Reviews WesternAnimation / Harley Quinn 2019

'Irreverent To A Fault' Is Still A Fault

I wanted to name this 'Rick and Harley' but I worried that it was too vague, and also there's probably a DC character named 'Rick' and I didn't want to confuse anyone who thought this was an episode-specific review about Harley and Rick Flag teaming up to kick the Anti-Monitor into a ball pit filled with dildos or something.

Harley Quinn was a breath of fresh air... when it first came out. A decidedly un-serious look at the DC Universe - at a time when both the live-action and animated output of DC was suffocating under the weight of its own angsty grimdark seriousness - Harley Quinn burst through the door and announced "Hey! ... What if Bane had a funny voice and everyone said 'Fuck' a bunch?" Which, in all fairness, is completely enough to carry a show, unless, for instance, you wanted to stretch that same formula over several seasons, without really developing the characters, or having them change in any meaningful way. But what are the odds of that happening?

Having split up for good and for realsies this time from The Joker, Harley Quinn is striking out as a villain on her own two feet, firstly to prove to everyone else that she doesn't need him, and then to prove to herself that she doesn't need anyone else's approval, and then... the show kind of just stagnates while both Harley and the showrunners themselves figure out exactly what the hell they want to do, besides making playground jokes about how Aquaman is lame and has sex with fish, probably.

The show is stuck in this strange limbo where they want to lambast the stereotypical tropes present in the DC Universe, while not ever actually deviating too far from the same path. So you get witty remarks like Harley Quinn commenting on how great a team she makes with Poison Ivy, since Ivy has the potential to take over the world, and Harley is... really good at gymnastics. But then Harley does save the day by being really good at gymnastics. Repeatedly. Or by being the only character who was allowed to have a brain for this episode. Or because the villains (well, villains is a relative term here) left a huge Harley Quinn-shaped hole in their evil plans, ready for her to bust in and save the day.

There are some deviations, namely the deaths of big-name characters who never had an important role in the story to begin with, like Scarecrow and the Penguin and Nightwing, at least currently, but anyone sufficiently close to Harley Quinn will probably be fine. I think the moment when I realised that the show had lost me was a storyline in Season Four where Wayne Enterprises has its funding cut, and it's revealed that Nightwing, Batgirl and Damian Wayne are all completely useless without their fancy gadgets, and it's up to good old Harley to show them how it's done. Harley Quinn. Has to teach Nightwing and Batgirl how to fight. It wasn't so much this specific point, as it was the realisation that every supporting character in the series only exists as a means to make Harley Quinn look more cool. It's not shitting on the source material to be funny - at least, not just that - but shitting on the source material in order to highlight that Harley Quinn and her Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are the only characters not covered in shit. Also, did anyone else just find it weird that Harley is hanging out with Nightwing and Batgirl, when two seasons ago, she led an army of Parademons to Gotham that led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people? No? We're just... skating straight on past that? Well, ok. At least it's consistent with how her character is treated in other media.

What this show really began to remind me of after a while is 'Harley Quinn's Little Black Book', a comic collection of short stories about Harley interacting with various other superheroes while making her fresh start as a hero. It's... not quite one of the worst things that I've ever read, but that's about the nicest thing I can say about it. I was hoping for at least one story where Harley deals with the consequences of having been a villain for so long, or struggles to let go of her past, but instead it's just a collection of Sue fics in which she outsmarts Wonder Woman, beats up Hal Jordan and steals his Green Lantern ring, knocks out (an admittedly depowered) Superman in one punch, and has sex with Lobo, and she also helps Zatanna defeat some extra-dimensional threat because said extra-dimensional threat is uncontrollably attracted to Harley. I'm surprised there wasn't one where she outruns The Flash and also goes back in time to prevent the destruction of Krypton while rewriting Season 8 of Game of Thrones to be better. There's not a moment of character growth, or introspection; it's just a collection of stories highlighting that Harley doesn't need to grow, because she's already so quirky and perfect and everybody wants to do the fuck on her. And you can only get away with these stories for so long before the audience starts to ask "Ok, but... why do I care?"

Harley Quinn, the show, succeeds and fails on the merits of Harley Quinn, the character. And the problem with Harley Quinn is that she's been coasting on her popularity for quite a few years now, with not one of her media outings doing a damned thing to examine why people like her so much; it's just assumed that you do, and then she does cool stuff. And after four seasons of 'Harley Quinn beats up everyone', the joke has lost its edge.

I saw someone say that Harley Quinn (2019) was just Teen Titans Go! with an MA rating, and honestly, that's probably a harsher and more succinct criticism than I could ever manage. I've seen this show positively compared to the first three seasons of Archer, and while that's an apt comparison, it's important to remember what came after the first three seasons of Archer. That's right. Another eleven seasons of Archer. We'll always have Season One, but here's hoping that one of the most potentially interesting characters in all of fiction gets a few more decent stories in the future to really explore why we all fell in love with her to begin with, rather than just beating us over the head with the fact.