“Pilot” is episode one of season one of Batwoman.
This latest entry in the Arrowverse begins with a woman saying that this isn’t the story she expected to be telling, but stories, like the people who tell them, are not always what they seem. A woman is swimming through the water to the bottom, where she retrieves a key and unlocks the handcuffs fastening her ankles together. She starts swimming back up to a hole in the ice, but something is moved to cover it. The woman fails to move the something, and has a memory from when she was young, in a car with her mother and sister when it was rammed to the edge of the bridge. Batman showed up to save them. The woman starts smashing her way through the ice, but in her memory, the car went off the bridge. She returns to a building and a man stops aa stopwatch and tells her she was too slow. She replies that he covered the ice. Yes, and she found her own way. Tomorrow, she will find it faster.
Three years ago, Batman disappeared. Some hoped he would be back; some thought he was dead. The woman, Kate, thinks that Batman abandoned Gotham for the same reason he abandoned her family. He didn’t care.
In Gotham, a truck with Crows Security on the side arrives outside a building and an older and younger woman, mother and daughter, get out. The woman is blocked by a man providing security. Though he’s actually her husband. According to Kate, her father founded Crows Security to keep people safe. The woman, Catherine Hamilton-Kane, says it’s time to turn off the signal, because he’s not coming back.
Crows’ surveillance feeds go down and the two GCPD officers by the Batsignal are killed by a woman who then appears on the feed. She says that the Crows are not a hero. Batman couldn’t save the city and neither can they. A masked person appears on the roof of the building where the event is taking place and one of the agents, Moore, chases. Another appears and, during the struggle, she is thrown from the roof – but caught by more masked people and bundled away in a van.
Kate gets a call from someone who introduces herself as Mary, Kate’s stepsister. Kate tells Mary their parents have been married for over a decade; she knows who she is. Mary wanted to tell Kate that Sophie is missing. Sophie being agent Moore and, by the looks of it, a former girlfriend of Kate’s.
Kate heads home early to convince her father she’s ready to join the Crows. He is currently briefing the rest about looking for Sophie, but they have no surveillance footage. Jacob Kane is busy and says the people who took Sophie are ruthless, spineless maniacs but they don’t stand a chance. Kate reminds Jacob of her cousin but, unlike Bruce, she has a chance to make something of herself. Kate tells him that Bruce was there for her after her mother and Beth died.
Kate then heads to Wayne Enterprises, which is boarded up and looks to be at least partially shut. T5his brings back more memories, then a man with a taser who says he’s Wayne Security tells her to step away from the desk. He doesn’t believe she’s Bruce Wayne’s cousin; she’s not the first to make that claim. Besides, no-one has heard from Bruce in 3 years (nobody has figured out that Bruce Wayne and Batman went missing at the same time?). Luke – Luke Fox – gets a surprise when Kate gets out of her handcuffs, cuffs him instead then downloads the video footage from the computer.
More memories show that Kate and Sophie were at a military academy together, and their relationship was not approved of. Sophie stayed; Kate did not. She brings the footage to her father and gets a clue from it; a bat with a motto from Burnside Orphanage. Kate heads there and takes out several people before finally being captured and taken to the woman. Who claims that Kate’s father runs an army of bullies who scare the city, but not her. That Sophie was the child Jacob always wanted, not Kate. And she? She’s Alice.
This is a starting episode, so there’s lots of starting stuff before the story really gets going. Kate finds out that several people are not what they seem. For one thing, she’s Batman’s cousin, and she finds that out and all of Batman’s toys. Which she, obviously enough, decides to play with herself. Mary is deeper than Kate thought, and Batman did care about her family. Because they were also his family. And Alice? Alice is not who she seems.
And what has happened to Batman?