A plane crash in Gotham city spells tragedy for Team Bat. But even as they continue the search for Kate Kane, it seems that someone else has the Batsuit, and is determined to use it to settle some scores of their own.

How do you solve the problem of your lead actor walking away after a strong opening season? Especially when you have built the show around that character’s strong ties to almost every other character, good and bad, in the show and left some fairly juicy cliffhangers on the boil at the end of that maiden season?

Well, not easily.

Let’s get one thing clear – Javicia Leslie is a hell of a replacement for Ruby Rose in the Batsuit. She has exactly the right mixture of strength and vulnerability, and the ability to switch between the two at just the right pitch, as well as charisma to spare. And the way in which she is introduced and finds the suit is all done very well. It’s just that – in this opener at least – she doesn’t really get to properly be centre stage as the show scrambles to deliver the send-off it feels is owed to its departed star, and given the strength of that opening series under Ruby Rose, it’s difficult to argue too much.

Indeed, we actually see precious little of Leslie in the suit, and although the show fills us in on the details of her background over the course of the episode in fits and starts, what this opener mostly amounts to is a lot of people emoting about how they feel in Kate’s absence, with a ‘returned’ Bruce Wayne muddling things further as Tommy Elliot gleefully assumes the identity and mantle of the man he’s spent his entire life obsessing over.

All that said, given what the writers are trying to navigate their way around here, they do a fairly good job. When you’ve tied the main driving meta plot of your show around the star who’s just left, it’s no easy feat to just start all over again. They take the opportunity of Kate’s absence to do some interesting things. Jacob Kane in particular has to deal with the fact he has now lost both daughters, and the obvious parallels mean that he isn’t going to give up searching for Kate any time soon, regardless of what the evidence might be.

Alice is particularly angry not because her sister is apparently dead but, predictably, because she didn’t have anything to do with it. Sophie and Julia are each struggling for their own reasons. Mary now faces having lost her mother and her sister, having only recently been properly inducted into Team Bat and Luke feels both lost without Kate and responsible for her apparent demise, having been the one who insisted she go to speak with Kara Zor-El about destroying the Kryptonite in the first place, leading her to be on the plane which went down.

If any subplot seems to have suffered, I’d guess it’s that of Tommy Elliott. One senses that plans were originally afoot to tease this one out longer, with a cat and mouse game between Kate and her ‘cousin’ and a constant edge of when his secret might be discovered. Given Kate’s absence, this would have been more difficult to do, and so it gets handled in its own way here.

But on what feels like the all-too-rare moments that the show actually manages to stick with its new lead, she really delivers. It feels like the decision to not see too much of her in the suit is deliberate, avoiding us having too much of a re-hash of the whole ‘discovering how the suit works’ schtick we already did with Rose last season and focusing more on the person who will inherit the mantle. Here, it does start to feel a little contrived as the show elects to create a link between Leslie’s Ryan Wilder and significant persons in Gotham, but that aside her backstory itself is both wonderfully acted by Leslie and horribly depressing in terms of how believable it is. Having leaned heavily into the social issues of Kate Kane’s sexuality and the issues it caused her in season 1, it always felt a little odd that Sophie’s challenges focused exclusively on the same, not really ever addressing the additional challenges she would have faced as a woman of colour. With Leslie in the lead, it seems that show seems set on redressing that balance, and that’s welcome as far as this reviewer is concerned.

As an opener then, it does its best with the curveball its lead’s departure threw at it, re-threading the needle for a new star while taking the time to acknowledge the departed one. Time will tell how quickly the show will allow itself to fully move on and focus on Wilder, and I suspect the direction of travel will include subplots like Batwoman’s ‘return’ causing confusion for certain parties and so on, but the signs are there that this could be every bit as good as the opening season, and possibly even better.

Verdict: Leaning a little heavily on the reverence for its departed lead (for understandable reasons) this manages to deliver a decent, hopeful opener. I’m intrigued. 8/10

Greg D. Smith