When Ruby Rose decided to leave her starring role on The CW’s Batwoman after just a single season, I knew it would be no great loss for the show. Her announcement last May sent shockwaves across the entertainment industry, partially due to this unusually abbreviated tenure and partially due to the apparent mystery of her departure, which she later attributed to the physical strenuousness of the job. Rose, an Australian model and chatterati thirst-favorite following her 2015 stint on Orange Is the New Black, brought much fanfare to a series already breaking ground for centering a Jewish lesbian superhero. But her stiffness as a performer shrank her star power and as the series progressed, she was soon eclipsed by her supporting co-stars, including the phenomenal Rachel Skarsten as a demented Alice in Wonderland-inspired villainess. The Batwoman creative team elected to replace Rose’s character altogether for Season 2, leaving me with one lingering question: If Rose’s absence is no great loss, will Javicia Leslie’s presence be a concrete gain.Batwoman Season 1-3 Download
Based on the two second season episodes available to critics, it remains unclear how the new protagonist will impact the show’s overall momentum, as these opening chapters work to transition viewers to a new narrative schema. So far, Leslie’s character provides some classic “fish out of water” levity to an otherwise self-serious superhero melodrama. That novice energy comes at some cost, however, to the series’ established emotional dimensions, which were always far more engrossing than its baddie-of-the-week crime-fighting. In its first season, Batwoman explored the complexities of sisterhood and created families. The second season will have a lot more to say about class stratification.Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) is a white patrician heiress with the best combat and survivalist training money could buy… and very little sense of humor to go along with it. Leslie’s Ryan Wilder is a hardscrabble Black orphan trampled by the foster-system-to-prison pipeline but savvy enough to take advantage of the windfalls that come her way.