Review: Harley Quinn “Family Feud”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ivy goes on the warpath to find Lena, while Harley gets a troubling call from her father.

OUR TAKE

Despite the major shift in main antagonists that occurred at the end of last episode, apparently since we have a handful of episodes left, we get to slow things down a bit and, to my surprise, have a call back to one of my favorite episodes of the show! If you don’t recall, back in the first season, Harley and Ivy ALSO had a major rift between them for a few episodes (one that felt a hell of a lot more organic than the one they had for five minutes in this one), and so Harley went back to live with her deadbeat parents for a bit, only to find out that her dad wanted to collect a bounty on her. It had some of the show’s best comedy and its now expected pension for parodying old sitcoms, but also fit in like a glove for that season’s overall theme of Harley finding herself and better understanding her toxic relationships. A theme that has…let’s say, slowly wandered off in subsequent seasons, but it’s still a nice callback regardless, and if this does indeed end up being the last season of the show, a nice way to make things feel like they’re coming full circle.

Is it good or bad that just about everything I have liked about this season has been callbacks or references to ones before it? I’m gonna lean on the side of BAD since the plot made for this season SHOULD be appealing enough for me to not feel my eyes roll back in my head every time we go back to something involving Lena Luthor or Brainiac, and keep in mind I have seen a LOT of iterations of these characters. This might be the most humorous they’ve been outside of a Robot Chicken sketch, but it’s not exactly funny. Anyway, the main progression here after having Harley’s dad (played by the great voice acting veteran Charlie Adler) try to kill her again and end up dead himself, is that Harley and Ivy have learned that Lena has always been after Lex’s approval…which feels kind of tacked on to be honest, but whatever. And now Lena, having taken control of Brainiac’s ship and powers, has taken all of Metropolis and shrunken it like was planned. And about the only characters I actually care about that live there are Superman and Lois, so the stakes aren’t that high. Hey wait, why hasn’t Superman been helping stop this? Have I just not been paying attention?