Warning: The following Feature contains SPOILERS for Batwoman Season 2, Episode 2 "Prior Criminal History."
Alice, the chief villain of Batwoman Season 1, proved so sympathetic to audiences that some fans of the show came to view her as the series' hero. That trend has continued into Season 2, despite the show's writers going to almost comical extremes in a bid to make Alice into a more monstrous figure.
In the reality of the Arrowverse, Beth Kane had a different route to becoming the crime lord called Alice than in the Batwoman comics. Beth spent over a decade as a captive of the mad Dr. August Cartwright, worked as a slave caring for Cartwright's abusive mother and assisting him with his experiments to create a flesh mask for his scarred son, Jonathan. Beth's only escape from the horrors of her existence was a copy of the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which led to her developing her Alice persona. When Alice returned to Gotham after several years traveling the world, she set about trying to expose the crimes of her father and his new wife, Catherine Hamilton, whose companies had grown rich establishing a police state.
Many Arrowverse fans have noted there was little difference between Alice's tactics and what Oliver Queen did during his first year as a vigilante in Arrow, and the abuse Alice suffered - coupled with the fact that she went out of her way to avoid hurting innocents - had some fans rooting for her after the first half of Batwoman Season 1. Many came to see Kate as a more villainous figure than Alice after she tricked her into a cell at Arkham Asylum, despite knowing Arkham's staff were more concerned with punishing patients than helping them heal. This left Batwoman's writers in a bit of a bind as Season 1 came to a close and led to Alice's suddenly murdering her right-hand man Mouse in the Season 1 finale. Batwoman's Season 2 premiere continued the push to kill any sympathy for Alice, having her randomly kill a woman for no reason before ending with a disturbing scene where Alice cuddled with Mouse's corpse. The second episode of Batwoman Season 2, "Prior Criminal History," went even further, with Alice plotting to poison hundreds of people with toxic bat bites and stabbing Julia Pennyworth after she rejected her idea for "a little supervillain/superspy team-up" against their approaching mutual enemy, Safiyah Sohail.
Although she is now more unhinged than ever, Alice is still considered by many to be far more sympathetic than many of Batwoman's protagonists. Despite approaching Julia Pennyworth with a knife drawn, Alice is still the only member of the ensemble trying to prepare against a battle with Safiyah Sohail and was the first person to propose joining forces against a common enemy. It should also be noted that Alice's poisoning plot was a necessary means to an end; enabling the mass production of the antidote to Safiyah's trademark poison before she got a chance to use it as part of her own evil scheme. While Alice could have offered the antidote up freely, there's no way it would have been used without an appropriate disaster to make it necessary. Compare that to Jacob Kane and Sophie Moore, who spend the episode grilling Kate's friends about whether or not they knew she was Batwoman and harassing Ryan Wilder over a crime she didn't commit.
There's a cruel irony that at the end of "Former Criminal History," Alice has done far more to protect Gotham City than anyone at Crow's Security, albeit it in an incredibly convoluted way. It seems that Batwoman's writers would do well to quit fighting the audience and embrace Alice's off-beat anti-heroism. Alice went on to become a vigilante in the comics and it's not too late for her Arrowverse incarnation to follow in her footsteps.