“A Narrow Escape” is episode seventeen of season one of Batwoman.
Kate is playing a video game when Alice enters. She asks if there’s any more wine. This seems rather odd; in the previous episode, “Through the Looking-Glass”, Kate got Alice locked up in Arkham with Mouse. The lights flicker and Alice makes a comment on Kate having renovated the building. Renovated badly, apparently, according to Kate. Alice asks if this is really happening; if they’re bickering, drinking and playing video games like sisters. Kate is pretty sure it is. Alice thanks Kate for never giving up on her. Kate says she’s worth it. The lights flicker again and Alice says it isn’t a bad connection. No. It was nice whilst it lasted. Alice is actually undergoing electroshock in Arkham at the hands of Dr Butler.
A man is running down the stairs and Kate, as Batwoman, intercepts him. He says she can take the jewels. Kate tells him to consider this a warning. He’s free to go. He tries attacking her from behind and she knocks him down the stairs. Then has a flashback to killing Cartwright and starts panicking he might eb dead. Like warns her company’s coming. The man isn’t dead but Kate isn’t doing great. Luke is concerned. The Batsignal is showing.
One week later, the Batsignal is still showing and an officer in a GCPD car wakes up to beeping. He has something strapped to his chest with a timer on it. Timer and beeping thing; not a good sign. He also has a cassette player – an actual cassette player – taped to his wrist with ‘PLAY ME’ on it. The tape greets him by name. He has a bomb strapped to his chest. Disarming it is easy; push the yellow button. That will trigger a bomb planted somewhere else in Gotham. He can save himself and see countless others die or die and save people he’s never met who will never know his sacrifice. Is he a hero? A hero will do anything for the city. He pushes the yellow button and a building is levelled.
The next morning, Vesper Fairchild is saying the Detonator is back after a seven-year hiatus, out to prove there are no heroes. And a GCPD officer blew up a bank to save his own life.
Batwoman is being wheeled into Mary’s surgery. Only it isn’t; someone has made their own costume and was caught by a ceiling collapse as she was helping someone out of the bomb wreckage. She’s pretending to be Batwoman because the real one is MIA and the city is still suffering PTSD from Batman’s departure. Mary tells her that her heart is in the right place. Her ribs, however, are not.
Kate is sleeping when Julia arrives. It seems they may have gone further than a kiss but Julia left Kate like that a week ago. And it smells like it. Julia wants Kate to put the suit on. Kate replies that she crossed the line when she killed Cartwright. She’s afraid she’ll screw up and kill someone else. Julia says fine, Kate screwed up. Bruce would be blustery with disappointment. Now, get over it. She’s needed elsewhere, as is Julia. There are 12 dead at a bank.
Mouse and Alice are at a discussion group in Arkham. Mouse is talking – unburdening himself, he tells Alice. He says this isn’t a cage; it’s a sanctuary. Family can’t hurt them and Safiyah can’t find Alice, and they have each other. Tommy Elliot, who Kate stopped – with Alice’s help – in “Down Down Down” arrives and starts causing problems. Kate notices he appears to have a shiv in his shoe. Tommy starts causing problems – Magpie, caught in “Who Are You?”, is in the same group – and it degenerates into chaos.
The Detonator is currently making a bomb whilst watching the news. Reggie Harris’s lawyer is on; Reggie was gunned down just after being released. Sophie and Julia are looking into this case. The man who killed Reggie and the witness also tried to kill Sophie and Kane. Kane killed him. The dead man was paid $180K by someone before the killings. He banked at Gotham International. Which, coincidentally, was just levelled, along with all its servers and backup servers. That’s a heck of a coincidence.
Luke is training in the Batcave when Kate arrives. He wants to know if she’s found out anything about Cartwright. She says not. She wants to know about the Detonator. Kane is also briefing the Crows. The Detonator targets good guys and pressures them to kill innocents. Bruce had a lot of suspects but the trail went cold. Each bomb, old and the latest, had 214 stamped into it. Kate wants to know if any of the suspects had military experience. One, George Adler, was discharged from military school. Bruce didn’t go to military school but Kate did. Furthermore, she was discharged from it, under a DD-214. Luke enjoys the irony that military school not thinking Kate was good enough will help her save the city. He’s selling the ability of the Batsuit to withstand bomb blasts but Kate isn’t wearing it.
Kate finds Adler as herself but he says the Detonator isn’t him. It was his father. Was, because he’s been dead for seven years. That explains why the trail went cold. So, the new person is a copycat, but one that knows information never released to the public. It looks like whoever is behind the attacks, and the murder of Lucius Fox, is on the verge of being found out. Alice, in Arkham, winds Tommy up so that he stabs her. One way of getting a shiv.