Batwoman

Batwoman really sings when it’s building the adversarial relationship between Kate and Alice, an opposite-sides-of-the-coin situation with similar vibes to Batman and the Joker. Skarsten is having a blast alternating between whimsy and dangerous menace, and her villain feels like the only performance that’s been lived in for more than two episodes. Better yet, it’s bouncing off of Skarsten’s unpredictable energy that Rose’s surly, tamped down performance works best.

Batwoman sometimes drops the ball. It’s a brand name with several new twists. But it also can seem like another one off the assembly line.

The series doesn't exactly hit the ground running, and appears short on arrows in its quiver, to borrow from another DC-CW staple. If that dynamic doesn't improve, other than the most loyal acolytes of the DC universe, it's a poor candidate for committing many more nights to it, dark or otherwise.

[Batwoman] has a generic quality — sufficiently well executed, with touches of quiet wit, but tinny and lacking in personality or excitement overall. It’s a superheroics delivery system, most notable for its efficiency.

Everything in Batwoman—the plots, the dialogue, the characterizations—is very comic-booky, in the worst sense of the term.

Everyone involved, of course, might fare better if they had a decent script, proper lighting, well-choreographed fight scenes and sets that didn’t look as if they had been nailed together from whatever was left after Michael Keaton left the building in 1989. ... For now, though, pure and perfect trash is what we need – and Batwoman provides.