Mary and Alice continue to grow closer, even as Ryan, Sophie and Luke search desperately for a way to stop them. Montoya is forced to confront her own demons.

If there’s one thing I am really loving with this third season of Batwoman, it’s finally seeing Nicole Kang finally get to take centre stage a bit more. Mary has always been such a vital yet completely under-appreciated part of Team Bat and oh boy are they all regretting that neglect now. Mary and Alice are still living it up as a pair and oddly this team up makes sense where it really shouldn’t. These two should, after all, be arch enemies for a variety of reasons and yet, the writers have wisely taken the journey of uniting the two through their mutual broken-ness. Both have personal axes to grind with the Kane/Wayne family legacy, both feel utterly alone and both want proper freedom. In hindsight, the surprise is that they didn’t team up sooner.

Back with Team Bat, Ryan, Luke and Sophie are racking their brains for how best to break up this new friendship and get their friend back, drawing on Montoya’s experience with the original Poison Ivy to come up with ideas. Turns out that the life of a vigilante crime-fighting super team is made considerably more difficult when they can’t access their usual high-end resources and are forced to resort to wi-fi in abandoned warehouses. Nevertheless, they hit on a plan which only requires that they infiltrate Wayne Tower to get to the Batcave and dig out Bruce’s old journals.

Of course, that’s a risk because Marquis now rules that roost, and is fully off whatever chain was mildly holding him back before. Frustrated at Team Bat’s continued meddling in her life, Mary decides to take some direct action of her own (on Alice’s advice) and this is one more unholy alliance of convenience that the team really did not need.

Running against all this in the background is the continued misery of Montoya at having betrayed the love of her life all those years ago (not to mention the tension between Montoya, Ryan and Sophie for obvious reasons). We see through several flashbacks the struggles Montoya had with her errant love as she became Poison Ivy, and forgiveness is a theme running insistently through the episode, though whose will be sought/given remains to be seen.

As the episode reaches its conclusion, several painful choices need to be made, new realities confronted and surprising truths revealed. As the credits roll the only certainty is that whatever problems our heroes think they had before are nothing compared to what faces them now.

Verdict: A triumphant return from the show’s mid-season break which promises much more drama to come. 9/10

Greg D. Smith