‘Batwoman’: Alice’s Horrific Origin Is Revealed

Alice (Rachel Skarsten) on Batwoman is the best new villain on TV. Like most other great villains, she’s sympathetic at points, intrinsically tied to the hero — in the show, she’s the long lost sister of Ruby Rose’s Kate Kane/Batwoman — and violently, deliciously evil. And though her origin was finally revealed on this week’s “Mine Is a Long and A Sad Tale,” it only added layers to her villainy, without subtracting from it.

Spoilers for Batwoman, Season 1, Episode 5, “Mine is a Long And A Sad Tale” past this point.

On the surface, Alice seems like Batwoman’s The Joker. She’s pretty pale, so there is that, and is prone to fits of insane violence. She also has a whole “Alice in Wonderland” theme going on, which probably puts her more in line with fellow Batman villain The Mad Hatter than the clown prince of crime.

But where The Joker is manic, Alice is calculated. Having already convinced Kate that she is, in fact, Beth, the sister who seemingly died in a car crash over a decade earlier, she’s now working hard on their father, Jacob (Dougray Scott). Though he found out last episode that his wife Catherine Hamilton-Kane (Elizabeth Anweis) substituted some animal bones for Beth’s bones in order to get him to stop looking for his lost kid, he’s still not convinced that the maniac who tried to blow up Gotham City is his daughter, somehow returned to him.

Spoiler alert: she is, and in fact it’s sort of his fault she became Alice at all. After stealing a bunch of skin from the morgue (gross), Kate tracks down Alice and captures her. The latter promises to tell her what happened to her, but in order to do so they need to go back to where it all began. We find out that after Beth fell off a bridge, leaving Kate behind, she was “rescued” by a man and his disfigured son, a boy nicknamed Mouse.

Is the seemingly kind man actually insane, and holds her captive? Yes. Does he have a severed face in a sink downstairs that he’s hoping to make into a new face for his son? Yeah, why not. And does Beth not only figure all this out, but manage to escape and call her father? Sure does.

…and that’s where things go horribly wrong, because Jacob does confront Beth’s captor, only to discover Mouse has the weird ability to mimic any voice. He doesn’t want to help out his father (and the implication is that he might have been captured by this man, as well), but after being threatened he “reveals” that he made the call, not Beth. Meanwhile, downstairs a young Kate manages to track down the room Beth is being held in, and even says “Beth?” through the door. But the girl has been told that if anyone comes looking for her, they’ll die. So she holds her tongue and stays hidden.

In the end, Beth manages to survive thanks to Mouse, who needs a friend, and a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” that bonds them together. Like how Kate got a stepsister in Mary Hamilton (Nicole Kang), Beth formed her own family with her new “brother,” Mouse.

In the present, Alice blames Jacob for leaving her, and Kate for not having the twintuition she needed to rescue her (even though she kind of did). When Jacob finally accepts that she’s Beth, she stabs him in the gut and escapes with the grown-up Mouse (Sam Littlefield), who has himself escaped from Arkham Asylum. The episode ends with the two of them quoting Lewis Carroll back and forth, and kicking off the beginnings of Alice’s Wonderland Gang/swearing vengeance on the city.

Like I said above, what works so well about the way this is executed is that it’s a sympathetic origin story, while still making Alice the villain thanks to several details she omits from her own personal history. Should Jacob have tried harder to find her? Absolutely. But by the time they reach the real Beth, they’ve already dealt with multiple false leads… When Jacob meets Mouse, and is told that once again his daughter is gone, he’s ready to mourn and move on. It’s unfortunate, but understandable. Same with Kate, who does, in fact, find Beth; but due to Alice’s selective memory of events, according to her Kate just didn’t try hard enough. She should have kicked down the door and rescued her! But with no answer from her twin, there was no reason for Kate to do so. Again, unfortunate, but not Kate’s fault, and Alice holding on to that vendetta puts her in the wrong, regardless of her circumstances.

The other thing that makes this episode work is the lack of violence against Beth. It’s hard to make a case that Mouse’s father grabbing her and yelling at her is good, but lesser shows would have used exploitative violence or sexual threats. As is, Alice was ultimately just raised wrong, in the worst environment possible. Her brain broke because she tried to adapt to her surroundings, not because of anything particularly gruesome (other than the severed face). She was gaslit, developed Stockholm syndrome, a million other things — and of note, we only get to see her initial captivity and the immediate aftermath, so who knows what happened in the intervening decade. But the show takes a relatively subtle approach, allowing the viewer to fill in the details between the margins.

And in that, it underlines a big difference between Kate and Alice, as well. Kate is rigid, unwilling to budge in her morals. Alice is flexible to the point of breaking, though she mostly goes there to survive. It sets up a controversy of philosophy and self, not just a physical battle of the two.

Because of that, and thanks to both the nuanced writing and Skarsten’s pitch perfect performance, it’s clear that Alice isn’t Batwoman’s The Joker — she’s better.

Batwoman airs Sundays at 8/7c on The CW.

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