Yahoo News How Harley Quinn season 3 made Batman a villain and Harley a hero
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Harley Quinn season 3.
Harley Quinn and her eponymous animated series have come a long way in three years.
When Harley Quinn premiered on the now-defunct DC Universe streaming service back in 2019, it began with the titular protagonist (voiced by Kaley Cuoco) finally breaking with her toxic boyfriend the Joker (Alan Tudyk) and trying to make it as a supervillain in her own right. That meant tangling with Batman (Diedrich Bader) and assembling her own crew of colorful characters.
In season 2, Harley escalated her villainy to a whole new level, bringing a horde of Apokoliptian parademons raining down on Earth while avoiding dealing with her romantic feelings for her best friend, Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). Once she did embrace those feelings, season 3 saw Harley and Ivy building a healthy relationship together.
Originally created by Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and actress Arleen Sorkin for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley recently celebrated her 30th anniversary as one of the most popular female characters in superhero comics, if not all of pop culture. Did that popularity, which has only increased over the years, bring with it a gravitational pull that eventually necessitated Harley's gradual transformation from villain to hero?
"I want to say no, but I actually think the answer is yes," Harley Quinn co-creator Justin Halpern tells EW. "I remember in season 1, we had talked about an arc that ended with her saying, 'I don't know if I'm good. I don't know if I'm bad.' But it felt way too early for that."
Courtesy of HBO Max Batman (Diedrich Bader) and Harley (Kaley Cuoco) in a dream sequence from 'Harley Quinn' season 3
Co-creator Patrick Schumacker adds, "In the comics at the time that we were developing the show, Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner were doing the run and Harley had gone off to Coney Island and had become a heroic vigilante. So that was in the ether when we were thinking about the show and pitching it, but it was too delicious to have her as a villain to start with. We pitched the show as 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show if Mary Tyler Moore was a killer.' Therefore it's an ensemble show, a workplace show, where she's surrounded by even more over-the-top characters. It felt right to start her as a villain. But we knew we could recalibrate her moral compass towards the heroic North Star, it would just take some time. So here we are."
Almost every Batman villain has some abstract goal that's relatable at its core but horrifying in practice. For Harley, it was initially her love of the Joker and then her seeking self-actualization; for Ivy, it's the salvation of the environment from humanity's pollution; for Bane (James Adomian) this season, it was a breach of wedding etiquette that infuriated him to no end.
But the biggest surprise of Harley Quinn season 3 was that Batman himself went down this same path. Desperate to restore his murdered parents to life, Bruce Wayne initiated a plague that transformed all of Gotham City's dead into horrible plant zombies.
Batman, in other words, became a Batman villain.
HBO Max Bruce Wayne (Diedrich Bader) mopes after his breakup despite help from Batgirl (Briana Cuoco) and Nightwing (Harvey Guillen) in 'Harley Quinn' season 3
"It was scary. It hadn't been done before," Schumacker says of Batman's heel turn. "But we had always pitched the show from the beginning as 'This is Gotham City through Harley's eyes.' The representation of all of the characters, especially the heroes, is going to be construed through her prism. So Bruce/Batman was always going to be a wet blanket and he was always going to be an antagonist, but not treated like a villain. So unveiling Bruce as the actual big bad of the season was our biggest swing, and the thing I was most excited about."
Schumacker continues, "It was scary to think about it, and we always think about possible fan reactions, but once we got into it, it felt really right for Harley, as the representative of the show, to treat this one-percenter as a villain. I think it paid off. A lot of people have embraced it in a really positive way."
Batman's descent into villainy was precipitated by the dissolution of his relationship with Catwoman (Sanaa Lathan). Harley did not share that problem. Her healthy romance with Ivy, as well as her sometimes forgotten skills as a psychiatrist, gave her the grounding to untangle Batman's problems — and her own.
Courtesy of HBO Max Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and girlfriend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) in 'Harley Quinn' season 3
"Something that was really exciting for me was seeing that even though Harley's in this relationship that is healthy, ultimately when you're in a good relationship, what you're really faced with is yourself," writer Sarah Peters says. "We see her repeating those patterns and glomming onto Ivy's thing as she would with the Joker. As we get to the end of season 3 and into the future, she's going to have this confidence and this support at home that she's never had before. Hopefully she can parlay that confidence into figuring out where she fits in this world that is very binary when it comes to good and evil. She'll be able to have a more individualized journey."
Peters has written some of the key episodes in the development of Harley and Ivy's relationship, like season 2's Themyscira-set highlight "Bachelorette," and next season she takes over as Harley Quinn showrunner. (As executive producers on the Emmy-winning Abbott Elementary, Schumacher and Halpern are quite busy these days.) Does that mean that what Halpern and Schumacker told EW at San Diego Comic-Con — "As long as we are in charge of the show, Harley and Ivy will never break up" — is now out the window?
Not exactly. Obviously Peters is a major architect of the Harley-Ivy romance, and she still supports it. But some interesting complications piled up by the end of season 3, because just as Harley is edging more toward heroism, Ivy is fully embracing her role as a villain.
HBO Max Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) embraces her villainy in 'Harley Quinn' season 3
"I think we all want them to be together forever," Peters says. "Now it's just a matter of, how is that going to affect them moving forward? They are a power couple now, and we've got a dynamic where they might be on different sides of the aisle."
All three seasons of Harley Quinn are streaming now on HBO Max. Join us in eagerly awaiting the fourth — and hopefully more after that.
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