By Julia McGrath ’23
mcgrathjj@lakeforest.edu
Staff Writer
Rating: 4 out of 5 Love Spells Gone Wrong
If romantic comedies aren’t your style, celebrate Valentine’s Day with your favorite DC heroes and villains by watching Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special. Taking place after the season three finale of Harley’s HBO Max series, this 44-minute episode is a raunchy love letter to the holiday. With short interviews sprinkled in featuring some of DC Comics’ famous couples, and an adorable opening where Harley waxes poetic about the perks of Valentine’s Day regardless of relationship status, the word “problematic” doesn’t seem to fit. That is, until the latter half of the special. More on that later.
Determined to give her girlfriend, Poison Ivy, the best Valentine’s gift ever, Harley Quinn (voiced by an effervescent Kaley Cuoco) stages a robbery of their favorite restaurant in Gotham City, Mama Macaroni’s. Despite Ivy (voiced by a reserved, yet heartfelt Lake Bell) stating that she absolutely loved it, Harley is insecure about the fact that her elaborate plan might not have been the best Valentine’s Day her girlfriend has ever had. As a result, she visits a shop run by the antihero, Etrigan, a demon from Hell who gives her a sex spell to try on Ivy. As expected, the spell backfires and ends up being cast on all of Gotham City, creating another mess for the couple to save the city from. A mess that also includes a giant naked Bane.
If you, reader, are not familiar with how the Harley Quinn animated series usually portrays the supervillain Bane, allow me to recap. Bane usually gets the short end of the stick in the show, undervalued by his fellow supervillains, excluded from Harley’s squad on multiple occasions and is generally the butt of most of the series’ jokes. The same is mostly true in the beginning of this special, which starts with Bane upset about being single on Valentine’s Day. However, Bane’s love life quickly takes a positive turn when he hits it off with a stripper named Elizabeth. When Bane gets insecure about taking their relationship to a physical level, he also visits Etrigan for a magic spell. This spell also backfires and makes him giant, as mentioned before. When Bane’s now-massive height interacts with Harley’s city-wide spell, Bane becomes extremely turned on and goes on a libido-fueled rampage across Gotham, destroying Mama Macaroni’s and even disrupting a poetry reading led by Ted Lasso star Brett Goldstein. Yes, that’s right. The Emmy Award winner, playing himself, has a brief cameo in which he reads Lord Byron’s work. Clayface also transforms into him in order to calm Bane down, which he does by using incorrect grammar. Bane hates incorrect grammar. Told you the second half of the show was problematic.
While A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special is full of crazy twists and turns, innuendos and more explicit visual gags, it ends with a sweet moment between Harley and Ivy, where Ivy tells her girlfriend about her favorite Valentine’s Day memory. It’s an unexpected flashback to Ivy’s time in Arkham Asylum, in which a pre-Joker Harley, then a psychiatrist known as Harleen Quinzel, visits Ivy’s cell and proceeds to describe the plot of Shrek 2 to the plant-powered heroine. It’s a silly thing for Harley to walk in and do, but it’s also completely in character. It also proves the strength and depth of Harley and Ivy’s relationship throughout their story arcs. “You made me feel like I mattered,” Ivy says. It’s a great way to end the special, showing that if you look past the dirty jokes and fight scenes, the Harley Quinn animated series has a heart of gold.
Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special is available to watch on HBO Max for $9.99 a month with ads and $14.99 a month with no ads.
