Review: Harley Quinn “Riddle U”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With two of her targets (Joker and Penguin) off her list, Harley and co. set their sights on the next: Riddler, who has made his territory into a sprawling college campus which keeps its students locked in the only area with power and clean water while locking everyone else out. Harley, Ivy, and Clayface (as “Stephanie”) infiltrate the area as students and meet Barbara Gordon, a Batman fangirl who is eager to end Riddler’s questionable reign. They eventually find out that the athletic students have been secretly been taken to run on hamster wheels which gives school its power. The four stop Riddler, but Harley takes him back to their hideout to run on his own wheel and give them back the power they’ve needed. Three down, three to go.

Also, King Shark and Psycho go searching for a water filter that they ultimately don’t need, while Barbara starts her new hero career as Batgirl!

OUR TAKE

What a world where the Barbara Gordon Batgirl gets introduced AFTER Damian Wayne! It’s certainly odd, but then again many Bat characters are often introduced out of order in adaptations. People often forget that Robin was a character in the comics a full three years before Alfred! As for Barbara shown here, she’s definitely her father’s daughter in terms of her odd obsession with Batman along with her own righteous urge to fight for justice, so she’s most certainly got a good link to her dad, who now has a fun way of keeping him in the story while he’s in his slump. Though a slight downside for me personally is that we probably won’t be seeing Cassandra Cain, the Batgirl after her who debuted in “No Man’s Land”, anytime soon. Still, the way Barbara is utilized here shows that this series is good at making use of its characters for their own purpose in the show as opposed to religiously needing to adhere to the comics to please fans with references as opposed to story.

The college set up was something I was kind of worried about, given that many jokes about college are pretty much played out by now, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they handled the premise in a solidly funny way that I would expect this show to do. In fact, I’d say this episode has relaxed my general worries about this season not living up the expectations of the first, as it shows the series still has the same rapid fire of jokes from all angles it had before. I’m still waiting on the more personal sides of the character work to shine through, but we have eleven episodes to go into that. We currently don’t have any obvious character arcs to work out, though I guess we don’t exactly need them RIGHT now, right?

Also relieved that they’re keeping Riddler alive, at least for now. As said, I adore Jim Rash in this role and would hate to see him knocked off so early in the season. But then again, we’re now down to just Bane, Freeze, and Two Face (whose comedy gimmick is that he and his crew are old timey gangsters, I guess?). If we go at this one villain per episode, that leaves everyone taken out by not even the halfway point of the season, so there’s got to be some breaking up of the take downs, likely starting with the next episode.