Kate gets blinded by her obsession in solving one mystery to the wider implications of her responsibility. Jacob Kane and the Crows up the ante as Alice becomes increasingly brazen and dangerous.

I’ll say this for the writers of Batwoman – they don’t believe in hanging around. After hinting strongly at the connection between Kate and villain Alice last time out, here they bypass the traditional slow burn buildup the genre might usually employ and have both characters arrive pretty instantly at the obvious conclusion. Freeing itself of the obligation to wind some narrative around this ‘mystery’, the show is left instead to concentrate on what comes next – how does Kate even begin to broach the subject with her father, much less convince him of the truth she believes she has found?

On top of that, there’s plenty else going on, not least of which the simmering tensions between Kate and old flame Sophie. This too doesn’t seem set on following conventional genre lines – anyone hoping for a sort of extended love triangle subplot between Kate, Sophie and Sophie’s new husband would appear from this to be setting themselves up for disappointment, and not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

There’s plenty of flashback stuff here as well, as Kate continues to relive the incident that robbed her of her mother and sister all those years ago, and the pain of the months that followed. What’s nice here is that the writers have avoided falling into the Batman trap of this tragedy being the formative incident driving Kate down the vigilante route. In fact, it’s clear that her narrow focus on her own private mystery is actively pulling her away from becoming the Batman stand-in that the city is crying out for. That said, what’s clear also is that Kate has no intention of being anyone’s stand-in – when she takes that mantle on, it’ll be in her own right.

There really isn’t a scene here that doesn’t pop, whether it’s the crackling tension between Kate and Alice, the undeniable undercurrent between Kate and Sophie or simply the heartfelt pleas of Mary to her step-sister. Everyone here is bringing their A++ game, actors and writers, and this takes a lot of what you might expect and throws it forcibly into the trashcan. Kate is confident and smart, but she’s not quite who she obviously will be yet. Luke isn’t the assured, confident mentor, so much as the guy who doesn’t really know what to do for the best. Everyone here is finding their way, and all signs point to that letting the series very much construct its own narrative, rather than living in the shadows of another.

Verdict: Making a whole raft of unexpected but very welcome decisions, this one definitely has my attention for all the right reasons. 9/10

Greg D. Smith