Spoiler review follows, so get out now if you don't want me to wreck it for you. I'm also going to take this from a comics fan perspective, so if you don't have an easy head for DC continuity, you might get left behind.

I was hooked about two minutes in. Because they brought to life one of the most chilling scenes in modern comics: those couple little panels from "The Killing Joke" where the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon in the stomach, confining her to a wheelchair (until a less respectful creative team takes over.) Having memorized "The Killing Joke," I knew what was going to happen the moment Barbara reaches for the doorknob, but I still jumped. And three thoughts instantly formed: I can't believe they're using Joker already! ... Holy crap he shot her! ... Was that Mark Hamill's voice?

That scene was inside a dual flashback... the second portion covers the stabbing death of Helena Kyle's mother, who we shortly learn was the supervillain formerly known as Catwoman. Joker is behind that attack too, so in one night he manages to create the Huntress and turn Batgirl into Oracle. Both of these attacks are witnessed psychically by a young girl named Dinah, and her journey to "New Gotham" seven years later sets the stage for the remainder of the pilot episode.

Dinah (Lance?) is the most un-comics of the trio. The comics Black Canary has no psychic powers, and - until Crisis - she didn't even have powers that warranted being called a Canary. Black Canary was a pure pulp name, like the Green Hornet or Doc Savage. I'll be interested to see how she gets her name/costume in the show, and if she ever manifests abilities besides standing-still-and-zoning-out. TV Dinah is a little young for a bustier and fishnets, though.

Anyway, through the magic of television coincedences, Dinah falls in with Oracle and Huntress and learns about their crime-busting operation. She also hears about the recent history of New Gotham... and about the Batman.

Batman is not in this show, but he is clearly the inspiration. The main characters all seem to orbit around his empty black hole. Oracle's Gotham history lesson is actually an interesting little Elseworlds... part comics and part movie, filtered through television. Making Huntress the daughter of Catwoman and Batman is sooooo Earth 2! In fact, you could place this after the first three Batman features with only one small change: Joker lives.

Sometime after Batman Forever, Barbara Gordon hunts down Batman (I'm going to assume that Batman and Robin never existed. And actually, you could subtract out Batman Forever too, but it was so meaningless that it doesn't matter either way.) Barbara becomes Batgirl and fights alongside Batman for a while. No mention is made of Robin, but I really hope Robin/Nightwing is added to the show further down the line. Batman also continues to fall for Catwoman, and Helena is born, but Bruce doesn't know about her. After Catwoman's death and the crippling of Batgirl, Batman skips town. Barbara's rationale is that Joker succeeded in driving Batman out of town... but the obvious implication - made all the more obvious by the episode's overawing theme of "finding yourself" - is that Bruce Wayne could not handle putting his loved ones in danger, and that he needed to quit the business. Don't know where Joker ended up. I can only assume Arkham.

(Batman and the Joker appear in a true-to-comics form. Batman looks like Movie Batman, although you never see him clearly. This may be the first live-action Joker that comics fans can accept... skinny head, long nose, wild hair. He looks great during the shooting scene, but puffy-faced and lame during the Batman tackle scene. Despite this being one of the best Joker appearances ever, both he and Batman really exist solely to ground the pilot in feature film terms that the audience can understand. But I'm crossing my fingers for a Return of the Joker sweeps run, culminating with the return of Batman himself.)

So, seven years later, Batman is gone and all but forgotten. Barbara and Helena now run the show, and the majority of their lives involves patrolling New Gotham and fighting crime. Tension occurs because Helena isn't sure why they bother - despite that she's good at it, and she's metahuman (another liberal comics change. Huntress can pull off superhuman leaps and acrobatics, and most of her action scenes are punctuated with a snarling cat SFX... an unnecessary invocation of Catwoman herself.) Add in more tension because grumpy Huntress doesn't particularly want Dinah to join their gang. But Dinah moves in anyway. The trifecta is complete. Blossom, Bubbles, Buttercup.

Their first case centers around the mysterious suicides of rich businessmen. Yawn. OF COURSE they're not suicides. OF COURSE there is something villainous afoot. Yawn yawn. Plus, the pilot seems to have trouble keeping track of how many deaths there are. At the beginning of the episode, Oracle references two suicides. Then Dinah witnesses another one. Then Oracle pulls up a file on the dead men, which clearly shows three deaths, but she only mentions two and claims that two people are still alive and need protecting. Writing revisions and re-looping dialogue are no doubt taking place as we speak.

As it turns out, the final businessman (fourth or fifth, depending on your count) is behind the deaths of the others. Presumably to get their money or shares or something, we never really know. All we care about is how he convinces them to kill themselves, which is by Scarecrow-like fear effects. Our erstwhile Scarecrow hints to Huntress that he's trying to ressurrect the Joker's crime empire. But when he's left battered and comatose, we find out that he was just a soldier under the control of Dr. Harleen Quintzel, played by Sherilynn Fenn. When you first realize that Twin Peaks' Audrey is playing Harley Quinn, you're going to have a fanboy wet dream right there on your new couch. It's a shame she's had to grow up since Peaks, although looking at her now-stern face in Birds of Prey I could imagine her playing guest star Wonder Woman instead. I'm crossing my other fingers for a decent Harley costume.

That plot? Pretty shaky. As with most pilots, it's purely a vehicle to set up the characters, their history, and their interactions. We are systematically presented with the motivating factors of all three women, and it's a little dizzying, given how miniscule the case becomes in comparison to it. I'm always leery of characters that run through a laundry list of emotions in 45 minutes. I would imagine that future episodes will be free of backstory to develop stories better... hopefully better than Smallville's kryptonite-villain-of-the-week syndrome.

Speaking of that, it's interesting that the first super-hero show to work in years succeeded because of a near-complete lack of super-heroey stuff. Smallville has no costumes and very little powers... aside from throwing people through plate glass windows. Birds of Prey ups that level quite a bit - lots of action, an attempt at costumes. Honestly, I winced a little seeing the Batgirl costume in the flashback portions. There's a certain cheesiness there, and the show refs it later when Barbara tells Helena "You're cooler than I ever was."

The girls. I have to say, this is some great casting. I've never heard of any of them, which is great for a show like this, where the concept is really the true star. Ashley Scott is dangerously impish as Helena/Huntress. She's the sexpot of the team and will probably spend many an episode either threatening to quit or blowing their cover to stud cops (she does both in the pilot.) Dina Meyer (Barbara/Oracle) has an Angie Harmon voice, and a jawline that demands you look at her. She's a little harder than an ideal Oracle, but that's the way the TV version is heading. Rachel Skarsten (Dinah/Black Canary) has the most to prove. She's about twenty years younger than her comics counterpart, has the wrong natural hair color, metahuman powers out of nowhere, and a frighteningly empty backstory. She also seems to be of the Kristen Kreuk (Smallville's Lana) school of acting through exhaling.

Did I mention that Alfred looks to be a supporting character?

It's a shame that WB is planning to run this Wednesdays at 9, because it's going to get lost there. Birds of Prey needs to be paired with Smallville, not Dawson's Creek. I would think that the male fanbase of the show could grow larger with a less-female lead-in... and I think this show is going to need those males (and Smallville itself) to get past the super hero curse.