Kate and her father elicit another twisted tale of Alice’s past tribulations from an unexpected source. Mary and Luke team up to follow up a lead on Beth’s killer.

I confess I find myself a little confused by Batwoman this week – not that it isn’t well-acted and superbly directed as normal, nor even that I disagree with the overarching narrative curve. I’m just not sure why certain elements of the narrative prove to be as impactful to the various characters as they evidently are, given all that has already been revealed before.

We spend most of the episode learning about another facet of Alice’s suffering during the time she was a prisoner of Cartwright, but one that seems rather trivial in comparison to the various other elements that we have covered to date – after all, this is a little girl who was taught how to make masks for her ‘little brother’ from the faces of corpses. By comparison, what we learn here doesn’t really seem anywhere near as bad.

Meanwhile I’m pleased to see that the writers have decided to have a lot of fun with Mary’s ongoing game of trying to get someone to admit to her the truth she’s already guessed at, as she links up with Luke to pursue the vaguest of leads in relation to the killing of Beth. This too seems a little odd, given everything we already know about the identity of Beth’s killer, but it does give us some nice interaction between the characters.

Mostly, I think the issue here is that the real meat of what the narrative is driving at doesn’t even start to emerge until very near the end of the episode, and when we get there it doesn’t feel as if the build-up was the right one. There are literally dozens of choices the show could have made to get to this point, and the route they’ve taken feels an odd path to have taken.

Verdict: Not the strongest episode, even though everyone is pretty much swinging for the fences, performance wise. 7/10

Greg D. Smith