Thursday, January 16, 2020

My Review of Harley Quinn's 1x07: "The Line"


Written by Laura Moran
Directed by Juan Meza-Leon

Harley: "I'm a bad guy, not a bad person."
Queen of Fables: "You're a dumb person. You're gonna regret letting me out alive, Quinn."

Oh Harley. So far you've made some decent enough judgments with your crew, even if I still suspect at some point that Dr Psycho might betray you. This week she decided that she wanted to help a mentor out with bringing the Queen of Fables into the mix. This also turned out to be something of a mistake.

When the courts decided to use Zatanna to return Fables to her human form and put her into Arkham, Harley broke her out and basically ignored every sensible bit of advice that Ivy had given her. Using Fables to then try and snag some unstealable weather device from Kord Industries then resulted in Fables highlighting just how much of a danger she can be when the Praxis family became the victims of her Big Bad Wolf. Well, all except one that is.

The surviving Praxis member, Jason (Phil LaMarr) quickly got some superpowers of his own and went on a vengeance spree with the attempts to finish Harley and her crew off once and for all. Harley unwisely showed some solidarity with Fables, only for the latter to kill Jason and warn Harley that sparing her life wasn't a smart idea. On the other hand, at least Harley has another nemesis she can go head to head with in the remaining episodes of the season.

As for Ivy, despite laying down some great lines about the levels of evil that both Harley and Fables are capable of, she was mostly in her own little B-plot with Kite Man. I've seen way too many people online hate that she's romantically involved with a man (newsflash: she's not gay) but this plot, silly as it might be actually took an interesting turn this week.

Kite Man might have the emotional maturity of a teenager but he does seem to genuinely like Ivy and while he was a bit much at the restaurant, I did feel bad for him when he realised that Ivy was slightly embarrassed to be around. I did like that Ivy met him halfway at the end of the episode though. This pairing won't last but for the time being it's inoffensive and fun enough to watch.

- Nice to see that Frank was back in this episode, though where did Sy Borgman disappear to?
- Another Joker free episode, but we did briefly get to see the Riddler in this one.
- Given where Harley was stealing from, it's a shame we didn't get to see another hero in this particular episode.
- Chronology: Fables spent 30 years trapped inside a book.

The Line was a nice study into the lines that both Harley and Fables are willing to cross as baddies. One of them is broadcast evil and the other is cable evil. As a description, I love this. Seven episodes in and this show continues to be bag of fun as Harley slowly builds up her credibility as a potential Legion of Doom member.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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