It’s a week of revelations for Harley and Ivy, the villainous odd couple who belong together but need to learn how to be together. With a reliable status quo restored — Catwoman’s penthouse now stands in for Ivy’s apartment and the abandoned mall from prior seasons — Harley Quinn forces its devious duo to confront minor tensions in their relationship that are made to feel significantly more important than your average superhero apocalypse. That’s the mark of good adult animation. Well, that and a billionaire orgy.
When “A Thief, a Mole, an Orgy†begins, foulmouthed Venus-flytrap Frank has found his way back into Ivy’s care, and he’s gotten pretty buff. Ivy, who still plans to terraform Gotham, is hard at work on reverse engineering a serum from her radioactive plant pal, and Harley’s version of staying out of her way involves starting an obnoxious metal band with Clayface and King Shark just a few rooms away. It’s a minor problem that easily could be solved, but it becomes a ticking time bomb when Ivy decides to play nice and make roundabout implications — “judicious transparency,†she calls it — instead of expressing her needs. Harley, of course, is none the wiser. This yields a simmering conflict over whether Ivy will be direct with her new beau or pile up lies and half-truths that are sure to topple over if it means tiptoeing around a minor (but potentially messy) confrontation. For instance, Ivy relays a made-up Catwoman text to the newly formed music group, asking them to put down the expensive instruments. Ivy, despite her annoyance, claims to have no problem with Harley “shredding … ass†(she’s clearly down with the kids).
The idea that Catwoman knows what they’re up to irks Harley enough to break all her security cameras, which would all be well and good, were it not for the fact that someone later breaks in and kidnaps Frank while the group is out to dinner. While Shark and Clayface look into the matter, with the help of a returning Sy Borgman — the group’s late former landlord, now a cloud-based AI voiced delightfully by Jason Alexander — Harley and Ivy follow a trail of bread crumbs. Their first pit stop is the Joker’s suburban home, where he’s trying to live a normal life and tutor his son, but their second is the meeting place of one of DC Comics’ most notorious recent additions to Batman lore: the Court of Owls, a masked secret society controlling Gotham from the shadows. Of course, this show being the send-up that it is, the setting isn’t so much a gloomy, villainous lair as it is the orgy from Eyes Wide Shut, with slightly more hooting.
With all of Gotham’s elites in one place, it also makes sense for Commissioner Gordon to show up and beg for donations to his mayoral campaign. Despite his daughter, Barbara, hovering over one shoulder — like an angel, begging him to stick to his moral code — the comish gives in to the devilish Two-Face, standing on the opposite side as he offers advice on how to get in with the city’s richest. Gordon is down in the polls, owing to widespread sympathy for his comatose opponent (who has been made into a very literal political puppet, with a pole protruding from his chest), but Gordon’s biggest challenge, as the night goes on, seems to be balancing his glasses on his Venetian owl mask.
The Gordon and Harlivy plots don’t exactly intersect — not yet, at least — but the coincidence leads to a fun moment in which Gordon almost figures out Batman’s secret identity. In a neat visual gag, Bruce Wayne’s owl disguise casts a distinctly Batman-shaped shadow, but the undercover billionaire gets rid of Gordon by promising him funds. (“Dude, if I give you money, will you leave me alone?â€) By the end of the night, Gordon accidentally snaps evidence of the orgy, giving Two-Face some valuable ammo for blackmail that’s sure to come in handy in later episodes.
Bane is at the orgy too — a phrase we’ve all wanted to say — and while his presence this season has remained inconsequential, his sheer devastation at being screwed out of a pasta-maker is now a welcome recurring gag. Harley and Ivy don’t have time for the masked flotsam; their objective is to locate a very specific butt mole since that’s the only photograph they have of Frank’s kidnapper (taken by Catwoman’s high-tech Japanese toilet, also voiced by Ivy actress Lake Bell). However, Catwoman, who has accompanied Bruce to the party, loves her some drama, so she begins exploiting the couple’s festering mistrust. Before long, Harley figures out that Ivy had been scolding her indirectly, and around the same time, Sy lets Ivy know that it was Harley who broke the security cameras, rather than the intruder, so it’s partially her fault that they have no leads on Frank. And to make matters worse, Ivy also lets it slip that she and Catwoman used to hook up several years ago, which Harley wasn’t aware of, even though they’ve been staying at the sultry jewel thief’s place.
Harlivy’s houses of cards all collapse just as dozens of people start fucking in their vicinity. The setting is grandiose and gaudy, which makes for a perfectly absurd contrast to the couple having to reach yet another intimate reconciliation — involving apologies and confessions of deep-seated fears — while still on a fact-finding mission involving inspecting everyone’s asses. It’s both riveting and silly. It also proves once again that the show works best when grounded in rigorous, realistic relationship drama, with characters informed by real fears and insecurities, even as they interact with a completely farcical premise. Frank may still be in the wind when the episode ends, but Harley and Ivy jumping yet another emotional hurdle is a pretty satisfying conclusion.
Jokes’ Gallery
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• “I’m plugged into the World Wide Web — what haven’t I seen? Biggest revelation: A lot of stepmothers are shtupping their stepsons.†We’ve all missed Sy and his matter-of-fact delivery.
• It’s hard to tell if Two-Face is the worst possible campaign manager for James Gordon or the best, especially with polling like this: “And another 15 [percent] said, ‘I don’t get ‘Carpool Karaoke’; they just sing along to songs in a car.’ Clearly they thought we were asking about James Corden.â€
• No, really. Is Two-Face the absolute worst for suggesting that Gordon schmooze with Henry Kissinger at the orgy? Or the very best, because he knows his bad guys?