DC Recap Round-Up 3, Week 1: Batwoman Begins!

11 Oct

Welcome back! It’s another season of superhero shows, which means another round of the DC Recap Round-Up has begun! Even though Legends of Tomorrow isn’t due back until early next year (just in time to be part of the big Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover), we got a full plate of recaps for this week, such as the return of The Flash, Supergirl, Black Lightning, and the arrival of Batwoman! Lots of catching up to do, so let’s jump right into it…

“Into The Void”

It’s been four months since all that drama that was Nora Allen got wiped out of existence, and Team Flash has been occupied with some changes and some weirdness, not among them future speedster villain Godspeed appearing...four times, as four different amnesiac people! Then of course, there’s a somehow more pressing bit of weirdness to solve, being small black holes appearing at random and threatening the city! The connection is inventor Chester Runk, who inadvertently created a black hole, and as the Team discovers, his consciousness is trapped in those black holes. So how do they save Chester’s mind and stop those black holes before they get worse?

Well, besides upgrading Barry’s suit to survive going into a black hole (yeah, GOING INTO A BLACK HOLE), he can retrieve Chester’s consciousness as energy and put it back into his body, which will stop the black holes. Look, I don’t understand it all either, but Queen’s “Flash Gordon” theme was playing over it, and it seems to have worked. Things seem okay until The Monitor shows up to tell Barry and Iris that timeframe for the Flash to disappear has moved up to…December…of this year! And even worse, if the universe is going to be saved, The Flash MUST DIE! DUH DUH DUHHHHH!

It’s FLASH! AH-AAAAAA!

–We meet Ramsey Rosso, an old acquaintance of Caitlin, who is interested in using dark matter to cure diseases. And last we see, this rather obsessive doctor uses himself as a guinea pig to…likely not good results if that gunk coming out of his arm is any indication.

–Also, Caitlin lets Killer Frost start taking the driver’s seat for a while to have something resembling a life. Plus she’s got a new supersuit from Cisco, so all’s good for Frost.

–Barry and Iris aren’t completely over losing Nora, but on the good side, Barry did retrieve that jacket of Nora’s from that black hole it got sucked into earlier while he was in there.

–Downside of not having Vibe powers? Cisco has to either take the STAR Labs van or get a ride from Cecile to a date like a sucker.

–I’m actually rewatching this episode just to note the hilarious live chat on Chester’s web stream. Pretty sure this audience wasn’t expecting to see a host have a scary encounter with a miniature black hole!

–The “Flash Gordon” theme from Queen. I still cannot believe that happened.

–“Did you know ‘yacht’ is not pronounced ‘YAKHT’?”

–“WHAT UP PARTY PEOPLE!!!”

“Event Horizon”

It’s been a month since we last checked in on everyone, so let’s just briefly see where we are: Kara’s about to win a Pulitzer for her exposing the whole Lex Luthor thing last season, Brainy and Nia are a couple, as are Alex and Kelly, J’onn is teaching judo to kids, and what else? Oh yeah, Lena is dealing with learning Kara lies to her about being Supergirl by killing her in countless VR simulations. But in case you didn’t think that was passive-aggressive enough, Lena goes a step further by selling off CatCo to a big tech conglomerate whose journalistic aims are more clickbait than actual journalism. Add to that, she is considering leaking Supergirl’s identity on the night Kara is to receive the Pulitzer Prize! And yes, Kara still hasn’t told Lena about that whole Supergirl thing yet.

BUT, on the night of the Pulitzer gala, Kara finally breaks down and admits it to Lena, which stops Lena from sending out that explosive expose from going out to CatCo. The problem is, Lena is not entirely through with her little campaign of Kara yet, wanting to use her to unknowingly help her in big future project (it involves computers). The big Lena-less menace this episode is Midnight, an alien who can create black holes and feeds on death being pulled out of the Phantom Zone by a mystery shapeshifter to seek revenge on the person who put her there, J’onn. After Midnight is sent back to the Phantom Zone, J’onn runs into the shapeshifter behind this and it’s…a Martian claiming to be his brother! J’onn doesn’t remember having a brother, but considering this mystery Martian was brought here by The Monitor, I smell some parallel reality screwiness going on.

And Kara has a new costume. With pants. That’s really the big thing you need to know.

Supergirl: another convert to superheroes whose costumes grow out of nowhere. Nano machine costumes are big in 2019.

–James is a little flustered by learning he got demoted because of the CatCo buyout (well, when you break up with Lena, what do you expect?) and the boss’ new policy of clickbait journalism, so…he quits! James is leaving the show this season, but how and to what is becoming a bit more clearer now.

–Kelly is now working at the same company that bought out CatCo, and they have virtual reality contact lenses which I’m sure will not be perverted into some kind of evil before the season’s over.

–Andrea Rojas, the owner of Obsidian North (who bought out CatCo) apparently went to boarding school with Lena, and…I can’t help but think something else happened between Andrea and Lena based on how clinical they discuss restarting a “relationship”.

–Nia and Brainy finally kiss, which…awwww.

–Also, a very quick development to end the episode: an in-hiding Eve Tessmacher gets kidnapped. As you may remember, Leviathan is watching.

–“Pants!”

–“How did you guys change so fast?”

“The Book of Occupation, Chapter One: Birth of The Blackbird”

It’s been a month since all that metahuman pod stuff happened, and well, things haven’t been going well in Freeland. The whole city is under martial law, the military is screening and imprisoning metahumans, and the Pierce family isn’t faring much better. Jefferson and Lynn are being held in containment, Anissa is busy fighting crime and saving metahumans from the government as a new hero called Blackbird, and Jennifer is needing to a way to expel her powers because they are causing her pain the longer she’s unable to use them. Agent Odell informs the Pierce parents they have to remain in holding for the foreseeable future after a Markovian attack on the holding facility puts the entire city into lockdown.

But as can be expected, Odell is full of secrets of his own, being revealed when he interrogates the imprisoned (and rapidly aging thanks to lack of serum) Tobias. Odell’s true purpose is to collect all these metahumans in Freeland, turn them into weapons, and dispose of any loose ends. The one thing he is really looking for though is that mystery briefcase Tobias had to awaken the pod kids because of what else it has. Tobias says he doesn’t know where it is, and he might not be lying, because we see where the briefcase is: on a nightstand next to the resurrected (again!) Lala! Also, Anissa finds herself captured at the government’s holding facility, and Jefferson can now see through walls, so we got lots of spinning plates at play.

Black Lightning and family have seen better days.

–Really nice opening montage for the season, as we see several metahumans (including Jefferson) be interrogated and prodded for information about themselves. Besides showing in one case how Islamaphobia affected one metahuman’s powers, it made clear we got some chaos brewing with keeping all these people in prolonged containment like this. Still being topical, and I like it, Black Lightning.

–The ASA’s point man, Commander Williams, besides being a metahuman who can mimic the powers of whoever he touches, pretty much threatens Henderson at gunpoint to announce a curfew. Can’t blame Henderson for punching Williams in the face after threatening him the way he does.

–Odell goes one step further to being the baddie of this season when he uses that metahuman kid who can make people tell the truth to interrogate Tobias…and then poisons the kid’s food! Although I wonder why if he’s meant to round up metahumans at the Preisdent’s request, why did he even made the deal with Jefferson and Lynn to let their kids run free?

–Gambi is still alive after that scorching he took in the season finale, helping the Pierce siblings any way he can. Also, he gave Anissa her own JARVIS!

–Anissa is still trying to keep tabs on Grace’s activities (one of which involves turning into a tiger that mauls some A.S.A. goons), but finds time to hook up with a Internet journalist woman. We’ll see if this is just a fling or not.

–“Only enhancements I got is hypertension and type two diabetes!”

“Pilot”

We meet Kate Kane, a woman training out in the Arctic (?), and a woman with her share of issues. Among them: losing her sister and mother as a child in a bridge accident that Batman (yeah, that Batman) attempted to help prevent; dropping out of military school when her relationship with another cadet, Sophie, was exposed; and spending the last few years training to join her father’s security company in Gotham, The Crows, who have filled the void left by Batman since he vanished three years ago. She leaves her training when she gets the news that Sophie, now working as part of The Crows, has been kidnapped by Alice, a new crime boss in Gotham who has a beef with Kate’s dad, Jacob.While Jacob is not okay with Kate helping out in this matter, she goes out on her own to find Sophie, using the resources of her absentee cousin…Bruce Wayne! It’s not long before she figures out Bruce is Batman, and starts using his technology (and eventually his suit) to fight Alice and save her ex-girlfriend.

Kate wears the Bat-suit (a bit more form fitted for a woman, of course) and arrives to save Sophie and stop Alice’s mad act of terrorism meant to kill Jacob and countless others. Her appearance sparks up the belief Batman is back in Gotham, and Kate decides it may be her fate to start wearing the cape and cowl in her cousin’s absence (maybe with a red wig to help differentiate her from her inspiration). Alice escapes, but later on, Kate starts looking at some of Alice’s weapons dropped at the scene and makes a terrifying discovery: Alice may be Kate’s presumed dead sister! That Alice has a photo of the Kane sisters as kids and wants them both to rule Gotham pretty much tells you we got a lot of family squabbling about to go down.

Batwoman: she’s still working on the whole “don’t make myself look like Batman from a distance” thing, but she’ll get there.

–The twist of Kate and Alice being sisters goes back to the comics, as does why Kate leaves military school. However, one massive change in Batwoman’s origin from page to screen is Kate’s mom and sister were supposedly killed in an kidnapping by terrorists gone wrong, as opposed to falling into a river off a bridge.

–There is one big snafu in Kate returning to save Sophie, because Kate finds out Sophie is married…to a guy. Well that’s all kinds of awkward.

–Poor Luke Fox. He’s just tasked to take care of all that Batman gear in his absence, and then Bruce’s cousin pretty much takes over the joint with little difficulty. I’m sure he’ll be less reticent and more helpful in the future.

–I didn’t really mention Kate’s stepmom, Catherine, and her step-sister, Mary. Catherine seems like she’s possibly in the Moira Queen mold, and Mary runs a makeshift clinic for the downtrodden. Okay. We’ll see what that turns into.

–Alice really burns Kate in their first encounter, when suggesting Jacob considers Sophie more a daughter than Kate is. That we learn later Jacob didn’t want Kate to join The Crows but take a cushy Army desk job seems evidence to that.

–That Bruce didn’t intentionally mean to have Kate’s mom and sister fall to their end like that is made easier to take when we learn he just didn’t have time to realize the car he was securing from falling over was poorly made. He safety tests his gear. Doesn’t explain yet why he’s gone missing.

–“Password’s still ‘Alfred’?”

NEXT TIME: Barry tries to deal with his potential fate in The Flash, J’onn faces secrets from his past in Supergirl, Anissa tries to escape the A.S.A. in Black Lightning, and Batwoman starts learning to be a hero!