​ "A High Bar" – Harley Quinn S01E02 Review

And so Harley Quinn settles into its "standard" format. "A High Bar" isn't as funny as last week's "Till Death Do Us Part". Then again, there's no Batman and no Commissioner Gordon, so that's one mark against the episode right there.

The comedy rests primarily on Harley Quinn's shoulders, and it's a tough call at this point to say whether the character is up to. She's almost as insane as her comic book and movie counterparts, but has just traded her pro-Joker obsession with an anti-Joker obsession. Like Ivy, I tend to roll my eyes each time Harley clearly demonstrates that. Her obsession and obliviousness is already a bit boring and we're only on the series' second episode. How many times can Ivy point out that Harley is going off the rails, and Harley does it anyway? The Suicide Squad movie didn't have scene after scene after scene of Harley obsessing over Joker.

But everything else is so damn funny that it's easy to overlook Harley's one-note character. The Legion of Doom (inexplicably made up only of Batman villains: where is Solomon Grundy and his pants?) is a good example of this. Bane (James Adomian) is a sensitive-yet-towering giant with a goofy voice. Scarecrow (Rahul Kohli) is a gossip queen. Penguin (Wayne Knight) is mostly concerned with making sure his nephew becomes a man by shooting Harley. Two Face (Andrew Daly) doesn't have much to do, unfortunately.

There's also Alan Tudyk as Joker, who is still furious that people think Harley dumped him. He's also negotiating the rebuilding of his lair with contractors and dealing with the city zoning codes. Tudyk does great voice work whether he's Mr. Nobody on Doom Patrol, or Joker on Harley Quinn.

The plot, such as it is, has Harley deciding to show up at the nephew's bar mitzvah after Joker blows up Howie Mandel (playing himself) on Good Morning Gotham. It's being held at the Gotham Mint, which is so confident of its security that it's letting the Legion of Doom host a bar mitzvah in its atrium.

Harley tries to make the best of things but keeps abandoning Ivy to try and impress the all-Batman Rogues Gallery Legion. Where's Cheetah? This leaves Ivy at the tender mercies of Kite Man (Matt Oberg), who thinks he's God's gift to woman. Ivy isn't interested, but has to have Kite Man fly her to her apartment when he poisons the teenage boys with Ivy's fatal pheromones. She isn't interested in him once he strips and gets her into her bed, either, but has to admit that it's cool when he glides her back to the bar mitzvah.

Meanwhile, Harley has decided to break into the mint and do what the Legion has never done. However, Penguin has replaced the guards with members of a comedy troupe and the money with counterfeit "Joshua Bucks". Harley gets tranq'd, and when Penguin hands Joshua a machine-gun umbrella, Harley taunts the teenager over his sexuality until he breaks down. A fight breaks out, but Harley turns the Legion against Joker by pointing out that he's a bully with no superpowers.

Ivy and her plants get between Joker and Harley, and Joker takes off to deal with his contractors. Back at Ivy's apartment, Ivy has to kiss the partially plant-transformed teenagers to cure them and one of them comes around for seconds.

The basic plot is an excuse to hang lots of non sequiturs and punchlines on. Joker and Harley are both insane, but several of the other characters aren't normal, either. Kite Man is as ineffectual as you'd think a guy with a kite costume and no superpowers is. Bane is passive-aggressive, going from wanting to blow up anything that offends him, to wondering why Kite Man is hitting him. There's a lot of poking fun at bar mitzvahs, with the typical bunch of teenagers lusting after a hot woman (Ivy).

The creative team gets in their usual blast of ultra-violence as Harley takes out the comedy troupe with a series of bone-crunching baseball strikes. That, and lots of use of the f-word assure the show continues to be "adult".

Overall, "A High Bar" was a fun follow-up to last week's premiere. Hopefully they'll lose the Harley-Joker rivalry, or at least downplay it in future episodes. They've used the character in other media where she's doesn't spend all of her time obsessing with her former relationship with Joker. So far, that seems to be the direction that they're going in, but hopefully they'll go for some deeper characterization down the road.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?