Helena is delighted when her old friend Sandy drops by for a visit after being away from the city for a long time. As if by incredible coincidence, assassin Lady Shiva also reappears in New Gotham determined to seek vengeance against Batgirl for the death of her sister.

Hmmm. I was really looking forward to this episode, based as it was on a key player in the Birds of Prey and other Batman-related comics. Obviously, however, the team's relative success with Black Canary has left them of the opinion that now they can do what the hell they like. In the comics, Lady Shiva is a vicious killer, the best martial artist in the world, and a death sentence to anyone she meets. Here she's a vengeful idiot in a mask with a stupid plan who can't even beat up a disabled woman.

Leaving aside the idiotic Sandy for a moment, however, marvel once again at the sheer idiocy of our heroes. Considering one of them use to slip into a cape and cowl of an evening, how come she can't tell, even from a distance of two feet, that Sandy is Lady Shiva? Why does no one suspect the convenience of both people turning up at once, and both being obviously of Asian extraction? And why doesn't Huntress wear a mask of some kind? From the moment she fights Shiva, one of the pair suddenly has the upper hand. Yet Sandy doesn't play her advantage, leading to the traditional 'Oh no, she'll have to be killed' sadness at the end. More importantly, why can't Babs tell Helena what's going on? It takes her ages and a couple more corpses to mention that she might have been able to stop this earlier.

Then we have the final face-off. Not only does Barbara decide to literally make a stand, knowing full well she'll last no time at all, but she even seems to think she'll need one kick and everything will be sorted out. It's not big, it's not clever, and it makes us doubt Barbara's alleged intelligence if she's more keen to get herself killed than to go to her friends and explain the situation. If this is the standard we're meant to expect, I'm glad we won't have to suffer through much more of it.

**

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