Kate is under pressure from Sophie to reveal her double identity to her father. An old family friend drops into town. A vicious killer is on the loose in Gotham, and it seems Alice may have a hand in his deeds.

It’s another fairly quiet one in terms of actual Batwoman action this week, but that’s ok because this is an episode that really doubles down on the emotional core of the show, and I for one am here for it.

Kate has a major problem – her ex-lover Sophie knows she’s been flitting around the place as Batwoman, and she’s determined to tell Jacob Kane that the Batwoman is his daughter. Kate already feels betrayed by Sophie for what went down at military academy all those years ago, and certainly isn’t comfortable enough to trust her with this information now. But what can she do?

The core of the episode deals with this and it’s to the show’s credit that it handles all of these issues so well where other genre shows have tried and (sometimes disastrously) failed. It makes sense that Sophie is the last person Kate wants knowing her secret, just as it makes equal sense that she can’t just forget the feelings she had for her. Where it starts to get really interesting is where it digs a little deeper into the background of those fateful events, why exactly Sophie made the choices she did, and how she feels about it all now.

As a bit of background to all this, a hired assassin is running around Gotham killing people to a very specific ticklist, and an old friend of the Wayne family is in town trying to stop him. This is welcome to see on a number of levels, providing as it does some context to Kate’s life between Sophie leaving her and when we first met her, as well as giving Kate a capable foil to bounce off, sometimes literally.

Meanwhile, Jacob and Catherine’s divorce is affecting Mary quite deeply, and all she really wants is for her big half-sister to help her get through it all, but of course with a sniper on the loose, her secret identity at risk and a gun in the wild that can pierce her armour, Kate has a few more pressing issues with which to deal.

And of course there’s Alice, pulling strings behind the scenes and making some extremely interesting decisions. In a cast full of talent, Rachel Skarsten is still absolutely killing it in every scene, giving us a villain who’s unbalanced without ever being stupid, and at whose motives we can only guess from one scene to the next. One thing seems certain, Alice is not an adversary for anyone to trifle with.

Verdict: It feels odd to say that a comic book-based TV show is one of the most emotionally resonant things I’m watching right now, but there we have it. This is everything I could have hoped for and more besides, and I can only hope this particular corner of the Berlantiverse runs for several seasons to come. 9/10

Greg D. Smith