Review: Harley Quinn “Bottle My Heart”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Harley, Clayface, and Frank try putting on a play about Brainiac’s life to…accomplish something.

OUR TAKE

If you have been keeping up with my reviews of this season of Harley Quinn…well, thank you so much for reading it week to week, I truly appreciate that. But if you have, you may have noticed that I have not been especially kind to this season thus far. I still stand by those reasons, but I have some good news! A joke this week got a laugh out of me! A rather hearty one, in fact! It was when Harley was worried about being a “house wife” and Ivy replied she was “not a very good one”. THAT got me to laugh. I don’t really know what that says about me or what my comedic tastes are, but the fact that this is the first time the show has gotten me to laugh in a couple years is something I felt was worth celebrating. Oh yeah, I still need a couple hundred more words. Well, the stuff with Brainiac is progressing, with Lena not so delicately making him realize his weird alien monkey is dead, which causes their partnership to break down and…I guess for him to gain the ability to break the fourth wall? That’s not something he’s been able to do before or anything close to what Brainiac in any comic has been able to do but…whatever, we’re just trying to get through the day I guess.

So, with Lena out of options and needing to alert people to what Brainiac is doing, the solution to stop him from completing his sinister plan is to…put on a play based on what Lena remembers about what he told her about his life. Yeah, sure, fine, WHATEVER. Who cares at this point? Clayface has to justify his inclusion in this season so now he’s putting on the play and playing Brainiac, with Harley elbowing her way to playing Lena (and somehow no one joking about how that’s whitewashing since this Lena is Black) and Frank as the alien monkey. Things seem to be going well, or at least as well as they can go, and then somehow Frank is stabbed a bunch of times and dies, to everyone’s surprise. I hope that’s not the end of him since I have quite enjoyed JB Smoove in this role, but maybe that’s enough to finally end this show so…it might even out. Four episodes to go, let’s see how they land the plane!