Stuck in a Bottle with You

I like Harley Quinn. I want to make that clear up front because I know this review isn’t going to be all that favorable. I think the series, on the whole, is fantastic. It has great characters, an irreverent sense of humor, and never lacks for weirdness, creativity, or a go-for-broke attitude. When it’s firing on all cylinders this ends up as one of the best DC Comics adaptations around, and I look forward to every season when it’s announced. Hell, they even managed to spin-off a show about one of the dumbest, jokiest characters in the DC Universe, Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, and even that was a grand time.

As such, it pains me to say that I just didn’t jibe with season five of Harley Quinn the way I have with past seasons. The show can still be smart and weird, violent and silly in equal measure, but the story being told this time around lacked the spark and energy that has been a key to Harley Quinn in seasons past. The show takes a big swing this time around, giving Harley and Poison Ivy a new setting and new roles to fill (as it actually has in most of its previous seasons), and while conceptually I can see the need to reinvent and try again, this season doesn’t feel as well developed or interesting as it should. And there are key reasons for that.

This season finds Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and Ivy (Lake Bell) in something of a rut in their lives. They don’t go out and commit evil like they used to, instead sticking to watching TV at home while eating take out most nights. They still are passionate for each other, but maybe not passionate for the world like they used to be. They need something to kick start a new phase in their lives, so Harley decides to move them from ratty out awful Gotham over to the city across the bay, Metropolis, home to Superman and the Daily Planet.

Of course, once they get settled in – in part due to help from new friend Lena Luthor (Aisha Tyler) – they immediately start causing (unintentional) chaos. This isn’t a problem for Lena, who thinks it’s all perfectly fine for them to throw a little chaos out into the world, but there’s a greater force that is none too pleased to suddenly have Harley and Ivy in Metropolis: Brainiac (Stephen Fry). His mission was to make Metropolis perfect so that he could then bottle it and keep it at its peak forever. Of course, he’d also likely destroy Earth afterwards, but he needs perfection first. Harley and Ivy are the fly in the ointment, the thing keeping the city from perfection, and Brainiac has to stop it, at all costs.

After having dealt with a number of big threats, including Darkseid, Lex Luthor, and more, it was fitting for the Harley Quinn franchise to address Brainiac. He’s a major DC villain, and with the Metropolis setting for this season, Brainiac is a perfect fit. I think using Harley and Ivy as a way to make Metropolis less perfect is a good way to have them balance out Brainy and his evil plans. It’s the right kind of inversion, that strange twist Harley Quinn is able to do so well, and for a few episodes it does feel like the show knows exactly what it’s doing.

Alongside this, the show also has Superman go off on a sabbatical, leaving Earth to find himself. That leaves Harley and Ivy as the only “heroes” around to deal with a threat of this nature. That works well, getting the one guy that could clearly deal with this threat and sending him away so he’s not there to actually deal with it. We have to assume there are no other Kryptonians around, like Supergirl, which does feel a little weird on a show where seemingly every DC character actually exists in some form, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief just enough. It works in context.

The problem is that the Brainiac story is really only good for four, maybe five episodes, and this season is ten episodes long. There’s a twist, which I won’t spoil, and it’s supposed to add more life to the story and take us in a new direction, but I have to be honest, it just doesn’t work. Once the first half of the season is over, and the twist comes along, it feels like the series spends the rest of its time treading water, unsure of where to go until it can finally hit the season finale and resolve everything. It feels padded, flabby, in a way this series usually doesn’t.

It doesn’t help that the change of setting actually feels like a bit of a detriment to the series. We’ve spent so long in Gotham the last few seasons that the city feels lived in. We understand the setting, the characters, and the vibe. Metropolis, by comparison, is new and undeveloped on the series, and instead of trying to get us used to the setting and give it that same kind of lived in feel, the series leaves it feeling bright and shiny and bland. There’s no personality to the city, no joie de vivre to give it that life. It’s an empty husk in a way Gotham never was.

Worse, the characters we get here don’t feel developed either. Lois Lane (Natalie Morales) should be awesome here, a character we’ve seen in previous seasons who can finally get some kind of real arc this time around. But the show doesn’t really do anything with her except have her pine for Superman when he’s gone and then be angry with him when he doesn’t come back when needed. Lois is a headstrong character who doesn’t take shit and can handle her own problems but we don’t really get any of that this time around. She seems defeated, not a woman ready to be victorious.

Lena isn’t any better. She’s a shallow character spouting platitudes while, quite obviously, having villainous intentions. She’s a Luthor, afterall, so obviously she has something sneak planned (although, again, I am not spoiling anything). It would have been nice to get some development for her as a person, see her in a context that didn’t make her seem like she was just another Luthor plotting something, but the series doesn’t really do that. It has a goal for her to achieve, and then it just randomly moves her around until it’s ready to get her in her position. Everything that happens up to that point is basically superfluous.

But the part that really got me down was that this season just wasn’t as funny as seasons past. There was an irreverent, dark, unexpected quality to the series in seasons past that was lacking here. Maybe it comes with time, and any show that lived on being gloriously chaotic, striving to always take big risks and do the unexpected, could only keep that going for so long. Five seasons, and 57 episodes, is a long time for any show and it might just be possible that the showrunners – Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, Dean Lorey – are starting to run out of good ideas for these characters and this world.

Although, now that I think about it, this is kind of what I said last season as well… Well, damn. We might just have a trend here now.

I’m not writing off Harley Quinn already, but I have to admit that this season felt shaky in ways that previous seasons hadn’t. Maybe it was just a blip, but it’s entirely possible this is an indication that it’s time for the show to start thinking about an endgame. All good things do, eventually, need to come to an end, and if the currently in development sixth season were set to wrap this series up at that point, I think that might be fine. I enjoy this series, but this season shows that maybe it’s time to find a graceful way to take Harley Quinn out with a bang.