Why ‘Batwoman’ Will ‘Reboot’ With a New Character Instead of Recasting Kate

Meredith Jacobs June 7, 2020, 9:30 am

Batwoman New Character Season 2 After Ruby Rose Exit — Katie Yu/The CW

Batwoman Season 2 will feature a “reboot” of its lead character. Rather than recast Kate Kane following Ruby Rose’s exit, The CW drama is going to be introducing a new character to pick up the cape and cowl.

“I did consider the soap opera version for a hot minute,” showrunner Caroline Dries admitted during an “ATX TV…from the Couch” panel with Legacies showrunner Julie Plec Saturday. “We had a couple episodes already written and transition-wise it would be seamless.”

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They’d already begun to break Season 2, Dries shared. The superhero drama’s first season was cut short when production shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, and when TV Insider spoke with her about the finale, she’d said they planned to “incorporate a lot” of what they had planned into Season 2. “Definitely the character dynamics, the relationship, the cliffhanger-y drama in all of the character emotional stuff for sure,” she said, teasing “a really big cool Alice move that happens in the comics.”

It was after speaking with executive producer Greg Berlanti that Dries decided not to simply recast the lead character. “He said, ‘we should just reboot Batwoman as a different character,'” she told Plec. Doing so will allow the show not only to “respect everything that Ruby put into the Kate Kane character,” but also to “not ask [the audience] to not address the elephant in the room,” of someone new in the role. (There were several explanations that could have incorporated into the series in that case, including giving Kate a new face, as has happened with characters on the show before, or simply not even acknowledging it.)

(Katie Yu/The CW)

Details have emerged about the character taking over as Batwoman. “Ryan Wilder,” according to a casting call, is reportedly “likable, messy, a little goofy and untamed” as well as “the most dangerous type of fighter: highly skilled and wildly undisciplined.” (We’ll have to wait to see if that name sticks.)

“In her past, she was inspired by Batwoman,” Dries said of the new character coming in during the ATX conversation, adding that “what makes it fun” is that “she is going to take on the mantle and is completely maybe not the right person at the time to be doing it.” What will that mean for the Bat Team (Camrus Johnson’s Luke and Nicole Kang’s Mary)?