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Camrus Johnson as Luke Fox and Nicole Kang as Mary Hamilton — Photo: Shane Harvey/The CW

Batwoman is shaping up to be a pretty fun addition to the CW-verse. It had a rough start, as it tried to be a direct Arrow-replacement. The first few episodes were filled with flashbacks and overwrought narration. In the past few weeks though, the show has embraced its comic book origins. We’ve seen Batwoman deal with the direct fallout from “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” and we just came off two fun villain-of-the-week episodes. The show’s in a strong place now and it can carry that momentum into the main season arc.

Batwoman is Gotham’s superhero now. We see her patrolling the streets at night, saving a woman from a real sketchy dude following her. The show even finds some humor in the scene when Batwoman shrugs off bullets, looking more annoyed than anything else. As soon as leaves him unconscious in the alley, the bat signal appears in the sky. It’s not official business, though. Alice turned it on, and left Dr. Cartwright for her, unconscious. She also left a note instructing Kate to ask about “Mommy Dearest.” Kate decides that Batwoman isn’t the best person to handle that. She ties him up in her bar and calls her dad in to help with the interrogation.

John Emmet Tracy as August Cartwright and Debra Mooney as Mabel Cartwright — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

He doesn’t give up that information right away though. Instead, he tells them what he’s done. You’ll remember last week that he hooked his son up to Scarecrow’s fear toxin. He tells them he did that to turn Alice into Mouse’s greatest fear. Mouse thinks she’s dead, so anyone who looks like her must be out to get him. It works, too. Alice shows up to rescue Mouse, but he attacks her and hooks her up to the fear toxin. As she breaths it in, her worst fear appears before her. As Cartwright boasts to Jacob and Kate, her worst fear is his mother. That’s what “Mommy Dearest” meant.

This episode gets back to the flashbacks, but they work much better than they did at the beginning of the season. In the first few episodes, the flashbacks dramatized information we already knew. They were boring, soap opera-y exposition. Here, we’re learning new information about Alice. And it’s a real rough watch. It turns out “Mommy Dearest” is the person Mouse and Alice referred to as the Queen of Hearts as children. She came to live with Cartwright, and acted sweet enough at first. Soon, the abuse started. She would beat Alice and poor scalding tea on her hands if it was made wrong. The show has tried to make us feel bad for Alice before, and this is the most successful it’s been. It’s actually horrifying seeing what she did to Alice, and how scared of her Alice still is. We’re just as scared as she is when the old woman appears in front of her, without a face, berating her about her hair. It’s almost worse when another fear takes over. The fear that her father and sister will decide she’s not worth saving and abandon her.

Ava Sleeth as Young Alice Nicholas Holmes as Young Johnny — Photo: Colin Bentley/The CW

Back at Kate’s bar, Jacob left to try and find Alice. Cartwright gets one had free and uses a glass to cut his own throat rather than give up the location. He thinks Kate is going to kill him anyway, given what he did to her sister. In a surprisingly gruesome scene, Kate calls Mary for instructions on how to close the wound. Without a needle and thread on hand, she staples it together. And they show it. I mean, the guy deserves all the pain he gets, but I didn’t expect this show to get that bloody. She cuts a deal with him, promising to let him go if he tells her where Alice is. He does and she calls Jacob, who saves Alice from the effects of the toxin just in time to stop her from killing herself with a shard of glass.

The show really makes you feel for Alice in this episode. Before, she was a complicated villain. Now that we’ve seen the extent of her abuse, it’s hard not to root for her a little bit. When her dad bursts into the room and saves her, acts like a father to her for the first time all season, I’ll admit the show got me. I started tearing up just a little. After all we saw, this was the reunion I wanted to see more than anything. Then we get the real story of Mommy dearest. Alice didn’t mean Cartwright’s mother. At the beginning of the episode, we saw a flashback where Beth and Kate’s mother gave them both necklaces to match her earrings. One day, Alice noticed Cartwright’s mother wearing those earrings. She checks the locked refrigerator she was never allowed to open, and finds her mother’s head. Cartwright had been saving it, as his mother demanded he give it to her. That’s when we see Alice’s first kill. She knocks off the top of Cartwright’s mother’s oxygen tank and uses it to burn her alive. It’s the only Alice kill I’ve been happy to see. Painful way to go, but she deserved every minute of it.

Rachel Skarsten as Alice and Dougray Scott as Jacob Kane — Photo: Shane Harvey/The CW

The episode ends in a real precarious place, though. Right as Alice was telling her dad about all that, Kate finds out too. She gets a call from Mary and Luke, who’ve been tracking the car Beth’s shooter drove. She figures out it was Cartwright. He mentions that Beth looked exactly like Alice, down to the necklace that matched the earrings. Kate demands to know how he knew about the earrings and starts choking him out. With all the trauma to his neck already, it’s enough to kill him. Jacob and Alice return and try resuscitate him, but it doesn’t work. Kate, like Alice, is now a murderer. Now they just have to bury the body. The same episode that Alice gets some small redemption, Kate gives into the darkness. Now, they’re in the same place, and that’s a super interesting, uncomfortable note to leave us on for a week.

This episode wasn’t a fun, light villain-of-the-week like we’ve grown accustomed to. It carried the season’s main story forward in a way that caught me completely off guard. It was an emotional, jaw-dropping episode and a good sign for where this show’s headed. It even had some good comic relief as Mary tried to get Luke to admit Kate was Batwoman. And lording her secrecy over him when Batwoman calls her for advice. A heavy episode like this needs those moments. This is my last week covering Batwoman. I’m sad I won’t be here to go over episodes anymore, but I’m glad to leave off on an episode like this. If these last few weeks are any indication, this show is only getting better.

Batwoman airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on The CW.

Previously on Batwoman:

• Batwoman Season 1 Episode 14 recap
• Batwoman Season 1 Episode 13 recap
• Batwoman Season 1 Episode 12 recap