Female Fury: Batwoman Episode 204, "Fair Skin, Blue Eyes"

I've wanted to like Batwoman. Wanted to from the very launch of the series. But the first season steadily tanked midway through, and this second season hasn't done much to right the ship.

The new Batwoman, Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) is personally moved by a missing boy when she sees the location from where he was taken. It turns out Ryan herself had been taken as a young girl at the exact same location -- a comic book shop -- by a woman who called herself The Candy Lady (Linda Kash). She would keep the children in her attic with a bowl of jellybeans, and then take a jellybean each day as a sort of countdown for two months to prove the child didn't matter to anyone -- as nobody would come looking for her.

And the Candy Lady isn't seen as a threat to her potential victims, because she's a nice white woman.

While in captivity, however, young Ryan (Ava Augustin) gets her hopes up when someone does come knocking at the door looking for a missing girl. The Candy Lady gags Ryan so she can't cry out, but it turns out the search party wasn't for her anyway. They were looking for a different girl -- "fair skin, blue eyes." The point being that nobody cares when a child of color goes missing, but everyone shakes the trees when a white child disappears. Ryan eventually makes her escape when her childhood friend, Angelique, allows herself to be captured so they can team up.

More to the story, the white child happened to be Beth Kane, which helps Mary Hamilton (Nicole Kang) help Ryan narrow down where the Candy Lady lives, because she knows Kate would have kept all the search notes for her missing sister. Mary has moved into Kate's place above the bar now, and together she and Ryan go through boxes of notes (and, apparently, a shoebox of vibrators that belong to Mary).

They eventually do find the house, and Ryan takes action as herself, not Batwoman, because she wants to confront her former captor. But it turns out that without the batsuit and other stuff, Ryan's pretty easily overtaken and captured, forced into having to find a way to escape, only to discover the boy she was after has already been placed in a "family" --

-- that family being the False Face Society run by Black Mask. So when we finally find Kevin afterward, he's confronting Jacob Kane with a gun, his initiation to show he's got what it takes to earn his mask. Fortunately for Kane, Batwoman shows up to take down the gang and talk down Kevin into surrendering, forcing Kane to reevaluate his hardline stance on Batwoman's vigilante activities.

Oh, and Alice (Rachel Skarsten) and Sophie (Meagan Tandy) are actively scouring the Internet for a guy named Ocean, so Alice can kill him and Safiyah will return Kate -- if she indeed even has her. It's riveting web-searching, I can assure you, and takes up a good 20 minutes of the episode, pounding keys and talking about food.

This show needs a serious villain to inject some life into it. The Easter egg of Jack Napier's name being dropped as the artist of a painting -- that painting being the last photo in Kate's recovered phone -- just isn't enough.