SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read if you haven’t watched “Survived Much Worse”, the eighth episode of Season 2 of “Batwoman”.
In the summer of 2020, after it was announced that Ruby Rose would be leaving CW’s “Batwoman”, in which she played the lead role, showrunner Caroline Dries wrote a short note on social media promising that he wouldn’t kill the character. Now, after just the eighth episode of the second season, proof that Kate is alive, even if not entirely well, has been provided in the form of a quick photo of her at the end of the episode, entitled “She survived the very worst”.
Wallis Day, perhaps best known so far for a role on another DC estate, Syfy’s “Krypton”, will take on the role of Kate and have her own recurring storyline for the rest of the second season.
“We provoke to see her a little bit in [Episode] 209 and we realized that someone has a plan for her and that plan will have a really dramatic impact on Kate Kane’s life, ”said Dries Variety.
Although seeing Kate with a bandaged face was an emotional enough revelation in itself, it brought an extra beating in the way of coming right after the new Batwoman Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) and Kate’s sister Alice (Rachel Skarsten) finally come to terms with the fact that Kate was probably dead.
“The first half [of the season was] our characters waiting, discovering that she may still be alive, trying to find out where she is and then realizing, ‘Oh no, she is dead.’ This allows them to close the chapter and move on without Kate’s shadow dominating all the thoughts they have. This gives our Bat team a chance to grow and find a cause that is specific to them, ”says Dries. “We started episode 9 with a beautiful funeral ceremony for Kate. The characters have to go through their grief – and I’m not saying you cry in a month, but it allows us not to see everyone crying to sleep in each scene. And it felt like we owed our characters to take a break ”.
In “Survived Much Worse”, Ryan expressed concerns about his place as Batwoman if she managed to find Kate alive and return her home. But now that she really believes Kate is dead, Ryan will have to decide what kind of Batwoman she wants to be in the long run.
“This is a woman who, all the good in her life has been taken from her, and I think in the back of her mind, she always thought that maybe the legacy of the Bat Woman was taken from her too, but now she is realizing that it is no, ”says Dries.
“What does that mean? Instead of trying to keep the suit warm, who am I as Batwoman? Who am I as Ryan Wilder? It will really encourage her to find out what mark she will make on the symbol, what mark she will make in the city” , she continues. “Taking crime off the street is one thing, but how can we put the good back on the street too?”
Ryan will start by making a list of “bat rules” for the team, which she will also follow, previews of Dries. (Consequently, the title of the ninth episode, “Rule No. 1.”) But while they are moving forward, the audience will be watching a side story in which “this altered version of Kate” is placed in the ring.
Dries calls Kate’s journey “complicated, mysterious, difficult” and notes that what she went through changed her personality as well as her appearance. The character has always been “incredibly complicated,” she says, but there are now several additional layers for her, which made the search for the right actor to get into the role complex as well.
After Rose left the show, Dries toyed with the idea of reformulating her immediately, but ended up changing her mind and decided to introduce a new character – Ryan – instead, because she thought “it would have been an awkward transition between 1st and 2nd season if we had just reformulated Kate with no organic history behind it, ”she says. But, in the back of her mind, she always planned to bring her back in a new way, since she wasn’t killing the character.
In May 2020, Day, whose other TV credits include “Jekyll and Hyde”, “Casanova” and “The Royals” and will soon be seen in the movie “Infinite”, tweeted that playing Batwoman would be “a dream job. ”Less than a year later, she will make her debut in that role. She is represented by Hamilton and UTA.
“Batwoman” airs on Sundays at 8 pm on The CW.