More of Alice's dark past is uncovered when August Cartwright shares a twisted story with Kate while Jacob goes searching for his wayward daughter. Mary and Luke follow a lead on Beth’s killer.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Mabel isn't Alice's mother, but her repeated physical and emotional abuse of her over the years they lived together still counts. It's implied that she's this to August too.
- Accidental Murder: Kate strangles Cartwright in a fit of rage, causing his neck bleeding to start again.
- Asshole Victim: No one will cry for August Cartwright and his mother. No one.
- Awful Truth: Cartwright didn't just kidnap a young Beth, he also stole Gabi Kane's severed head and kept it in his freezer with the possible intention of one day carving the face off of it as a gift to his mother. Learning of the horrific way their mother's remains had been desecrated drives both Alice and Kate to kill someone (although in Kate's case, the killing was an accident).
- Big Damn Heroes
- Batwoman starts the episode in full heroic mode, saving a woman from a would-be rapist whom she doesn't kill even when he tries to shoot her In the Back. She's then told by the grateful Damsel in Distress that the Bat Signal is on, finding Cartwright dumped there for her by Alice.
- Jacob turns up just in time to stop his insane daughter slitting her own throat, jabbing her with the epipen to counteract the fear serum.
- The Bad Guy Wins: While Alice is a lesser evil than Cartwright, and certainly far more sympathetic, her plan for this episode works: Kate is provoked into killing Cartwright, getting Alice revenge on her abductor and "proof" that she and her sister are the same. Kate also ends up proving Cartwright right that she's capable of murder, just like Alice.
- Bookcase Passage: When in Bruce Wayne's old office, Mary can be seen pulling books out at random trying to activate the door to the Batcave, which she saw Kate, Luke, and Julia about to enter in "Tell Me the Truth". Mary then claims to Luke she was just curious about The International Periodical of Technology and Innovation, Vol.2.
- Boring, but Practical: The fliers with the partial license plate of the car driven by Beth's killer turn out to be useful after all, when a junkie reports seeing such a car in a junkyard.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: Cartwright uses the fear toxin to put Mouse in a suggestive state in order to turn him on Alice.
- Bungled Suicide: Cartwright manages to cut his neck with a shattered glass, but fails to hit either his carotid or jugular.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Gabi's earrings from the beginning end up being part of The Reveal, which leads to Kate reaching her Rage Breaking Point with Cartwright (and in a flashback, the same with Alice toward Mabel).
- In her first scene, Mabel scolds her son for having an open flame near her oxygen tank. In her last, Alice uses a flame to turn the tank into a flamethrower in order to kill Mabel.
- Cliffhanger: Kate has committed murder, leaving her and Jacob with the choice of turning themselves in or cooperating with Alice to cover up the crime.
- Comforting Comforter: Jacob drapes a blanket around Alice while she recovers from the effects of the fear toxin.
- Continuity Nod: Kate recognizes that Cartwright is talking about fear toxin when he mentions dosing Mouse with a "concoction" developed by Jonathan Crane; she encountered it during Elseworlds.
- Darker and Edgier: Batwoman is the darkest series on the Arrowverse, but even by series standards, this episode gets the cake, with wounds shown in graphic detail, child abuse, the decapitated head of Gabi Kane in a refrigerator, an elderly woman being burned alive, and a brutal Downer Ending with our heroine murdering the villain, getting traumatized by it, and preparing to help bury his body.
- Defiant Captive: Cartwright towards Kate and Jacob.
- Desecrating the Dead: Cartwright kept Gabi Kane's head in a locked freezer for years, with the intent of eventually using her face on his mother. Assuming he would, since it's implied that he only said he would (not that the distinction is worth much to Alice or Kate).
- The Dog Bites Back: Alice, after years of abuse, burns Mabel Cartwright alive.
- Doting Grandparent: Mabel does speak kindly to Mouse, if no one else.
- Downer Ending: Kate breaks her moral code and murders August Cartwright in a fit of rage.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Kate ends up drinking straight from a bottle of what looks like whiskey after accidentally murdering Cartwright. Alice downs a mouthful as well to help deal with her experience with the fear toxin.
- Entitled Bastard: Cartwright absolutely refuses to give up Alice's location without a promise of his freedom from two people who have more reason than almost anyone to want him dead.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Subverted as Cartwright's mother turns out to be just as abusive as he is, so it's questionable whether there's any real love involved.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Even Alice hesitates to tell Jacob what she saw in Cartwright's freezer, and for good reason.
- Everything Sensor: While searching a crowded carpark, Mary asks Luke if has has some kind of gadget to cut down the search. Of course Luke working for a real estate firm would mean he'd have no need for such a bat-gadget.
- Evil Is Petty:
- As his Bungled Suicide proves, Cartwright would literally rather die than help Alice without being promised his freedom. It also shows that he's willing to die purely to spite Jacob and Kate for not giving him what he thinks he deserves.
- Mabel abused Alice out of jealousy for her looks and youth and scalded her hands with boiling tea for making said tea too hot. She also wanted to take the late Gabi Kane's face just to reclaim her lost beauty and youth.
- Evil Old Folks: Mabel Cartwright, full stop.
- Facial Horror: Mabel appears in some of Alice's fear toxin-induced visions as a rotting corpse with a hideous, desiccated face.
- The Fettered: Deconstructed. Kate gives a brief speech to Cartwright, proclaiming that she has all the virtues that Cartwright stole from Beth, such as honor and integrity, but at the end of the day, even someone with strong ideals is still only human, and Kate's understandable response to Cartwright's atrocities sees her lose sight of her personal code for a brief, terrible Moment of Weakness that sees her become a killer.
- Foreshadowing: When Kate tells Cartwright that she isn't a killer, Cartwright responds that she's not a killer "yet", hinting that he knows something that could (and does) drive her to kill.
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Alice slaps Mouse when he gets hysterical over how the supposedly dead Alice has returned. We find out why when he reveals the fear toxin showed him that Alice is his worst nightmare.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: We see the flames reflected in Alice's eyes as she burns her abuser alive.
- Hoist by Her Own Petard: Alice kills Mabel Cartwright by creating a flamethrower with her oxygen tank.
- Horrifying the Horror: Alice is a psychopathic Serial Killer, but being faced with a hallucination of Mabel Cartwright reduces her to a terrified child.
- If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!:
- Kate says this when she stops Jacob from choking Cartwright.
- Alice sets up the situation with Cartwright so Kate will be driven to kill him, after which Alice boasts to Jacob that he now has two daughters who are killers.
- Ignored Epiphany: Alice is straight back to her old self after getting rescued by Jacob.
- Internal Reveal: Mouse and Jacob find out that Alice is alive, and Kate, Luke, and Mary discover Cartwright killed Beth.
- Interrupted Suicide: Pushed to the brink by fear toxin, Alice is an inch away from cutting her own throat when Jacob arrives to rescue her.
- It's Personal: Turns out Cartwright didn't just kill 'Alice' to remove her influence on Mouse, but because she burned Cartwright's mother alive.
- Kick the Dog: As she and Jacob kneel over Cartwright's corpse, Alice takes a moment to point out to her father that both of his daughters are now killers.
- Kill It with Fire: When Alice realizes that Cartwright kept her mother's head frozen so he could give her face to his mother, she snaps and murders her by creating a makeshift flamethrower using her oxygen tank.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Mabel Cartwright is murdered by a woman she spent years abusing. Alice incinerating her is also a fair bit of karma for Mabel scalding her hands with boiling tea.
- August Cartwright, who sought his freedom and prestige above all, dies a brutal, undignified death while tied to a chair. His fate comes at the hands of the family he tore apart, and was specifically orchestrated by the girl he abducted and abused.
- Locked Out of the Loop: Although she informs him of Alice's survival, Kate doesn't tell Jacob about the other Beth's true nature.
- Made of Incendium: Oxygen itself isn't flammable, meaning Alice's makeshift flamethrower wouldn't work unless the gas mixture also had a flammable component for some bizarre reason. Sure didn't stop it from looking cool, though.
- Meaningful Echo: The words of Gabi Kane are heard again in voiceover after Kate murders Cartwright."Red is a very symbolic color. It's the color of love, but it's also the color of passion, courage, war. At one point or another, you're going to have to wrestle with all of these emotions, and what defines your character is you how you balance them."
- Mind Rape: Both Mouse and Alice suffer this via Scarecrow's fear toxin.
- Moral Myopia: Cartwright has the gall to say to Kate that it "would have been a shame" to let her dead mother's face "go to waste". This proves to be the last straw for Kate, who fatally throttles Cartwright in a blind rage.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Kate is horrified when she realizes she's just killed Cartwright.
- Mythology Gag: One of the meanings of the color red that Gabi mentions is war. In Batwoman: Elegy, Kate mentions that red is the color of war when seeing her Batwoman uniform for the first time, connecting it to the kabbalistic tree of life.
- Never My Fault: Cartwright pins the blame for Alice's psychopathy on his mother's abuse of her, rather than his own actions. Kate calls him out on this.Kate: You threw Beth in a cellar, taught her to carve up faces, but Mommy's the bad guy? Nice try.
- Not So Similar: While they both prove capable of killing when pushed far enough, Alice and Kate are still shown to react to it quite differently; Alice murdered Mabel in a brutal and premeditated fashion with a joke and zero remorse, whereas Kate lost control of herself, didn't intend to kill Cartwright, was horrified to see what she'd done to him, tried to save his life, and is clearly wrought with guilt at the end of the episode.
- Papa Wolf: Jacob understandably goes ballistic on Cartwright for what he did to his daughter.
- Pay Evil unto Evil:
- Subverted with Alice's ordeal with the fear toxin; while she certainly is a nasty piece of work, no one deserves to go through that, and her suffering is played for all the horror it's worth.
- Played straight with the fate of Mabel Cartwright, whom Alice burns alive for her years of abuse and her intention to take Gabi's face just to improve her own looks.
- Averted with Cartwright's death; while he was an absolutely horrible person, his death is a traumatic event for Kate and no one, save Alice, sees it as anything but horrifying.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Cartwright was reluctant to give Gabi's face to Mabel not out of any moral objection (he kept her head, after all), but because his elderly mother walking around with a dead woman's face would be like advertising his crimes. It also wouldn't really grant her wish of being young again for a fresh start because giving her a young face wouldn't change the fact that she was an old woman in terrible health. She'd still be barely able to walk hooked up to an oxygen tank to breathe and reliant on the care of others, just wearing the face of an seemingly much younger woman, which in itself would be very suspicious.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner:Mabel: I said I need you to warm this tea!
Alice: Consider it a pleasure. (breaks off valve on oxygen cylinder)
Mabel: What the hell are you doing?
Alice: Long live the Queen. (burns her alive) - Pun: In a flashback to the twins' bat mitzvah, Kate has a tin of novelty mints called "BatMints-Vah."
- Rage Breaking Point: The same revelation ends up being the straw that breaks the camel's back for both Kane sisters at different points:
- Upon discovering her mother's head in Cartwright's freezer and realizing what he intends to use it for, Alice snaps entirely and brutally murders Mabel with a makeshift flamethrower, adopting her manic, supervillain persona in the process.
- Already pushed to the limits of her patience, Kate finally snaps when she hears about what Cartwright did with her mother's head, and even more, that he tries to justify it; she throttles him in a fit of rage, breaking the sutures on his neck wound and causing him to bleed to death.
- The Reveal: When Cartwright said he wanted to kill Alice for destroying his family, not only was he referring to how she drove a wedge between him and his son, but she also murdered his mother.
- Running Gag: The woman whom Batwoman saved mentions she would ask for a selfie, but the Bat Signal is on.
- Sadistic Choice: Cartwright presents Kate with the choice of letting him go or letting Alice succumb to madness, which would make her even more unhinged.
- Slashed Throat:
- Cartwright does this to himself so that Kate can't make him reveal where Alice is being kept. She saves him with advice from Mary, but then accidentally tears open the suture when she attacks him in a rage upon finding out what he did with her mother's head.
- In despair after her fear toxin exposure, Alice tries to do this to herself, but Jacob interrupts her.
- Start of Darkness: While previous flashbacks showed the events Beth went through that broke her, and the moment she snapped and started calling herself Alice, the ones here show when her last shred of sanity disappeared and she started killing people.
- Trashcan Bonfire: Trying to find Cartwright's abandoned car in a junkyard presents problems until Mary realises that the junkie who reported it would want to stay somewhere warm while shooting up. She goes to investigate a burnt-out oil drum and finds the car right next to it.
- Troll: When Luke demands to know what Batwoman's phone call to Mary was about, she says she can't violate "doctor-vigilante confidentiality".
- Undignified Death: Cartwright painfully bleeds to death while tied to a chair, helpless to save or defend himself.
- Villains Want Mercy: Cartwright goes a step further; even when Kate makes it clear that she has no intentions of killing him, he still wants to not only be allowed to live, but to be set free, considering going unpunished for his crimes to be "merciful".
- Walk-In Chime-In:Woman: Just leave me alone!
Creepy Guy: No one with those legs wants to be left alone, huh? Come on, I'm friendly.
Batwoman: (dropping out of the sky) I'm not. - Wham Line: Kate and Jacob assume that Alice's note about "Mommy Dearest" refers to Cartwright's mother Mabel. When Jacob mentions this to Alice, however...Alice: His mother? Is that who you think this is about?
- Worst Aid: Kate stitching Cartwright's neck wound with a staple gun. As expected, it doesn't hold for long.
- You Have to Believe Me!: Averted when Kate has to explain away Alt-Beth to her father. Rather than reveal the truth of the Crisis and her role in it, she just dismisses the body as another Skin Pirate minion and points out that Gotham has seen stranger things.
