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Batwoman (2019)
They're trying to convince us...(SPOILERS)
As I was reading the reviews for this show, I'll admit that I was a bit baffled that there were so many negative reviews for the first season, since by and large I did enjoy the first season. Granted, it wasn't my favorite Arrowverse show...it took itself a bit too seriously for that...but I liked the dynamic between Kate and Alice and the tension built in there. Plus, I just like Alice as a villain...the best villains are the ones with back stories as tragic as any hero's, as far as I'm concerned. And so, if I were rating the first season, I would have given it a 6/10: decent but definite room for improvement.
However, this review is about the second season, and as the lack of stars shows, I've been far from impressed. Admittedly, the way they handled Ruby Rose's departure wasn't too bad, all things considered: Kate's plane gets blown up, and they can't find her body...it's not the most elegant solution, but it did set up the main conflict of the season and left a possibility for Ruby to return if she wanted to, though that's probably not going to happen. So as far as that goes, the show didn't do too bad of a job.
However, there are two key issues that have drastically altered my opinion of the show. The first concerns the reactions and interactions between the returning cast and the new Batwoman, in particular Mary. Pretty much from the first episode of the new season and on, it seems like nearly half of Mary's screen time is used by the writers to try and convince us that Ryan Wilder, the new Batwoman, is worthy of inheriting the cowl from Kate. More than once, she gives long winded speeches about all Ryan's qualifications and why they...and we the audience...should accept her as the new Batwoman. The problem is, these speeches hardly feel organic, and as I said, it just feels like the writers are trying to "jedi-mind trick" us into accepting Ryan, even though as a character she isn't really all that interesting...the writers also trying to shoehorn a conflict between "new bats" and Alice by making it so that Alice killed Ryan's adoptive mother while for some reason leaving Ryan herself alive just seemed kind of lazy.
This leads us to the second issue with this season: the outlandish plot lines the writers started throwing at us. Granted, not ALL of them were bad...Tommy Elliott posing as a retuned Bruce Wayne made sense and fit with the overall theme of the show. Unfortunately, that's pretty much the only decent plot line. The whole subplot of Alice being trained as an assassin on an island by an ancient cult made absolutely no sense for her character. Like so many Bat-villains, she's a clinically insane person with an unhealthy obsession with a storybook character...the trained assassin thing didn't add anything to her story other than a questionable timeline for her appearance in Gotham during the first season. Likewise, the addition of Safiyah and her cult made little sense either...they're supposed to be cut off from the world to protect their cure-all flowers, and yet, they have access to all these resources connected to the outside world...they don't sell their miracle plants, so where do they get their money bat-writers? As I said, none of it made much sense.
I will point out that I haven't completely given up on the show yet. I'm hoping the introduction of Black Mask can turn it around a bit...they should have given Ryan her own villain like this from the beginning, instead of trying to force the connection between her and Alice. However, it's going to take a great deal of effort on the writers' part to try and salvage this show's crumbling infrastructure, and unfortunately, I don't think they'll be able to pull it off.