I Watch TV: Harley Quinn Season 3

 

Harley Quinn

At the end of last season Harley and Poison Ivy, having hooked up, run away together. After some adventures at the start they return to Gotham, where Harley decides to be a supportive girlfriend, helping Ivy create a plant-eden in the city. This, of course, will be a giant disaster, something of a side issue to the pair of them.

Ivy’s experiments centre on Frank, her talking plant, who is kidnapped shortly after she makes a breakthrough. This leads the pair on a convoluted adventure to get him back. Ivy, unable to access the Green (a DC comics psychedelic shared-plant-consciousness/dimension), goes to Louisiana where they encounter the idiosyncratic Harley-verse version of Swamp Thing. Following on from this inevitably brings them into contact with the bat-family, whose b-plot intersects as Harley continues to move from ambiguous-villain-sidekick to chaotic-vigilante-anti-hero.

Meanwhile there's also the, I suppose, c-plot, where Jim Gordon running for mayor gets derailed when the Joker discovers that his adoptive children can’t get into the immersive Spanish program they want. He stands for mayor on a platform of taxing the rich and providing excellent services to all. He’s accused of socialism and retorts that he is, in fact, a socialist. The greatest villain Batman has ever faced.

The show’s strengths are in showing ridiculous comic-mayhem and even gore as both genuinely horrific and also just part of living in Gotham City, matched with characters who have actual feelings and personalities it takes seriously, plus some clever jokes and sly looks at the DC comics etc. universe. The weaknesses come somewhat to the fore, in that these match up fairly poorly, and where the show has previously used these to transcend a rather silly concept, it often has to scramble.

I enjoyed it a lot.

Watch This: Hilarious and gory comic-cartoon fun, with enough serious character storyline to give it a spine
Don’t Watch This: Villains or heroes, they’re all monstrous