One of the things that makes a good superhero great is just how they handle their most compelling villain. While CW's Batwoman series has employed quite a few villains-of-the-week, the most interesting, and longest running, remains Alice. With a past connection to both titular Batwomen, it's unlikely Alice will ever be gone from the series for good. Even when she's not creating chaos for the hero, she's still a large part of the story, following her own journey.
Alice's story in the second season - discovering pieces of her past taken from her - leads to the question of whether or not Alice could ever be redeemed. It seems unlikely that someone who has led her own gang, sews new faces for people, kills without a second thought, and makes trips to uncharted islands could ever live a fully normal life. Perhaps though, Alice could find her place as an anti-hero in Gotham.
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Many hero stories see the main character as the one with the tragic backstory. Like Batman, Spider-Man, and more losing their parents, many heroes have something tragic in their past that propels them on their path. In the case of the CW version of Batwoman, however, it's initially Beth Kane, not her twin sister Kate who has that tragic past.
Beth Kane ends up kidnapped after losing her mother in a car accident. Her remaining family members eventually stop looking for her, believing her dead. She grows up in a hostile environment, forced to become a member of the family to survive. The experience changes her and she uses Alice In Wonderland to escape her reality. Burying herself in the novel she loves leads to her (eventually) adopting the Alice persona. The cruelty she experiences while held against her will, however, leads her to be willing to kill to get what she wants, setting her on the journey to becoming a villain.
Much of the first season of the series is devoted to the back and forth between Kate and Alice. Kate wants to save her sister, but Alice denies wanting to be saved and continues to perform chaotic villainy in Gotham in an effort to get revenge on the people who wronged her. What the audience discovers in the second season is that Alice isn't entirely Beth Kane's creation.
Instead, before Beth goes full Alice prior to the start of the series, she ends up on the villain Safiyah's island. It's Safiyah who gets the hypnotist known as Enigma to get inside Beth's head. Enigma doesn't just hypnotize Beth into forgetting the man she's fallen for - Ocean - but also plants the seeds for the Alice persona. As she admits, she effectively takes away Beth's empathy and compassion. Enigma creates Alice. Alice doesn't put her plans in place in Gotham until after the hypnosis. Considering Enigma also provides the trigger word to remove the mental block she put in place, Alice should have all of Beth's compassion back intact for the remainder of the second season.
Despite Enigma's assertion that Alice doesn't have Beth's warmth or humanity, Alice herself proves that untrue. Sure, it takes her memories being unlocked for her to experience her feelings for Ocean again. Long before that, however, Alice still deeply cares for her siblings. She just shows it in odd ways.
After her traumatic upbringing, Alice doesn't cut ties with her "Mouse." The name she gives to her adopted brother comes right out of the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland. He's the one person she keeps by her side through all of her criminal activity. Mouse is also the one person she keeps safe - until she doesn't. When Alice realizes that she and Mouse don't see eye-to-eye about Kate, Alice cuts ties with him in a drastic way. She poisons him. It's cold and calculated, but she repeatedly makes comments that demonstrate she regrets the decision.
The one person Alice seems to never be able to cut ties with is Kate. That bond she feels with her twin sister as a child never really goes away. Alice puts the entire city in danger regularly, but can never bring herself to kill her sister. She even can't bring herself to let their stepsister Mary Hamilton die. Even when Alice poisons Mary and her mother, she knows that Catherine Hamilton will make the choice to save her daughter. Alice saves Mary herself when another villain captures Mary. Her seemingly lost humanity exists somewhere below the surface. Alice just doesn't want to admit it.
Alice's history as Beth Kane and her emotional state serve to make her one of the Arrowverse's most complex villains. It's hard for the audience to pin down her real goals and motivations because she doesn't always know them herself. Her own confusion makes it seem like she's not completely lost in her own villainy. Despite all of the bad things she's done, Alice could be on the road to something of a redemption. DC Comics set the precedent for this particular character arc.
While the circumstances of Beth's upbringing aren't exactly the same in the comics, the Alice persona implanted in her brain is very similar to her time as a villain on the page. When Kate Kane realizes that her sister becomes Alice because of some magical work on her brain, she enlists help. With a whole lot of therapy, some of it provided by magician Zatanna, Alice gets back on track to be Beth Kane again. She doesn't give up the Alice mantle completely though.
Instead, she teams up with Batwoman as Red Alice. Beth becomes a vigilante in her own right, going out of her way to help people in Gotham so they don't end up like her. Batwoman could very well be heading in that same direction. Much like the comics, Alice would likely never fit into the Bat-Family's code of not killing. That doesn't mean she couldn't be an anti-hero, willing to walk the grey area of the black and white in Batwoman. Maintaining her emotional connections to other characters and revealing the manipulation of Alice laid the groundwork for the audience to accept her redemption. Now, Alice just has to want it.