Welcome back to Gotham! The city’s own paragon of courage Kate Kane defends Gotham as Batwoman, but her life has been difficult. Not only does she have to find Lucius Fox’s journal (again,) she also has to save Luke in the process. So don your cape, grab your sardonic teen tech support fill in, and join us as we give you five thoughts on Batwoman season 1, episode 19 “A Secret Kept From All the Rest.”
1. Trouble brewing on every team.
After some key betrayals and missed opportunities, it’s safe to say that tensions are high for everyone involved in Batwoman, which highlights some tensions that have been brewing all season in “A Secret Kept From All the Rest.” The first is Alice and Mouse. Mouse has long been advocating for Alice to leave her sister behind and instead focus on them being safe and happy. Mouse pleads with Alice to see the benefits of their situation. They are safe, comfortable, well-fed, potentially even happy. They’ve found their Wonderland. But Alice continues to obsess and it’s clear that Mouse is becoming less loyal to his friend.
But the tension on the main team is what really drives the plot of this week’s episode. After a blowup between Kate and Luke about Julia and her true intentions, Luke angrily storms out and is captured by Alice and company to translate his father’s journal. The episode does a good job showing the importance of Luke to the team, with Kate having to recruit Parker Torres (much to the chagrin of Mary, who had to work hard for that spot on the team, damn it!) While by the end of the episode it seems that Alice and Mouse’s relationship is straining, Luke and Kate’s has only grown stronger. Luke is upset that Kate risked so much to save him, potentially taking away Gotham’s renewed sense of hope, but Kate stops him and gives him a hug. It’s a nice moment of tenderness in a pretty intense episode, showing how important they are in each other’s lives.
2. Hush shows the effectiveness of the show’s long game.
The back half of season one of Batwoman has been paying off stories introduced throughout the stories in various ways, but none more effectively than Tommy Elliot. Introduced way back in episode three, “Down, Down, Down,” he recently was reintroduced as a resident of Arkham, dealing with Alice for freedom from Gotham’s most notorious asylum. Elliot has become the bandaged villain Hush, doing Alice’s bidding in the hopes of getting a new face and starting a new life. (It seems pretty clear that Alice will keep him around as much as possible.) It was exciting to see how the show has transitioned from a “villain of the week” show to tell a much larger story.
It also should be said that Hush is just cool. Gabriel Mann is terrifying as Hush, which is even more impressive considering that he doesn’t have use of his face to convey his emotions. Rather, he uses a combination of weird and jerky movements and just crazy intensity in his voice which creates a character that almost doesn’t feel human. Hush also helps to escalate the growing tension between Alice and Mouse, acting ruthless to get his new face, making Mouse nervous. While he only arrived on the scene this week, Hush has made a big impact on the show, made even more impressive based on how long ago he was introduced.
3. Parker is back to provide levity (and act as an audience surrogate)
Alice is kidnapping codebreakers, hoping to crack Lucius Fox’s cipher and kill Batwoman. One of the potential victims is Parker Torres, the hacker from “How Queer Everything is Today!” Who not only knows Kate’s secret but was one of the major inspirations for Batwoman to come out of the closet. With Luke missing, she temporarily fills the role of tech support, though she is much more sardonic than Luke. The majority of the tension in “A Secret Kept From All the Rest” revolves around teams and friendships splintering, distrust rising in all corners of Gotham, but Parker helps to create some levity. While Mary is now a full-fledged member of the team, Parker’s introduction allows for some comical tension as Mary is eager to show her importance to the team as well. This actually also helps to find an important tool, Lucius’ decoding glasses.
Continued belowBut Parker is here for another reason, acting as something of an audience surrogate for the love triangle of Kate, Sophie, and Julia. She gives Kate the advice to let Sophie know how she truly feels, makes some light commentary as she watches security footage of a conversation between Kate and Sophie, and basically plays like something of an “anti-Luke.” Parker is fun, but sometimes her “teen speak” felt a little forced, which often detracted from her scenes. It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the team deals with their teen liaison.
4. Saving the good stuff for late.
I’m a fan of animation, specifically animated television series (you can check out my reviews of Marvel’s Spider-Man right here on this site!) The longer you watch animated tv, you begin to realize that in many cases these shows will choose to save their budget for the bigger flashier stuff they had planned in the latter bit of the season. It seems like Batwoman also adopted this strategy, this week giving us lots of exciting action in the suit! While every episode has at least one or two solid moments of Kate giving some well-executed badassery in the suit, it often felt like a limited resource.
To be fair to the show, many of these episodes justified and even benefited from limited costumed action, but after a while when watching a superhero show, you want to see the superhero. “A Secret Kept From All the Rest” provided some really exciting and intense moments throughout, but the highlight was the escape from Arkham after Alice let all the inmates run free and started a fire. The whole sequence was well shot, with easy to follow action and plenty of Batwoman fully costumes taking down opponents. As we approach the end, it was clear that they were saving the best super heroics for last.
5. Victory is bittersweet as new threats continue to emerge
Kate saves the day, gets Luke back, and their bond seems stronger than ever. But as always in Gotham, victories are short-lived and new threats always continue to emerge. Alice is back on the streets, now armed with the knowledge of how to kill the bat. Julia has put both her and Kate in danger, working for the woman who hired “The Rifle” to kill Kate, but has failed to retrieve the journal. But possibly the most dangerous is her own father, Jacob, has moved Batwoman from a nuisance or distraction to a serious threat. While Batwoman argues that she’s helping, Jacob doesn’t see it that way, that Arkham is proof that even the right intentions don’t always create the right results.
Who knows where things go from here, but it seems that Kate now has more to deal with than ever before, and each threat has the ability to make her defense of Gotham quite unpleasant.
So there we have it. Another top-notch episode in the back half of the freshman season. What did you think? Sound off below!
