1x47 Harley and Ivy

[9.2/10] What a fun ride this is! Sure, there’s a little 1990s Go Girl Feminism at play here, but even if the approach is a touch quaint by 2019 standards, just seeing Harley and Ivy given the spotlight and acknowledging the crappy treatment Joker dishes out to Harley is outstanding. There’s a sort of Thelma and Louise by way of Gotham to this one, and it works like gangbusters.

It’s weird to describe as something I “like”, but I appreciate the show’s depiction of how awful Joker is to Harley. While the show is tasteful about, there’s a real sense of menace how Joker reacts to his erstwhile paramour. The way he blames her, intimidates her, and let’s be frank here, abuses her, tracks with real life abusive relationships, albeit fit into this hyperreal cops and robbers motif. It creates real sympathy for Harley here, and the way she still pines for him and thinks he can change, and how Joker expects he can get away with such behavior because she’ll always come crawling back, work as an all-ages appropriate take on battered woman syndrome (even if the show leans into a certain comic sense to it more than I might like).

But the best part is how Ivy tries to break her partner in crime of that pathology. The two meeting up at the same robbery by accident, escaping together, and realizing they make one hell of a criminal team is a great setup. The pair have an outstanding dynamic and seeing them paint the town red with crime sprees and Gotham Girl Power is a blast.

The finish also comes together nicely, with both Batman and Joker having good reasons to track them down. Joker coming back to harass Harley some more, only to have Ivy prove her immunity to his laughing gas and hit him where it hurts, is roundly satisfying. And from a visual perspective, Batman carrying Joker and racing away from an exploding toxic dump is a thrill, with flashy oranges and yellows turning the landscape into a black and white silhouette when the embers cool. It’s also a nice touch that Officer Montoya is the one who gets Harley and Ivy in the end.

Overall, this is an outing that is tons of fun and has some great visual panache, but which also gets at something really insidious and mature in that unassuming, B:TAS way.