Wow.
Blah blah blah, I’m not a DC gal, Batman is boring, blah blah. We’ve been through that before. But. This season has convinced me otherwise.
I thought Kate Kane was a fine Batwoman in Season 1. I was glad she had her story told and the points were made. And I was super glad to get past the Alice arc, with its so many handwaves. It was good stuff. Season 2 capitalized on the strengths of the cast and weaknesses of the story. It was better stuff. In my review of Season 2 I said, “What had been an ensemble flapping around Kate, waiting for her to listen to any of them, has now coalesced into a solid team looking for Kate (whatevs) and fighting new and different baddies, something I can get behind, finally.” Which is pretty much what happens. And now we reach Season 3 of Batwoman and I have not stopped thinking about it since I began to watch. It was one of the best live-action shows I’ve watched in a long while. Mostly because the cast is killing it.
Javicia Leslie’s Ryan Wilder is likable, smart, strong and vulnerable. The story uses those vulnerabilities without hesitation, but the story is not about torturing Ryan. Nope, instead Season 3 is 1000000% about Mary Hamilton and Beth Kane. Not as a couple, but as a pair of mismatched, deeply broken and needy people.
Nicole Kang’s Mary Hamilton is…amazing. She’s broken, and breaking, and healing, and permanently effed up and likable and redeemable. Even when she is at her lowest, you have to love her. Early on the season, she and Lucas have a little energy. I would not object, except I believe you should not fall for your coworkers. (More on that later.)
Beth, nee Alice. Holy Shit. Rachel Skarsen is doing a lifetime’s worth of acting with this role. She takes up a lot of space on the screen and again, love her and hate her, you always love her. Mary and Beth trying to patch a family together between the two of them had me tied up in knots.
Where Kate and Sophie made my skin crawl, Ryan and Sophie as the main love affair of the series works just fine. See above about coworkers for a caveat. But it, too, is a side story. The main plot uses relics of the Bat-universe, but with new plotting and characters. Did we need a new Joker? Maybe? But what we got with a new Poison Ivy was an outstanding arc, that will have repercussions into next season. It gave us a brief moment with Renee Montoya and Pamela Isley, but it left us with Poison Mary…and Alice as a sidekick. That was a hell of a ride.
Lucas’ battle with his long-dead father added unpredictability to his story, and Ryan’s own journey into her own family’s past drives the larger arcs in a way that succeeds.
These character arcs -and others – are overlapped so that they have consequences. It’s not “character development of the week,” and kudos to the writers for that.
Season 3 is about family. For Batwoman and her team, that means a lot of everything: Good, bad, extremely bad, and pathologically apocalyptic. It means love and hate and despair and hope. And, for the first time in my watching experience, it means a majority non-white, majority female cast, full of queerness, which I absolutely love.
This was a fantastic season. you should watch it.
Ratings:
Cinematography – 8
Characters – 10
Story – 9
Queer – 10
Service – 7 Kissing, sex implied
Overall – 9
This team convinced me to love Batwoman.