Now that’s a crime spree.
What They Say:
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy team up to wreak havoc and Joker wants a piece of the action.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With good episodes for both characters previously, this episode is the one that brings them together and fully sets the dynamic that has been touched on in various media since with how close they are. My favorite is still the Bombshells version but I’m quite biased there. This episode, written by Paul Dini and directed by Boyd Kirkland, aired in early 1993 and made quite the impression. Harley has been good in how she’s altered the comics because of her TV existence and bringing the relationship that forms here there as well, and really expanding on it over the years, has delighted a great number of fans.
The cold open is a fun on with the Joker and Harley working their latest heist but the escape goes poorly with Batman after them. That’s normal but everything is going wrong and the Joker has to blame someone, which falls squarely on Harley. Things go bad enough that Joker ends up firing her and kicking her out, which she angrily accepts while in front of him and makes a big speech about doing her own big heists. She returns to the big one she had planned but that runs into trouble with Poison Ivy there setting off alarms, which brings the two together formally. While they’re both after different things here, they do work together in a sarcastic way for part of it but Ivy shows she’s got the stuff to handle being a criminal. Harley’s a mix of frustrated and comical here in how she deals with it but it definitely begins their wild ride together.
There’s a lot of fun in the way the two put together their capers going forward and bringing in both Joker and Batman at different times so that everyone gets involved. We even get some Montoya material here, which will always please me. But what we also get is something that reminds us just how bad Harley and Joker’s relationship was from a very early stage. When she and Ivy are in Ivy’s place and Ivy is helping Harley with how she’s feeling, the dialogue from Harley is straight out of an abused person in how she knows she deserves the pain that the Joker gave her and that it doesn’t seem right without it. There’s a lot of other tidbits in the dialogue that leans into this toxic relationship and how much it means to her which has been an issue for people for a long time. It’s been dealt within the comics for the most part but going back to the past and its originals in ths is both interesting to revisit and a reminder of how accepted certain things were for the longest time by a lot of people, myself included.
In Summary:
A lot of what would define the comics for years to come began here between Harley and Ivy and their beautiful friendship that became something more. The various comics configurations of it have been enjoyable over the years and the resulting fallout that finally recently put Harley on her own path. It’s frustrating to see other media work the characters and go back to the well here but it’s also understandable to watch as the comics side is obviously a more limited audience. There are a lot of important foundations put to screen here that have held up over time but also have been reworked and deal with in the years since too. I like this episode a lot, with all of its flaws, because from it something great came.
Grade: B+
