Batwoman boss on that secret villain: [SPOILER] has 'absolutely bonkers' secrets
Warning: The following contains spoilers from the second episode of Batwoman, which aired Sunday night on The CW. Read at your own risk!
Alice isn’t the only member of the Kane family that Kate (Ruby Rose) should be wary of on Batwoman. There’s also her stepmother Catherine Hamilton-Kane (Elizabeth Anweis), who is up to something very shady.
In Sunday’s episode, Kate decided to prove Alice (Rachel Skarsten) was her long-lost sister Beth by testing her knife for DNA. Before she could that, though, a squad of rabbits ambushed her and Sophie (Meagan Tandy) in the Crow’s garage and stole the knife back. We’re led to believe Alice was behind the attack — but then the end of the episode revealed that Jacob’s (Dougray Scott) wife Catherine hired men to dress up like Alice’s rabbits because she wanted to stop Kate from testing the blade. Pair that with the revelation that it was Catherine’s investigator who found the bone fragments that convinced Jacob Beth died 15 years ago, and we have a new mystery on our hands: Why is Catherine determined to keep Jacob from finding out Alice is Beth?
“We’re obviously teeing up a mini-villain here who has a huge secret about how she’s connected to Beth/Alice in the past,” Batwoman showrunner Caroline Dries tells EW. “Like everything in Gotham, nothing is exactly as it seems and Catherine is one of those people… And Kate is going to discover secrets about Catherine that are absolutely bonkers.”
As the season unfolds, we’ll learn Catherine is essentially a powerful businesswoman who handles making defense contracts, and that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to safeguard both her family and the city.
“She’s trying to protect Gotham, but she has her own way of going about it. She’s also in love with Jacob and she wants to preserve that relationship,” says Dries. “But Catherine being a mother, she’s not evil or anything. She has her own agenda as a mother to be protective and care about her city and care about her family and care about Jacob. So, it becomes a really interesting dynamic that we could barely hint at in the pilot because we didn’t have time, but Catherine becomes such a huge, instrumental character. There’s a mythology through-line about Kate’s family that Catherine is instrumental in.”
So she’s comparable to Arrow’s Moira Queen, an iconic mother who crossed lines in the name of her kids? “Yeah, kind of. I was trying to not have her that way,” says Dries. “As a person without superpowers who has access to tons of power and tons of money and tons of connections, what ultimately unfolds is that she’s kind of like the chess-piece-mover of Gotham.”
Sounds like the Kane family drama will only get more complicated from here.
Batwoman airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
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