天下制覇

This was really Lex's master plan?

Impressions:

I take only a small amount of smug satisfaction in being completely correct about the Lazarus Pit/Nightwing stuff, just for the record. Is this really why Talia was brought in at the start of the season, just to sit on the sidelines, be horrendously inconsistent between *sigh* girl bossing and sucking up to businessmen, just to be the cliffhanger for the next season? The whole "We were trying to be things that we're not" doesn't even really make a lot of sense for either of them. They certainly weren't trying all that hard. For Harley, wasn't that the point? That she was trying to change and reconnect with her helping-people psychiatrist past? For Ivy, wasn't she supposed to be transforming the LoD? Harley successfully didn't kill Alfred that one time, and Ivy spent the entire season trying to suck up to people for their approval.

This season just felt like a very wide miss to me. At least Gordon and Bane were a bit more restrained, but it had none of the raw, emotional episodes like the Freeze one in the second season, or Harley's family in the first. Ivy especially felt horrendously out of character from her normally misogynistic self while also not actually attempting much of anything. Harley was also barely part of the Bat Family at all. She killed Pyg, fought those Swedes and then went off on a drug and murder bender before falling back into drunken murder and covering it up instead of dealing with her mistakes. There's so much more potential there and it feels so squandered, especially thinking back to some of the more memorable one-liners from earlier seasons like building affordable housing to actually fight crime, or just plain everything about Damien being a little idiot brat. And so much, from Nightwing to Joker to Lex is still unresolved. Did they really deal with the season's main antagonist by phoning in a deus ex machina to just move him elsewhere? Really?

I cannot at all say that I am interested in the Kite Man spinoff either since they posted a trailer for that. Maybe it'll surprise me, but I still have the opinion that he was, and remained to the end, a giant jackass, and do not at all see the affection that people apparently have for him.