Author's Notes Kate is impersonated by Brainiac 5 in all scenes.
In a large warehouse, Batwoman attacked a gathering of Black Mask thugs. One of them inexplicably charged Beth and had his throat slit by her armband as she went past him. Beth fired into the head of a man already on his knees, leaped over him, and shot the third man in front of her. A fourth man snuck up on her from the side. Beth punched him back and shot him. She took the third man and slammed him against a circuit breaker box and then shot him in the head as he fell to the ground. Beth avoided the fifth man as he charged her with a pipe a few times and then slit his throat. Beth reloaded her pistol and continued on her way into a more open space.
She quickly shot two thugs as they tried to hit her with poles on either side of her, shot another two also with poles on either side of her, and then shot the fifth man in the center. A sixth man kicked her from behind and tried to subdue her. Beth punched him to the floor, quickly reloaded, and shot him in the head. She then wrestled with a seventh man until she threw him over the railing where he hit some machinery and fell to the floor dead. Beth kicked the eighth man to the floor and shot him in the head, threw another man to the floor with judo and shot him in the head, and did a leaping kick on the next guy dropping him to the floor. He tried to escape her only for Beth to slam his head with a brick stunning him.
"Where's Black Mask?" Beth questioned.
"Fuck yourself," the thug refused.
"Let me guess. You're afraid of him more than me," Beth rolled her eyes.
"You have a code. He doesn't. You do the math," the thug said.
"I'm going to break every bone in your body starting with your toes and ending with your skull," Beth threatened.
"Freeze," a male Crow agent said to Beth with three other Crow agents with him.
"You have to be shitting me," Beth sighed.
"Back away and put your hands up," he ordered.
"I'm kind of in the middle of something," Beth refused.
"Hands in the air or I shoot you in the face," he threatened.
"Let's not blow this out of proportion," Beth said as she casually dropped a grenade near them all.
"Holy shit!" they all said as they tried to get cover.
The grenade exploded in smoke giving Beth sufficient concealment. The Crows fired on her as she made her escape using a projectile cable gun out the window leaving several dead bodies behind.
Beth entered the Bat-Cave and met up with Brainiac 5. "Anything interesting?" she asked.
"Sophie Moore, Mary Hamilton, and Ryan Wilder are making their way to a gun range," Brainiac 5 tracked. "There is a fourth heat signature where the targets should be," he said as he looked over an infrared map. The lights went on obscuring the heat signatures. Brainiac 5 changed the scan to visual light and focused on a woman inside a glass cage.
"Who is she?" Beth asked slightly concerned.
"Stephanie Brown, the Clue Master's daughter," Brainiac 5 said as he got a facial match on her.
"Who?" Beth wondered.
"A rip-off of the Riddler. He was imprisoned after Crow agent Sophie Moore figured out his puzzle. He recently escaped Blackgate prison," Brainiac 5 said as he went through several articles a second.
The screen suddenly saw Sophie shooting at four different targets near Stephanie's cage. The cage then opened. Soon thereafter, all four women left the scene. "Well, that was weird," Beth remarked.
As soon as they left the firing range, several Crow cars ambushed them. Kate walked up to Sophie with a condescending smile. "Little late to be shooting on this range, don't you think, Sophie?" Kate asked.
"You don't understand. She was imprisoned in a glass cage and was poisoned. This is all part of Clue Master's plot, and you're screwing it up by being here," Sophie scolded.
Kate scanned Stephanie's body that was covered in letters and numbers. She circled Stephanie eyeing her entire body. "You can at least take me to dinner before you eye-fuck me," Stephanie said offended.
"That's not my intent. I'm merely looking for a pattern," Kate said.
"Clue Master wants to finish what he started. Quizbowl was the last place he tried to bomb before I stopped him," Sophie brought up. "So, I say we work that angle."
Kate went to her radio. "I want an EOD team at the old Quizbowl studio," she ordered.
"Roger that, Commander Kane," the EOD squad leader replied.
Kate turned to Stephanie Brown. "We'll take you into protective custody."
"Fuck no," Stephanie resisted.
"Alright, you're under arrest for trespassing," Kate said simply.
"What the fuck? I was kidnapped by my crazy-as-fuck father. You can't do this," Stephanie raged.
"Yeah, this isn't cool," Sophie agreed.
Kate motioned for her men to take Stephanie away. She was dragged kicking and screaming into a Crow car. "This trespassing charge is bullshit," Sophie told Kate off.
"Perhaps, but now we have resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer," Kate smirked.
"Kate, stop this right now. Dad will have your ass after he finds out what you've done," Mary scolded her.
"Nah, more like chewed out. I've been chewed out before," Kate said unconcernedly.
"Wait, what if we're missing something here? What if Stephanie Brown is involved?" Ryan said.
"That's crazy. She kidnapped herself, poisoned herself, and locked herself in a cage?" Sophie asked incredulously. "How did she write all those letters all over herself?"
"It's your day off, Sophie. You should get some rest," Kate said and then walked off with the rest of the Crows back to the nest.
At the Crows nest, Kate went through Crow emergency calls associated with the Clue Master five years ago. She locked onto a particular call and listened to the voice. It was a frantic girl's voice talking about Clue Master's plan. Kate analyzed the voice and matched it with Stephanie Brown. Clue Master had been sent to prison based on a tip by his daughter and Sophie had taken credit for solving the mystery. Kate took off her headset and decided she would use this incriminating evidence against Sophie at a later date.
"Scope out this address," she ordered her men and showed the Clue Master's former house on the screen.
Crow agents immediately took off to form a perimeter around the neighborhood. Kate had broken the code on Stephanie's skin. It was her old childhood home's address. With a drone in the sky, Kate eyed the neighborhood and found a man walking around the house in circles as if waiting for someone. Crow agents moved on him. The Clue Master gave them a surprised look and took out one of his smoke grenades to escape. The Crows understandably interpreted the grenade to be real and blasted him full of holes.
"Keep your distance. EOD will take care of him," Kate ordered.
"But EOD is at the Quizbowl studio," the squad leader radioed.
"That's right. You're going to camp out until they get to you," Kate said obviously.
"Well...shit," the squad leader said already bored.
At the Quizbowl studio, the EOD squad worked on the pressure plate bomb while Clue Master's video message went on loop. "I wish that guy would shut up," one of them grumbled.
"So, hypothetically, what if I were to step on that pressure plate and then I used a cable to swing through that window to safety?" one EOD guy asked another.
"A C4 explosive speed is 8000 meters per second. As soon as your weight is no longer on the pressure plate, you better be moving 8 kilometers per second or nearly 18,000 miles an hour. That's Mach 2.5," the other said.
"Damn, that's fast," the first guy said.
"Math is a bitch," the other agreed.
"Are you done yet?" Kate asked impatiently via radio.
"Yeah, we're about the blow this thing," the EOD leader said as he finished with the final charges.
The Crow EOD team went outside and then blasted the studio with their own explosives taking out the pressure plate in the process. The EOD guys cheered as they completely destroyed the building. "I have another bomb threat. Move to this address," Kate ordered.
"Well...shit," the EOD leader muttered realizing they had more work to do.
At the Crow's nest, Sophie confronted Kate while still in civilian clothes. "We could have figured out that puzzle. Now, a man is dead and an innocent girl is in jail," Sophie accused.
"Forgive me if I don't approve of my sister, a street-rat, and yourself detonating a pressure plate where all three of you would be killed," Kate said condescendingly.
"You just destroyed a shit-ton of evidence by blowing up the studio. Who's going to pay for that?" Sophie argued.
"Evidence is irrelevant. The Clue Master is dead. The building was abandoned and condemned," Kate told her.
"And the girl?" Sophie asked.
"She'll be released once I am certain Clue Master acted alone. It never occurred to you that she might have written those letters and numbers on her body?" Kate asked.
"Well...no," Sophie said flatly. "This didn't need to involve the Crows. I could have handled it myself."
"All evidence to the contrary," Kate mocked. "You're in no condition to lecture me. In fact, considering how you made field agent in the first place, I wonder if you should even be a Crow in good standing."
Sophie gave Kate a stunned look. "Go home," Kate ordered her.
The EOD arrived on the scene and determined that Clue Master's explosive vest was all just harmless smoke grenades. They took the vest away and sent Clue Master off to the morgue.
At the Crow's nest, Kate went to see Stephanie in her jail cell. "You're free to go. The case is closed."
"I figured it out. It's my childhood home. You see, I went to MIT. That means I'm smarter than you Crow fucks," Stephanie raged.
"We found your father at your childhood home. He's dead," Kate said coldly.
Crow agents took a speechless Stephanie out of her cell and out of the station.
Author's Notes: This episode was kind of dumb. The pressure plate would have killed them all even with that cable gun. Therefore, Sophie knowing Ryan is Batwoman and having access to the cave shouldn't have happened. The Crows would have put surveillance on Clue Master's old home finding him there even if they didn't figure out the code on Stephanie's body. No one suspected Stephanie may be in on it. Luke easily gets dispatched and Stephanie going off on her own without telling anyone was stupid. I don't understand why Sophie needed to shoot the targets from so far away. Mary could have shot the targets by being right in front of them. I wanted to make clear the point that the "white supremacist" Crows could have handled this professionally and correctly more so than our heroes.
So, Alice knows Kate is alive. It only took her 13 episodes to get to this point. It will probably take a few more episodes for Alice to verify this fact and a couple more episodes for Ryan, Luke, and Mary to know as well. Likely, the Kate we have come to love in Season 1 will not manifest itself mentally until the beginning of Season 3 because we deserve to be teased and not get what we want. I have my own plans for Kate that don't involve her being the Winter Soldier of Gotham.