Wade says he's a sucker for happy endings. Barbara offers to recommend some plays he might like, and he suggests she do that over coffee with him. "Are you asking me out on a date?" she says. "If I say yes, would that get you to come?" Dude, I'm no expert on women, but it's my experience that it takes more than coffee to make a woman…oh, he means on a date. My bad! "It might," she says, so he says yes: "Coffee, dinner, you name it." She says, "That sounds great," and is a little flustered, but before they get into specifics, her beeper goes off.

At this point, I'd like to point out that on the blackboard, under "Suggested Reading" in block letters, is an all-over-the-map list of writers, including Jack Kerouac, Jane Austen, Charles Bukowski, Joyce Carol Oates, Harper Lee, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, Ray Bradbury. Suggested reading? "Yeah, just read Bukowski or Austen. Or Bradbury, whatever. Just read it."

Barbara's pager reads, "Delphi Alert," whatever that means. And yes, I know her superhero name is Oracle. But in keeping with the whole secret identity thing, wouldn't it make more sense to have a pager that seems like a normal pager, instead of one that flashes some Birds of Prey logo and reads, "Delphi Alert"? Barbara tells Wade she has to take care of something and promises to let him know about dinner.

It's The Sunniest Gotham Ever as we swoop in through the face of a clock atop the tallest building in the city. The camera corkscrews in on Barbara sitting at a computer screen, looking at a completely fake-looking newspaper clipping of a story with the headline "Man Falls More Than Ten Stories To His Death." Maybe it's just because I work in journalism, but I really hate fake-looking newspaper clippings in television and movies. "Huntress, it's Oracle," says Barbara. "Do you copy?" No answer. "You've gone offline again, haven't you? God, this is so like you. It's a transceiver, not a Walkman." Barbara futilely continues to call Huntress, but we see said transceiver in her palm as she lolls on a psychiatrist's chair. Quick: We need a way to dump a lot of back story into the show, and we opened with a voice-over. What else can we do? Have a main character visit a shrink! In this case it's Dr. Harleen Quinzel, played by Mia Sara, whose short blonde haircut bears absolutely no resemblance to the long brown tresses of doe-eyed beauty Sloane Peterson, long ago squired about town by Ferris Bueller on his famous day off. Mia Sara was second in my adolescent '80s heart to Adventures In Babysitting-era Elisabeth Shue. When Chris Parker held up the knife and yelled, "Don't fuck with the babysitter"? I was in LOVE.