BATWOMAN Discussion Thread.. Javicia Leslie is new Batwoman (Update: Luke Fox is BatWing 6/8/2021) Bring on MORE Assorted White TEARS!!

[playahaitian]

Batwoman stars Ruby Rose and Rachel Skarsten on what makes Alice 'so terrifying'

By Chancellor Agard
October 01, 2019 at 03:40 PM EDT
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DOUGRAY SCOTT AND RACHEL SKARSTEN PREVIEW WHATS TO COME IN 'BATWOMAN'
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Fall TV

Batwoman
TYPE

• TV Show

NETWORK

• The CW

GENRE

• Superhero

A hero is only as good as their nemesis — and that’s especially true for the newest Arrowverse vigilante.

Batwoman follows Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) as she returns home to Gotham City after her ex-girlfriend is kidnapped by the Wonderland Gang. To save Sophie (Meagan Tandy), Kate becomes the red-haired Batwoman, which brings her face-to-face with the gang’s capricious leader, Alice (Rachel Skarsten).

“She’s just ruthless. She’s a sociopath,” Rose says of the Joker to her Batman. “What makes Alice so terrifying is that you can’t tell if she’s 100 percent bad or evil.”

Adds Skarsten: “They’re both very, very strong, very independent, very intelligent, extremely capable, both intellectually and physically females. So you have them on opposing sides, but you don’t know who can outwit the other, who can out-punch the other. It’s a toss-up. So I think that makes them amazing, amazing foes for one another. But then of course there is also some history that will come into it that I think complicates everything, but also feeds into them being great nemeses for each other.”

KIMBERLEY FRENCH/THE CW
Skarsten relishes playing Batwoman’s riddle-loving big bad because she is such a mercurial character. “You so rarely get the opportunity to make a meal of a character,” she says. “Alice is all over the place. One minute she’s murdering someone, and the next minute she’s making a joke, and then she’s crying, and then she’s asking if you have a burger.”

But beneath Alice’s enigmatic exterior is a tragic and potentially sympathetic backstory. “Getting to motivate all the bad things that she does from that place, it really makes her this redeemable character,” Skarsten says. “I think people are actually going to surprise themselves and root for her.”

Batwoman may feel otherwise.

Batwoman premieres Sunday, Oct. 6, at 8 p.m. ET on the CW.

 

[playahaitian]

Rachel Maddow Enters the Arrow-verse With Batwoman Role
By Jordan Crucchiola@jorcru

Photo: Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

The bat signal went up and Rachel Maddow has responded. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the star MSNBC anchor will lend her voice to to Vesper Fairchild, a gotham city news personality whose broadcast persona is wildly different from Maddow herself. “We consider Vesper Fairchild to be the sardonic Voice of Gotham,” Batwoman showrunner Caroline Dries said in a statement to THR. “In addition to Rachel’s interest in Batwoman, we thought she’d be the perfect casting choice because her own hard-hitting journalism wildly contrasts Vesper’s penchant for snark, gossip and criticism of female superheroes.” Gossip! Snark! Rachel Maddow!

The author and journalist is a fan of the Batwoman comics, and even wrote the introduction to Greg Rucka’s 2010 deluxe hardcover edition of his Batwoman graphic novel, called Elegy. In addition to being bitchy, another way in which Vesper Fairchild differs from Maddow is that the character previously had an affair with Stephen Amell’s Arrow character within the Arrow-verse that Ruby Rose’s Batwoman exists. So now you can go, “Huh. Rachel Maddow and Stephen Amell?” But it sounds like the newswoman had a great time putting on her CW character and playing against type.

 

[playahaitian]

not good

@fonzerrillii @ViCiouS

Yall appear to be right

Batwoman Is a Lifeless Adaptation in Search of a Hero
By Angelica Jade Bastién@angelicabastien

Photo: Elizabeth Morris/The CW

Near the end of Batwoman’s pilot episode, airing Sunday, Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) stands on the edge of a building overlooking the city she’s decided to protect, her cape billowing behind her in the night sky. An image clearly meant to evoke awe and grandeur, it instead hits like a thud — in part because of the cheap-looking costuming, haphazard choreography, and unconvincing potboiler dialogue that leads to this moment, but mostly because of all the wasted potential it embodies.

The new CW series — set within the Arrow universe, after star Ruby Rose’s debut as the character in last year’s crossover event — broadly pulls its story from the 2010 graphic novel Batwoman: Elegy (by Greg Rucka, with art by J.H. Williams III and colors by Dave Stewart). Kate Kane is a West Point dropout, having lost both her Army career and girlfriend Sophie (Meagan Tandy) in one fell swoop after refusing to hide that she’s a lesbian. As amber-toned flashbacks dictate, she also has tragedy in her past, having lost her mother and sister in a car accident from which Batman couldn’t save them. The show picks up three years after Bruce Wayne’s disappearance from Gotham, where Kate returns after hearing of Sophie’s kidnapping at the hands of main villain Alice and her Wonderland gang. While navigating the dynamics of her blended family, Kate learns of Bruce’s secret identity and picks up the mantle in order to protect Gotham.

On the surface this story presents a lot of opportunity to question notions of familial loyalty, identity, and trauma, but based on the first two episodes provided to critics, Batwoman doesn’t seem so sure of its own existence. In broadly adapting Elegy, the minds behind Batwoman — including creator and writer Caroline Dries and director Marcos Siega — leech out much of the story’s emotional bramble and intrigue. But even without considering the comics the show draws from, Batwoman offers scant pleasure that would separate it from the plethora of superhero stories saturating film and television today.

Going into Batwoman I wondered if the show would fall victim to Arrow’s problem of making Green Arrow into a Walmart-issued Batman, but the problem with Kate Kane isn’t that she’s been flattened into a watered-down version of Bruce Wayne. Rather, it’s that she exists too much in his shadow, with the leaden voice-over that drowns out the series taking its cues from the letters Kate writes Bruce. The show doesn’t seem to know how to handle Bruce’s absence, so he’s mentioned at every turn, making Kate feel less like a person with her own story than someone grafted onto his. Just as with Alice and the Wonderland gang — which are stripped of their supernatural and uncanny elements, making Alice come across as a grating Harley Quinn knockoff — Kate loses any sense of distinction that might make her approach to crime-fighting feel vibrant or intriguing. She’s just another street-level vigilante with no personality or style of her own to set her apart.

Batwoman’s inability to step out of Batman’s shadow wouldn’t be such a problem if anything else in the series clicked into place, but unfortunately there is little to hold onto. The show is as muddled visually as it is narratively, with heavy-handed, honey-hued flashbacks bursting into focus, sometimes without good reason, before the present-day scenes can gain any rhythm. Gotham is too clean, not lived-in enough to sell its storied history. The visual palette is all muddled grays or treacly, warmly lit flashbacks. The fight scenes lack tension and dynamism, relying on quick cuts and multiple angles to manufacture a false sense of energy.

There’s also a missing spark of chemistry among the cast. The scenes meant to show the connection between Sophie and Kate feel awkward, and Dougray Scott and Rose can’t sell their characters’ tense father-daughter dynamic. The flimsy backbone of the series is the push and pull between Kate and Alice, but a crucial scene in the second episode that sees the two characters playing off each other — affected by a reveal that they’re closer than Kate originally thought — lacks the verve necessary for the emotional throughline to work.

Batwoman clearly has a lot of kinks to work out based on these early episodes, but there is one problem that won’t be so easy to fix: Ruby Rose. She perpetually squints her eyes in a poor approximation of a scowl meant to show how tough and edgy the character is, but it only highlights the extent to which the character’s cocky bravado and thorny moral considerations have been sanded off in favor of something more easily recognizable. There’s little going on behind Rose’s narrowed eyes, making the role feel more like posturing than a lived-in character. It’s a textureless, bland, hollow performance that mutes the character’s potential to evolve into something more intriguing. There’s still a chance that Batwoman can grow more visually inventive and narratively dynamic from here, but if the heroine at its center isn’t strong enough, all the potential in the world won’t be enough to hold the series together.

 

[TENT]

End of Arrowverse completely.

 

[TimRock]

oh they got Luke Fox in here. Hope he doesn't turn out like Mr. Terrific.

 

[GuessWho21212]

I'm trying to give this show a shot but it's got two things going against it. One, that stupid ass Party City red wig Batwoman wears, I know it's an attempt to stay true to the comic book canon, but it just looks silly in live-action. And two, CW is setting this series up as the heir apparent to Arrow which are some big shoes to fill. The Arrow pilot prided itself on demonstrating the technically accurate way to break someone's neck with your bare hands, do they really think Ruby Rose will be able to live up to that level of fight choreography?

 

[TimRock]

I'm trying to give this show a shot but it's got two things going against it. One, that stupid ass Party City red wig Batwoman wears, I know it's an attempt to stay true to the comic book canon, but it just looks silly in live-action. And two, CW is setting this series up as the heir apparent to Arrow which are some big shoes to fill. The Arrow pilot prided itself on demonstrating the technically accurate way to break someone's neck with your bare hands, do they really think Ruby Rose will be able to live up to that level of fight choreography?

make that 3, the black chic......you'll see.

 

[DaAssWatcher]

Show trailer was feminism on steroids and opioids. That dyke bitch can't act for shit and isn't convincing at all as a super hero. CW network has become apart of this annoying liberal sjw culture that has sprung up in the last 5 years where transgenders are real women and women and men are physical equals.

 

[TimRock]

So the black chic is gay obviously, but is no longer with Batwoman. She moves on to a white man. She can switch to a man, but can't switch to black. Come the fuck on. Really?

 

[HAR125LEM]

Watched the pilot at its NYC Comic-Con panel yesterday.
And again when I got home last night.

Like some of You,
I had my issues with it.
Some of the shit felt forced.
But I feel it still has some potential.
Guess we'll have to see down the pike.

 

[DWBass]

Show is lame. Won't make it to season 2.

 

[playahaitian]

The actors on here are completely devoid of chemistry ..

Of any kind.

 

[playahaitian]

I'm trying to give this show a shot but it's got two things going against it. One, that stupid ass Party City red wig Batwoman wears, I know it's an attempt to stay true to the comic book canon, but it just looks silly in live-action. And two, CW is setting this series up as the heir apparent to Arrow which are some big shoes to fill. The Arrow pilot prided itself on demonstrating the technically accurate way to break someone's neck with your bare hands, do they really think Ruby Rose will be able to live up to that level of fight choreography?

This is a very good observation...

It felt rushed to me. The bat man references were so forced...

They had a daredevil hallway / luke cage no cuts straight ass whipping potential intro and never got there...

The lead isn't clicking.

But i see a whole lot of potential they COULD fix this. But it already needs recasting.

 

[ThaBurgerPimp]

Show is lame. Won't make it to season 2.

UNLESS(key word) DC changes up that whole "such and such character is off limits" bs and figure out some way to include more villains from Batman's rogues gallery,up to AND including Joker & Harley..then when the next big crossover event comes along have Batman himself show up

 

[playahaitian]

UNLESS(key word) DC changes up that whole "such and such character is off limits" bs and figure out some way to include more villains from Batman's rogues gallery,up to AND including Joker & Harley..then when the next big crossover event comes along have Batman himself show up

^^^^^

 

[TimRock]

UNLESS(key word) DC changes up that whole "such and such character is off limits" bs and figure out some way to include more villains from Batman's rogues gallery,up to AND including Joker & Harley..then when the next big crossover event comes along have Batman himself show up

I can't take another Joker.

 

[ansatsusha_gouki]

UNLESS(key word) DC changes up that whole "such and such character is off limits" bs and figure out some way to include more villains from Batman's rogues gallery,up to AND including Joker & Harley..then when the next big crossover event comes along have Batman himself show up

I don't understand,how DC use this excuse to not have certain characters on one of their shows....They had no problem with having two diffeeent versions of the Flash out at the same time but got rid of Suicide Squad on the Arrow to make room for the movie.

As,much I thought the Suicide Squad movie was okay the one on Arrow was light years better....Hell,they even had Harley Quinn on Arrow in a deleted scene..

Whoever's making decisions at Warner Bros at the time was a fucking idiot.

 

[yaBoi]

i checked out when they made her a dyke

 

[playahaitian]

i checked out when they made her a dyke

to be fair...she been gay (or bisexual) in the comics.

I don't mind all that

its the fact that her so called long lost love has absolutely NO CHEMISTRY with her.

 

[Empire]

I’m going to give it 5 episodes. Two episodes in & it’s not looking good

 

[knightmelodic]

There have been lots of shows that have had lackluster first episodes and turned out to be good or even great, once they hit their stride. So, I was trying to give this one the benefit of the doubt. Yes, it was cliche af. Yes, the acting was flat at best, poor at worst. The plot was written by an eight-year-old and the story was choppy and forced.
But worst of all was that goddamned helmet, headpiece, cowl whatever the fuck it is. Man, the chick looks like The Great Gazoo with that monstrosity on her head. To me, she's not very sexy from jump, but having that watermelon on her head takes away whatever sexy was left. And let's face it, sex has to be the ingredient to bring eyes back until folks get involved in the plot if they ever manage to find one. I mean, the presumed-dead sister is now evil card? Seriously?

Look at the size of this motherfucker. I would have strangled her too just on gp.

Submitted for your approval

 

[fonzerrillii]

Watched the first episode and you know what...

Not half bad

 

[fonzerrillii]

Hold the front door.. Wonder Woman exists in the arrowverse.

Also..

Episode 2 is kind of boring so far. But Ruby Rose is acting much better on this show then when she was in the elseworlds arc

 

[fonzerrillii]

I do agree that the uniform needs work... but we alll know that eventually the suit is going to get a upgrade

 

[chrislee]

Forgot to record the first 2 episodes. From the comments/posts I'm guessing its not looking good so far?

 

[playahaitian]

Watched the first episode and you know what...

Not half bad

Its NOT bad

And i feel like all these shows much like og Arrow need time to find their legs...

However.

The lack of chemistry among ALL involved is a really bad sign.

Its like every actor is on a different show

The vibe is off

And they just RUSHING to get going...

Take a breathe

Let us meet these people.

She hated Bats all her adult life and got over it in like 3 minutes?

 

[playahaitian]

Hold the front door.. Wonder Woman exists in the arrowverse.

Also..

Episode 2 is kind of boring so far. But Ruby Rose is much better in on this show then she was in the elseworlds arc

I feel THAT was the best moment

She is NOT a bad actress but a young katee sacoff wiuld have KILLED this role

Hell the current Black Canary would too her sex appeal is so incredible damn near had Dig going to HR off accident.

 

[ThaBurgerPimp]

Hold the front door.. Wonder Woman exists in the arrowverse.

And i bet,just like Batman(or Green Lantern for that matter) we will never see her on screen

 

[playahaitian]

And i bet,just like Batman(or Green Lantern for that matter) we will never see her on screen

I don't know with crisis they about to bring the kitchen sink...

So maybe they finally got they stuff together

 

[BATMAN]

They do have a Joker's daughter character out, they may explore that role. Alice may take up that role though.
Ruby is not the greatest actress and in some scenes you can really see it but I'll give it a shot.
Some of the scenes, they must have CGI'd from Dark Knight. Couple of the street scenes look like where bats and The Joker had their standoff.

 

[fonzerrillii]

Its NOT bad

And i feel like all these shows much like og Arrow need time to find their legs...

However.

The lack of chemistry among ALL involved is a really bad sign.

Its like every actor is on a different show

The vibe is off

And they just RUSHING to get going...

Take a breathe

Let us meet these people.

She hated Bats all her adult life and got over it in like 3 minutes?

Dude I was saying the same thing.... about the speed.

It’s odd to see a series rush through story reveals like this..

I mean we are two episodes in and basically everyone knows that Alice is Kate’s sister and Alice and Ol girl already know that Kate is Batman.

We also already know that the stepmother is hiding shit.

But the thing that is killing me is that Kate is already proficient with the bat gear. I mean.... just cause you have been training doesn’t mean that you already able to be Batman.

I do like the fact that Lucious Fox’s son is straight up trying to tell her that he doesn’t know how use half of the shit that Batman has.

 

[mrdiego2020]

i would NEVER watch this crap.bad reviews everywhere plus the trailer runned me the wrong way to the point i wont watch it.

 

[veritech]

i am surprised so many of you are watching.

i have given up on cw super hero shows. when they brought laurel's ass back in arrow i was over it.

legends. gtfowtbs. supergirl. omg awful.

and in every episode of flash there is a scene where one character literally has to say, "i will go talk to him/her" or "can i talk to you."

these shows were fresh and ground breaking at one point. now they might as well be 90210 with super hero back drops.

 

[playahaitian]

Dude I was saying the same thing.... about the speed.

It’s odd to see a series rush through story reveals like this..

I mean we are two episodes in and basically everyone knows that Alice is Kate’s sister and Alice and Ol girl already know that Kate is Batman.

We also already know that the stepmother is hiding shit.

But the thing that is killing me is that Kate is already proficient with the bat gear. I mean.... just cause you have been training doesn’t mean that you already able to be Batman.

I do like the fact that Lucious Fox’s son is straight up trying to tell her that he doesn’t know how use half of the shit that Batman has.

^^^^^^^^^

BOOM

It feels like they don't have confidence in they show...or the AUDIENCE sticking around.

The Alice reveal is supposed to be at the end of the season or mid season finale at the EARLIEST!

And while do NOT think Alice is REALLY her sister it was just too much to soon

and THAT also messed with the chemistry!

I'm not saying you need to do the SAME things in EVERY superhero show, but damn TRAINING MONTAGE IS A STAPLE for a DAMN good reason

It doesn't make SENSE she is so proficient in using bat tech

the stepmother thing is cliche

Her and the ex have ZERO chemistry

and they REALLY squandered a HUGE opportunity for Rose to get some big fan support across the board with the just OK wannabe "gauntlet" fight scene.

If they could have concentrated MORE on just the ONE scene?

She would have gotten a lot more fan support out the gate.

 

[Empire]

But the thing that is killing me is that Kate is already proficient with the bat gear. I mean.... just cause you have been training doesn’t mean that you already able to be Batman.

I do like the fact that Lucious Fox’s son is straight up trying to tell her that he doesn’t know how use half of the shit that Batman has.

I HATE that! It took Bruce years to to learn how to use his weapons perfectly but she achieved expert level in less than a day. I would give it a pass if they showed her falling a couple of time but COME THE FUCK ON!

I don’t know who that Luke Fox is on the show but it’s for damn sure not the Luke Fox from the comics. I also can’t stand that he’s mild & meek. I think he’s going to end up like Jax’s from Legends of Tomorrow. Everyone around him will be getting tail, EXCEPT him!