The CW’s Batwoman series premiere recap: Pilot

Batwoman fails to match the heights of The Flash and Arrow and is off to an okay start with a mixed bag of some cool moments and bad writing.

The Flash and Arrow both had an amazing series premiere episodes that set the bar high for their respective seasons while Legends and Supergirl also had a fairly solid and fun pilot that made them a welcome addition to the Arrowverse. However the same is not the case for Batwoman, the show has a lot of problems going around and it seems like not getting Gotham right is the least of their worries for now.

The trailers made out the show to be some kind of bad anti-Batman type of story, but the good news is that it is not the case at all, Kate aka Batwoman is in fact inspired by Bruce and hopes to follow his path. The series premiere establishes that very well.

Kate gets her share of screentime as we see some of the defining moments of her life but Ruby Rose doesn’t exactly shine as the character and comes off way too bland when she is not in a costume. She does shine as the woman under the Bat-outfit.

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Kate Kane has suffered her share of loss as she lost her sister Beth and her mom as a kid when their car was almost knocked off a bridge by a Joker-hijacked school bus. However, Batman was on the scene and tried his best to save the only family he had left but something went horribly wrong as the mom and the sister fell into the river alongside the car.

We also saw flashbacks of Kate in a military academy, where she was training in the hopes to someday join her father’s Gotham security force, called The Crows. Kate soon met and fell in love with fellow cadet Sophie Moore (Meagan Tandy) which was against the academy’s “homosexual conduct” and when they got caught kissing, Kate refused to sign off on denial, and quit the academy altogether but Sophie did not do so and lied about her involvement with Kate and broke off with her.

Kate had isolated herself from the Batman-less Gotham but is forced to come back when Sophie gets kidnapped by this new criminal Alice. In the process of finding her, Kate discovers that Bruce Wayne is Batman and decides to put on the cape because the only thing that these criminals fear is Batman and thus she puts hope back into the city while also managing to save Sophie.
We later find out that Sophie is married now.

Yeah, all of this feels very normal for a network drama and even the big twist that Alice is in fact, Kate’s presumed dead sister fails to pack a good enough punch.

The show does deliver on the Bat-references and that actually makes me want to watch more of this show. But as a whole, Batwoman does not seem to be off to a good start, it failed to captivate me. The series premiere though was not bad or mediocre or anything, but it just felt okay-ish and more like some B-level network drama and we all expected more from this show.

What did you think of the Batwoman series premiere? Comment down your thoughts below and let us know.