“Cheer up, kid. You just need some lessons in good old
female self-esteem. In other words, let’s play with the boys on our terms.”After a falling-out with The Joker, Harley Quinn strikes out on her own to prove her criminal abilities. She sets her eyes on the theft of the Harlequin Diamond but runs afoul of Poison Ivy mid-heist. Realizing that two heads are better than one, Harley and Ivy team up, becoming the new scourges of the underworld as Batman and The Joker both try to stop them for very different reasons.
Insert the standard praise of Paul Dini here. You know that this Bat-fan believes Dini can do no wrong, and “Harley and Ivy” is one of the finest of his many fine episodes for its remarkable freshness. Dini takes Harley Quinn, already a newcomer to the world of the Bat, and does something even further unique with her by taking her out of Joker’s orbit and seeing what she can do when she’s on her own. This episode gives a full character portrait of Harley, mired as she is in an abusive relationship with The Joker and yet irresistibly drawn to his side. Dini wisely juxtaposes her with the avatar of femininity, the incarnation of Mother Earth herself, Poison Ivy, and it’s a match made in heaven. Opposites do attract: maternal/juvenile, aromantic/boy-crazy, scientific/instinctive, sultry/squeaky. Of late, Harley and Ivy have been posited as a romantic couple, but here Dini suggests Ivy as a kind of surrogate mother for Harley, who struggles against her urges to return to Joker’s side.
Some of the episode’s gender politics feel a bit on the nose, but I’d argue that the episode needs it when you’re dealing with someone as far gone as Harley. I don’t recall that the show has foregrounded the abusive qualities of the Harley and Joker “romance” (or, to put it another way, their mad love) to the degree that this episode does. Harley only leaves the gang when she’s forced out by The Joker, who doesn’t remember that she’s gone and expects her at the ready with his socks. Ivy lets us see the relationship with fresh eyes; blinded as we may have been by the visual gag of a harlequin sidekick and the vocal stylings of Arleen Sorkin, we might have missed that Joker is wholly incapable of love. And yet there remains a kind of “oh, you” incorrigibility about their fatal attraction, a romance that plays by the same rules as cartoon physics, where an anvil to the head only makes you see stars and where loving a madman leads only to an indistinguishable stay in Arkham (where, recall, the doors are literally not locked).
Batman: The Animated Series has done this strange yo-yo between two different kinds of episodes that barely feature Batman – the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Last week, “The Mechanic” showed us how dull a story can be without the Dark Knight as its anchor; this week, we see how madcap and magnetic the world can be when it spirals wildly from its bat-shaped center. Dini has long since proven himself the master of misrule, an expert hand at the till of insanity; no one writes The Joker like Dini does, but more importantly I’d say no one has ever written Harley Quinn with the pinprick precision and deft navigation that Dini did (at least, not without the character quickly descending into unaware self-parody). Dini strikes such divine equilibrium between his trio of villains that one could easily have forgotten that Batman’s even in this episode (confession: I myself forgot Batman has a running subplot of pursuit in this episode). I’ve said it in one form or another before, but it bears repeating – Paul Dini is one of a very short list of writers who could probably pen the greatest adventures of Gotham City without using Batman for so much as a minute. So densely populated with fascinating characters is this fantasy universe that Paul Dini could revel in it for months at a time without needing to draw on the narrative’s ostensible protagonist.
Batman does arrive, though, and order is restored, but it’s Harley who gets the last laugh when she proves herself wholly irrepressible, unburdened by the events of the narrative. We, however, in full control of our sanity, can’t help but remember what’s happened; we’re changed by it, and we’ll always look at Harley knowingly askance, wondering if she’ll ever wise up and drop her Punchinello paramour in favor of her poisonous playmate. “Harley and Ivy” is a real treat, the start of a thematic trilogy for Harley (with “Harlequinade” and “Harley’s Holiday,” “Mad Love” being a prequel), and it happens to be one of the best episodes of the entire show. Not bad for an episode that manages to pass the Bechdel test in the process.
Writer: Paul Dini
Director: Boyd Kirkland
Villain: Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), and The Joker (Mark Hamill)
Next episode: “Shadow of the Bat,” a two-parter in which the Bat-family grows by one.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
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