With Ryan becoming weaker by the moment, the search for the map to Coriana becomes more desperate for Team Bat, even as the search for personal vengeance becomes more pressing to Ryan herself. Alice interrogates an old enemy to try to fill in the missing gaps in her memory left by Safiyah.

Batwoman’s second season hasn’t had the strongest of starts overall. Between an arc that has spent far too much time focusing on its departed lead and not enough on its new one and a slowly growing list of coincidences and connections, it’s got in its own way as much as it’s done good stuff. That said, it seemed by last week’s instalment to have really started to move in the right direction, so it gives me no pleasure at all to say that this instalment is easily the weakest yet.

Let’s start with Ryan’s ‘illness’ at the hands of the Kryptonite that’s raging through her body. I get that this is Batwoman’s show and that you need her to therefore be doing stuff, but I also can’t help but feel ripped out of the moment in terms of the tension of Ryan’s condition when every time the plot decides she needs to do a thing, she just gets up and does it, before immediately being too weak to do anything other than slump again. I’m not asking for realism here – that ship long since sailed from the CW-verse – but could we at least get some consistency? And that’s before we even consider the stupidity of a character who knows they’ve been shot and has a glowing green wound that causes increasing pain but doesn’t do anything about it. Yes, she’s trying to prove herself to people who have been treating her like she’s an unworthy stand in to the last incumbent, but that excuse only goes so far.

Then let’s consider Alice, or rather Alice’s history which she is so desperate to uncover. Why did Safiyah take her memories? What was it that happened between her and Ocean back on the island? Well… nothing that interesting. Seriously, there’s a part where the actual, real root of the truth is revealed to her and both Rachel Skarsten and the actor delivering it look about as uninterested as I am in it because it’s not only terribly cliched and not really much deeper than what she and we already knew, but it’s also a little bit stupid – the sort of plot point you might expect from Days of our Lives or rather the parodic version of that show which Friends used to put out back in the day. Seriously, you’ll be looking for Joey Tribiani to enter stage left at any moment.

As to Jacob Kane and his ongoing search for the daughter he didn’t abandon but did try to kill more than once because he didn’t know she was Batwoman… eh. There was an opportunity here to tell an interesting story – Jacob’s guilt at having ‘abandoned’ Alice, his loss of Kate combined with finding out she was the Batwoman of all people. The ongoing revelations of just what his dead wife was up to. But it feels like it’s being wasted, not least because for a middle-aged man Commander Kane seems remarkably resilient – didn’t he get stabbed in the gut in the last episode? Wouldn’t know it from how spry he seems here. And the dialogue and framing is just hackneyed and dull – ‘I won’t sleep until I find Kate’ he declares, pouring himself another shot of 40% proof cliché from his big bottle of whiskey as he rubs his stubbled chin. Please…

As for Ryan, she gets to have the same ‘I have a particular personal struggle with the idea of not killing anyone’ bit that the show already did with Kate in season one. That might have worked had the writers not contrived to have Ryan be connected to Alice by way of her mother’s death, and what makes it worse is that the resolution is stupid.

Verdict: This cast and these writers are better than this and they have shown it before. Poor all round. 4/10

Greg D. Smith