At first glance, with the soaring gothic skyscrapers of the Gotham skyline and the now iconic "bat" signal aimed at a perpetually cloudy night sky, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd seen it all before. But Batwoman, neither Batman nor Batgirl, manages to strike a fresh sound in a genre, generally, and a masthead, specifically, which has been creatively squeezed to the limit.
As we take our first hesitant steps in this iteration of Gotham we learn that Batman, alias billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne, has abandoned the city to its fate. And well he might. He probably got as tired of Batman movies and TV shows being recast and recycled as much as we did.
Ruby Rose as Batwoman.Credit:Warner Bros
In its wake is a city struggling under the weight of its crime, a corporate security company more or less doing the work of the local police force and the suggestion that this is a city on the verge of something, taking perilous steps back to normal society while teetering on the brink of a city-crippling crime wave.
Dougray Scott's Jacob Kane is the show's patriarchal figure, a sort of Bruce Wayne-lite, whose company's technical and security expertise has filled the city with cameras in an attempt to demonstrate to the people of Gotham that all they need is a bit of privatisation and not a leather-costume clad, winged avenger soaring across their night sky. Little does he know.
Kane's daughter Kate (Ruby Rose) comes into the frame as a rebellious former soldier who took a stand on the right side of the don't-ask-don't-tell policy, even if it cost her her army career and the love of her life, Sophie Moore (Meagan Tandy). Sophie made what Kate considers to be a bad call, stayed in the army and ended up married and with a career working for Kate's father.
For the television audience who watched last year's Elseworlds crossover between all of the DC Comics television shows, in which Rose's Batwoman made her debut, it is clear that this Batwoman predates that one. This series begins as an origin story and we follow Kate as she takes her first steps into the ruins of the old Batcave and dons her first costume, a stitch-job on one of Batman's old ones.
Rose acquits herself well in the part, bringing a measure of her own real-life experience.
Getting things right here is almost a trick of the light. Rose acquits herself well in the part, bringing a measure of her own real-life experience to the sexual complexity of the character, and also some of her real-life physicality, kicking and fighting her way through a number of complex stunt sequences.
In the end, the brilliance of the Batwoman story is that while most comic books would suggest there is a vast backstory that comes with the character, the principal tent poles of the Batwoman story are the same as those which recur in all of the Batman stories broadly: the darkness of Gotham, the pain of a child losing a parent or parents and the comfort that is subsequently found in the dual identity.
Those were the first building blocks of the Batman story some seven decades ago – a young boy, orphaned after the murder of his family who escapes to the bat-infested caves beneath his family's gothic pile – and they are replicated in a sense here, the story of a young woman scarred after surviving an accident which killed her mother and sister and struggling to contain a rage that needs to be channelled into something positive.
That positivity is found under the now boarded-up Wayne Tower – side note: did no one in this town think it odd that Bruce Wayne and Batman vanished on the same day? No, come on, really? – and some of the pilot episode's most exquisite sequences are those in which Kane explores the Batcave while its guardian, loyal Wayne family security guard Luke Fox (Camrus Johnson), looks on in nervous horror.
Their friendship, in particular, sparkles in the pilot and is hopefully an inkling of a fabulously modern twist on the Batman-and-Alfred friendship, which which was so central to the Batman story.
Batwoman is sharp and fun, full of mythology and unexpectedly easy to explore. The show's villainess, Rachel Skarsten's Wonderland gang leader Alice, is magnificently malignant, a sort of Harley Quinn-lite in the best Batman tradition of properly mad villains. And she comes with a whopper of a twist that, in a franchise where such twists tend to travel like semi-trailers through the story, lands with a genuine surprise.
Caroline Dries and Greg Berlanti have developed a Batwoman story which manages to be both refreshingly new and nicely placed within the larger mythology. The Bat-touches are gorgeous. And Colleen Atwood's costume for Batwoman – seen in the Elseworlds crossover episodes and hopefully seen in Batwoman soon – is a marvel to behold, with silver-black stitching and a titian coif that is a bright red as a Tattooine sun. Well, one of 'em at least.
Batwoman, Tuesdays, FOX8 (Foxtel), 8.30pm
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