Batwoman Season 3 Finale Ending Explained

Season 3 of Batwoman came to a close on Wednesday night, with the hit The CW series definitely not pulling any punches. The final episode of the season had a lot of ground to cover, as Marquis Jet / The Joker (Nick Creegan) enacted an evil plan on Gotham City, and Alice (Rachel Skarsten) attempted to pave a new life for herself. Along the way, the episode ended on a surprising cliffhanger, and might have introduced a long-running and formidable Batman villain in the process. Spoilers for the Season 3 finale of Batwoman, “We Having Fun Yet?”, below! Only look if you want to know!

The majority of the episode followed the Bat Team’s plans to stop Marquis from raining acid down on Gotham City, which he hoped to do with the use of the Bat-Blimp. Eventually, Ryan Wilder / Batwoman (Javicia Leslie) managed to stop Marquis and get him to safety, but not before stopping the bomb attached to the blimp. The blimp was forced to crash on the outskirts of Gotham — and in the final scene of the episode, a news team was on the team to survey the damage. They were then attacked by a macabre figure with long, spindly fingers and exposed bones, who brutally killed them and then sauntered off into the night.

On first guess, the villain seems to bare an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Death, the very first villain that Batman ever occurred in the pages of DC Comics. Initially just a shady scientist, Doctor Death was later established as a grotesquely mutated man, who played a particularly key role in the “Zero Year” comics storyline (which, coincidentally, has ties to the Bat-Blimp). Of course, there are other possibilities as well, including the Monster Men created by Hugo Strange in the DC Rebirth continuity, or even an odd version of Solomon Grundy. As Batwoman showrunner Caroline Dries recently revealed to Entertainment Weekly, the long-term plans for the character are being kept a secret, especially as the series has not yet been renewed for a fourth season.

“I’m not revealing specifically who that was supposed to be, if it were supposed to be somebody in particular,” Dries explained. “But the point of it was is that our Bat Team did everything in its power to get that blimp out of the city. And it got very close, but not quite. And that people were affected by this blast and that there are going to be consequences from this blimp. You drop barrels full of acid on a certain location, there are going to be repercussions.”

“Yes. The idea is that we pulled something from the cannon that we will put our own spin on,” Dries continued. “Once we get picked up for season 4, then we’ll get into the minutia of like, “Okay, what actually could that be?” And I have ideas for more of a grand scale thing, but is that like a one-off bad guy or is that the bad guy? We’ll see. But I’m curious to hear what you thought it was. So that’s interesting.”

Batwoman airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on The CW.