Sunday night’s Batwoman introduced a sobering consequence of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” when it became clear that while a version of Beth Kane from a now-lost Earth of the Multiverse had somehow survived and existed on Earth-Prime, the new world wasn’t big enough for both her and Alice (both played by Rachel Skarsten). One would have to die in order for one to survive and while Kate Kate/Batwoman (Ruby Rose) made her heartbreaking choice and saved the “good” Beth in “Take Your Choice” it isn’t Beth who survived the episode. In a shocking twist Beth was mistaken for Alice and shot, dying in Luke Fox’s (Camrus Johnson) arms. It’s a sat turn of events that Johnson says may have been the most emotional thing to happen to the character thus far — and it will have an impact on Luke going forward.
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Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Johnson talked about how “Take Your Choice” may have been the saddest episode of the series so far.
“The fact that Luke got to have someone die in his arms is pretty crazy to me,” Johnson said. “That’s the most emotional thing that’s happened to him this season so far, so when I saw that I freaked out. Also, the moment where [Kate] choose Beth over Alice was heartbreaking. I think Rachel really delivered today. But yeah, when [I was done reading it], I just realized this [was] going to be one of the saddest episodes so far, if not the saddest episode far.”
The idea that Kate had finally gotten her “wish,” as it were, to have her sister — one not deranged and villainous — and then had to choose who she was going to save only for everything to come undone and force her to experience the terrible loss of her twin all over again is definitely emotional and difficult, but for Luke there’s a different sort of guilt and anguish attached. Luke is also still struggling with the death of his father, a death he blames himself for. Losing Beth on his watch, Johnson said, will only exacerbate his guilt and grief.
“It’s crazy that Luke lost his father not too long ago, and he was already sort of blaming himself for that,” Johnson said. “And then now he’s got this other death where it literally happened on his watch. It was his job to get her to safety and then she died quite literally in his arms. So it’s just a whole other batch of guilt, like it’s a whole other death that happened, sort of in his mind, on his hands.”
And for Luke, coping is going to be a difficult process.
“He will try to distract himself, he’ll try to distract Kate,” Johnson said. “But then, one moment, he’s taking it on himself and then he’s acting like it’s not his fault. So you see that he doens’t really deal with things very often. I think it took six episodes for him to even talk about what happened to his dad. It took five or six full episodes for him to like explain the night that happened. So it takes a lot for him to open up, and this is such a current big thing that happens to him. At first, I think he’s gonna sort of act like he’s okay, but I think eventually, it’s gonna start to hit him.”
Guilt isn’t the only thing that Luke will have to deal with, either. The episode saw Alice make her way to Wayne Enterprises to meet Beth, an incident that also exposed Luke to Alice and it’s something that Johnson hinted could make Luke a target.
“Look out for future danger in that case because of that reason,” Johnson said.
Batwoman airs Sundays 8/9c on The CW.
