天下制覇

Eff the Macaroni.

Impressions:

Better than the first episode, largely because Dick/Nightwing's half was a bit more amusing and better handled than Gordon's was. Him coming back, trying to go for the classic angsty Batman bit while the whole Bat-family has gone… Macaroni… at least gives a few chuckles. I'd say they flubbed the 'reveal' that he was back because he was running away from failure, largely because it was done via throwing a massive tantrum. At least the ending, riding off into the sunset with… the Macaroni… brought things back a bit. Bane was also back, and thankfully in only small doses. Like Gordon, his schtick is good for a chuckle, but gets old fast.

Harley and Ivy, meanwhile, continue to go in weird, inexplicable directions. For most of the episode, the lesson sure as hell seemed like it was meant to be "Ivy needs to learn to work with other people/be a member of the team." She's dismissive of the others, arrogant, controlling, ditches them as soon as things go wrong, and then they go to a team building escape room. Yet we reach the end of the story and the speech is about how she needs to stop being afraid of messing up. How does that follow? If she hadn't been afraid of failure, she wouldn't have been a dick to Shark and Clayface? Her lack of confidence in herself wasn't why everything screwed up in the first half.