It's a good episode but i don't like how the personalities, the consciousness of those plant beings weren't explored. They acted like humans and were as complex as humans, yet in the end the writer reduced them to pretty much mindless enemies. By doing that you take away interest, you take away character, and you take away an interesting point concerning morality and existentialism, some of my favorite topics. That of who these beings are? What do they think of themselves as creations? Can they change? Susan was mostly just forgotten about. It would have been nice if she tried to change at the end or if she felt something real for Bruce and tried to do something, but then again their relationship wasn't fleshed out a lot.
Instead of any moral nuance concerning characters, we get nothing but a standard direction of plot.
Bruce falling for Susan (voiced by Linda Hamilton!) makes sense more when it's later explained by the pheromones. And also because of how genuinely caring and understanding she seems to be, and Bruce falls for that more because he's unaccustomed to this kind of woman, and he's unaccustomed to relationships in general. His inexperience made him a fool in love, as most of us were.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-04-30T22:16:32Z
[8.2/10] This one was so good that I wish it was a two-parter. There’s a lot of meat here: Bruce being so happy that he’s ready to give up being Batman, the hope that he would leave his work to the next generation, the brilliant unspooling of Ivy’s plan, the reveal that she’s the one responsible for it, and the final epic confrontation are all big enough things to warrant...well...a little more room to grow.
Still, what we get is great. While it’s a little glancing, the episode nicely walks the line between Bruce being so enamored with this new Susan person he met at Veronica Vreeland’s (sudden) wedding so quickly that you think something’s up, at the same time you wonder if maybe Bruce has once again found someone he cares about enough to be willing to give up his life as the Caped Crusader. (Shades of Mask of the Phantasm!)
I do wish we had more time for the relationship to breathe, if only because it makes Batman’s falling in love and recovering from it seem a little too unbelievable on both sides of the occasion. Still, even if it’s clear that something’s up, it’s not necessarily clear what or who’s behind it, especially as the rest of the crew seems to take it at face value (give or take Tim), so when things start to fall apart, it just leaves the viewer that much more interested to know what’s going down.
It became nicel clear once Veronica’s husband showed green skin when he tried to move through her laser grid. But I still like the way the episode built to the reveal that Ivy is behind it all. There’s a series of hints that make it more and more plain what’s happening, until Ivy herself takes control, replete with a nicely creepy ripping off of one of her goons’ skin.
Her scheme is a particularly good one. The perfect plant-based spouses feels like a natural extension of her efforts at human cloning when she had supposedly reformed and settled down, and the notion of setting up Gotham’s elites with their ideal partners so she could worm her way into their fortunes is deligthfully diabolical.
That said, I like Bruce’s emotional reasons for being suspicious rather than his more practical ones. All of these perfect spouses having green eyes is a solid tell. But there’s more of a charge when Bruce confronts Susan, sees the green goop dripping down her face, and you can see him struggle with the realization that the woman who practically saved his psyche is a fake. “I’m your wife” is a tough line to take.
The de jure action climax works well too. The image of tentacles emerging from beneath the sea and wrecking the ship, and of Ivy’s verdant, leafy henchman threatening our heroes stands out. In the same way, Robin blasting “perfect mates” with herbicide and watching them disintegrate and melt away is pretty gruesome. Hell, there’s even something that feels very high drama and almost operatic about Batman sending his seconds to lead the others to safety, narrowly escaping himself but being unable to grab Ivy, and watching his fabrication of a wife sink beneath the water and toss a ring in after her. I wish that material had more time to breathe, but it’s all good stuff.
Overall, this is a rolicking and, at times, emotionally potent episode that was so much going on that my biggest complaint is that I wanted more of it!