Harley Quinn #20 — On the Nose

May 15th, 2020

 

This was not an episode fraught with subtlety.

Impressions:

Not a great place to pick it up, because this was definitely one of the weaker episodes, particularly missing about half the cast, and the stronger ones at that. It probably peaked early with Manbat shrieking as a lawyer, but they really missed the opportunity to have him make cogent arguments. It really did seem like they were setting up the court thing to be a whole episode, and then it anticlimactically just stopped and we moved on to the usual "Bane does administrative things relatively efficiently" gag for about the fourth time in the series's run so far. The big problem, though, is that it's continuing to try to tell us that Ivy was a loner and anthrophobe when for the entire run of the show, she's been the complete opposite. From the very start, she was the one who wouldn't shut up about how friendship is magic, works with/gets along with everybody she meets, and has a semi-functional relationship with zero effort. A stand-up routine about being in a pit is already absurdly on the nose, but it's just kind of disinjenuous coming from her. Yes, I'm deliberately avoiding any desire to even speculate about the kiss at the end of it. Maybe it means the end of Kite Man, although I expect it'll probably just make him more obnoxious.

Meanwhile, in the B Plot, Gordon kicks his alcohol habit. You'd think if they were going to have him immediately sober up and go back to bad-ass cop, they would have gone for a gag like "Oh, that wasn't whiskey, I was just a wreck" or "It was laced with narcotic Mexican bull semen," but they apparently really wanted to do that joke where they explain a bad cliche and then do it anyway, in this case, "overcoming alcoholism is hard, so here's a montage." That's practically a verbatim quote from the episode, and it's just as funny there as any of the fifteen thousand, two hundred and ninety seven times I've seen it done in anime over the past year.

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One Lonely Comment

  • Anonymous says:

    perhaps gordon will relapse