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Batwoman boss and stars break down the season 2 premiere's biggest moments

Batwoman boss and stars break down the season 2 premiere's biggest moments

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Sunday's season 2 premiere of Batwoman.

Yes, you should definitely be worried about Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie), Gotham's new hero, after Batwoman's season 2 premiere.

In the CW superhero drama's opener, Leslie's Ryan Wilder discovered the Batsuit in the wreckage of a crashed plane that was transporting Kate Kane (Ruby Rose) back from National City. As the other characters grieved Kate's apparent death (no, she's not dead, according to showrunner Caroline Dries), Ryan put on the suit as a way to reclaim her power after years of being a victim in Gotham City and went out to fight crime — which, unfortunately, right in Hush-as-Bruce Wayne's (Warren Christie) crosshairs.

On Alice's (Rachel Skarsten) orders, fake Bruce Wayne infiltrated Wayne Tower and acquired the shard of Kryptonite. However, Hush decided he wanted to become Batman, so he stole the Batmobile and went after Ryan to get the Batsuit. Ryan managed to put Hush down, but not before he shot her with the Kryptonite shard. In the wake of the fight, Ryan returns the Batsuit to Luke (Camrus Johnson) and Mary (Nicole Kang) because she believes the hero life isn't for her; however, she's not out of it yet. In the final moments of the premiere, she discovered that's not the case because the area around the Kryptonite bullet wound started turning black and green. That's the definition of not great, Bob!

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"The worry level for the wound after this premiere should be on 100," Leslie tells EW in the latest installment of our postmortem video series On Set, which you can watch above. "It's Kryptonite. It's going to be an issue. In any superhero show that you watch, you know what kryptonite means. It's literally a thing. When someone is bad for you, say, 'That's my kryptonite,' that is what it is. So it's going to get really, really bad and really, really interesting."

"We wanted to show the audience in that moment, 'Hey, look. There's something up here. There's something awry. She's not going anywhere. She's going to ultimately need the Bat team at some point," says showrunner Caroline Dries. "This is obviously a wound that we've never seen on another human being before on our show at least."

As if Ryan's introduction wasn't enough, everyone who didn't know Kate was Batwoman learned that she was — specifically her ex-girlfriend Sophie (Meagan Tandy), who kissed Batwoman and didn't realize it was Kate last season, and her father Jacob Kane (Dougray Scott), who declared war on Batwoman in the season 1 finale (Oops!).

Below, Dries and the cast break down some of the premiere's biggest moments:

The CW

Why every character needed to find out Kate's secret:
DRIES: I think it was important to let everyone in on the Kate Kane is Batwoman secret because the jig is up, basically. As a writer, I thought that more drama came from people realizing they didn't know it was Kate, and the fallout from that, and the feelings they have regarding that. With Jacob, he feels like he didn't even know his daughter.

How Jacob will react to the new Batwoman after learning Kate's secret:
DOUGRAY SCOTT: I think he's still very much opposed to anyone in Gotham who is not in with his philosophy, which is the Crows and he sees himself as a legitimate law enforcement agency. And although he discovers that his daughter was Batwoman, I think he wants to know how he managed to miss that first of all, and how he didn't know. And I think he would like to find his daughter and talk to her, and try and discover the history of that, and how that came to be. Do I think that he is more sympathetic to the vigilante antics of Batwoman? Possibly a little bit, but then again, not very…Jacob is pretty hardcore when it comes to toeing the line and doing the right thing, and he sees Gotham as his enclave, he sees it as his kingdom as it were. And he's the one who is in charge. And he's in control. He is the law. So if you go against that, then he's not very happy. Regardless of whether or not it's his daughter or not.

The CW

On the introduction of the Batmobile:
DRIES: When we were shooting season 1, we ended up losing two episodes because of the COVID pandemic. We had already prepped and created the Batmobile for what was supposed to be our penultimate episode...I already had that in my brain of like, "Well, we have it. We're obviously going to use it." So ultimately, we decided, "Well, it's great to use it in the premiere," of course. And I wanted to give Ryan a new mode of transportation, ultimately. So she's going to adopt this car as her own... This 2021 Corvette kind of already looked like the chassis of what we were looking for. So our production designer souped it up, and then I sent photos of the mock-up to DC, and it goes through their channels, and they basically approved it.
CAMRUS JOHNSON: So I took a lot of videos behind the scenes of the Batmobile that no one knows about. I am so excited about the Batmobile. It was funny, because when I read the first episode of the season and I saw the Batmobile, I kind of was just like, "Is no one freaking out like I am right now?" I feel like a lot of people were like, "Oh, cool. The Batmobile is here." And I was like, "No, the Batmobile is… What are you… No. This is like one of the biggest Batman properties ever!" I am still so genuinely surprised that we have the Batmobile on the show, because I didn't know we could do that. I love when I first saw it and it was just completely black with a bunch of stickers on it for special effects reasons. And then as it starts to grow and get different and sort of become Ryan Wilder's Batmobile, I love it.

On Leslie wearing the suit for the first time:
LESLIE: I think that Ryan's reaction to putting on the suit and Javicia's reaction to putting on the suit is pretty much the same. It's freaking epic. It's epic but then it's also this interesting dynamic where you realize the responsibility of just the suit...To see the bat on my chest, it just felt like, wow, I'm a part of the family. We had fittings so I saw little pieces of it here and there, but the first time I put the entire suit on, I was in my trailer and there's this moment of like, oh my goodness, I am a superhero. No matter what happens in my life from this point on, I will forever be a superhero and that's pretty freaking cool. My grandkids are going to be able to say, "My grandma was a superhero."

How the cast handled starting the season without Kate Kane:
JOHNSON: Knowing that we wouldn't have Kate Kane in this season prepped me when getting into season two because I knew that Luke was going to have to already figure out a way to adapt without Kate Kane in his life. So knowing that going into season two, that one of his only friends wasn't going to be there, helped me in the process because I knew that however, this journey was going to go, I had to have Luke already have this missing part of him. And it was our job, me, Caroline Dries the showrunner, and our writers, to figure out how we fill that hole in the beginning. Is it going to be anger? Is it going to be self-hate? Is it going to be grief? So definitely helped in the process of trying to figure out where we're going to take Luke this year.
NICOLE KANG: There's this beautiful moment at the end of the episode that Caroline gave us, where we exhale, and we really feel the impact of what has happened. On the one hand, I was a bit surprised at my own emotional response [to Mary crying in Kate's bed], which is a lovely surprise as an actor. On the other hand, it was completely cathartic.

Why Alice needs Mouse's corpse:
RACHEL SKARSTEN: Of course Alice kept Mouse's corpse. It's just so deliciously morbid, and so something Alice would do. She has a much larger plan [for Mouse's body]. Alice always has a large overarching plan and Mouse's body will be the starting point for that plan, which will evolve. And you'll think that you know what the plan is, and then the plan is even bigger because I'm an evil genius.

Watch the full On Set episode above.

Batwoman airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on The CW. Be sure to subscribe to EW's YouTube channel so you won't miss new On Set episodes, dropping every Monday morning after the latest Batwoman episode.

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