up to a fuckup. This and how absurdly dark the filming is, so the fight scenes are almost wholly obscured, were the weak points.

The biggest pleasant surprise of the opener in both writing and acting is Nicole Kang as Mary Hamilton, Kate’s sister by marriage. Everything about her was terrific. She way set up as a loopy-harmless-bubblehead, then given a twist that made sense and was…fun. Between this and the downplay of “the mystery of Alice’s identity,” this first episode gave me real hope for the writing. Hope for the writing is why I’ll be tuning in tonight for the next episode of Batwoman.

I can’t really rate it fairly after one episode, but it’ll give us a point of comparison later.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 4 Who can tell, it’s so dark.
Story – 6 Alice, but with some improvements, here’s hoping
Characters – 7
Service – 5 Some nice lesbian kisses

Overall – 6 with hope for improvement

I just hope like hell they don’t try and get Sophie and Kate together again. Introduce another character as a love interest, PLEASE.

3 Responses

  1. Mariko says:

    I was never a fan of American comics, even growing up. The closest I got was a passing enjoyment of the Tim Burton Batman movies, and later the Christopher Nolan ones. But when I heard the buzz about the way the “New 52” effort was going to do real justice to Kate Kane’s backstory as a major out superhero, I bought my first comic ever. I ended up buying the entire J.H. Williams cour on Batwoman because I loved the art style so much; Elegy, though, was by far the strongest volume on both an art and story front.

    Anyway, all that to say I am, like you, familiar with the arc they’re adapting the TV series from. It’s a good choice, logically, but I don’t think I really share your enthusiasm with the adaptation so far (except for the early reveal of the painfully-obvious-even-in-the-comic Alice twist).

    On the one hand, jettisoning the whole “Religion of Crime” thing makes sense, because even though I figured it out from context in the comic, it was a throughline from earlier stories that would be confusing in a from-scratch TV series. But without that background Alice seems significantly less menacing, both to Kate personally and to Gotham in general. The setup for who Alice is, what she’s capable of, what she wants, and why is so far a bit subdued.

    My main issue with the show’s choices, though, is the kind of a metastasizing that happened with the issues we should all have with Batman as a whole. First there’s Gotham itself – I get that Gotham is, in its way, a character. It has to be foreboding and crime-ridden, filled with freaks and maniacs that the law can’t handle to justify Batpersons at all. But it’s annoying the way it perpetuates the very 1970’s view of cities as hopelessly crime-infested, degenerate wastelands that is far from the modern truth. Isn’t there a way to update this to where the city is a good, thriving place, and still find a place for superhero stories? Maybe that’s what Supergirl is for, and I just have to accept the pro-vigilante Batman setup. I find it much less appealing as an adult with today’s political reality, though.

    Even accepting that, though, the show pushes it much farther than usual, stating outright that the city is in such terrible shape that for some reason a private for-profit paramilitary organization is the only thing that can keep order in the absence of a lone vigilante. Maybe again I am adulting this too much, but why should we accept that corporate military force beholden not to the law but to their shareholders should be allowed to patrol an American city? Batman is usually portrayed in kind of a gray area, where even he acknowledges that his vigilantism is a problem, but is unfortunately necessary “for now.” There is public pushback against him and what he does, and it makes for an interesting tension between what we know is right for society and what we know is right for this story. Batwoman seems to be jettisoning that moral dilemma in favor of an outright acceptance of vigilantism and armed civilian policing as acceptable solutions.

    Which brings me to the problems with Kate and her dad. In the comic, Kate’s dad is an actual military officer with accordant responsibility and restraint. He moonlights helping Kate “find her own path to serve” when she is discharged and eventually meanders back to her calling, but he is always bound by his military role. Having him just be the leader of the unaccountable paramilitary occupiers (and married to the mayor, I think? I wasn’t entirely clear on his rich heiress wife’s role in the show) is all kinds of problematic. Also, Kate’s backstory is handled so well in the comic, it’s disappointing to see it given such short shrift here. Her growth into and choice to become Batwoman is so much more organic there.

    Finally, there are other shortcuts that maybe are nitpicky but I can’t help noticing. The batcave is supposed to be underneath Wayne Manor – why is it inside Wayne Tower here? How do you hide that construction on a city permit? And how is there a rock cave underneath a skyscraper anyway? Also, I really don’t like having Kate be related to Batman. There’s already enough focus on lineage and entitlement by blood in superhero stories – in a story where a rich billionaire decides the best way to help his city is to spend his inordinate wealth to turn himself into a one-man army, do we need to perpetuate the narcissism by making it a blood-relative-takes-up-the-cowl story too? In the comic Batman isn’t missing, he’s a sometimes-adversary-sometimes-mentor for Kate, which is fitting. He inspired her but he also has his own agenda and can be kind of a prickly asshole. Much better than whatever sad-sack failed-in-my-duty-so-I-left thing they’re going for here so far.

    I am definitely going to keep watching, and I did like Ruby Rose’ performance a lot. But I couldn’t help but feel like this was a C effort on something that could have been amazing.

    PS – The haircut I’ll give you too, though I am partial to the pixie and Bettie Page cuts in the comic, but I’m not sure Ruby Rose could pull those off as well as the close crop (she would need to be a little more buff, I think!)

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