Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Harley Quinn episode 2, "A High Bar."
The latest episode of Harley Quinn makes Gotham City's villains seem far from menacing, and downright ridiculous. While this can partly be explained by their being off-duty for most of the episode, many of the antics in episode 2 "A High Bar" suggest that Batman has a fairly easy job of it when it comes to outwitting his enemies.
The first scene of "A High Bar" takes place in the break room at the Hall of Doom. It is here that Scarecrow and Bane gossip about the recent break-up between Harley Quinn and The Joker, while hanging out around the coffee machine. This is hardly worthy behavior of the self-described "Master of Fear" or the man who "broke the Bat," and it's hard to take either of them seriously for the rest of the episode.
Harley gets her own moment of humiliation after she decides to prove to the rest of the villains that she is completely over The Joker and is living her best life without him. This leads to her and Poison Ivy crashing what Harley thought was an official Legion of Doom gathering, with Harley making a grand rap-star entrance, guzzling a bottle of Cristal while walking a tiger on a leash. Unfortunately, the gathering turns out to be a Bar mitzvah for The Penguin's nephew, Joshua. To add insult to injury, The Penguin thinks Harley is one of the strippers he hired for the event.
Even The Joker, who was originally planning to skip the party, doesn't fare much better as we cut to him as he's in the middle of rebuilding his secret hideout, which Harley destroyed in the first episode. We see the Clown Prince of Crime arguing with his contractor over Gotham City's requirement that he apply for a special permit for a trap door, when "the whole point is no one is supposed to know about it, especially the city!" Going to Penguin's party proves a welcome distraction from the bureaucracy of the whole thing, after Bane calls The Joker to report that Harley crashed the party and seems to be doing pretty well after their break-up. Unfortunately, Mr. J is forced to put his plans to kill Harley on hold when he is called by his contractor in the middle of the inevitable fight, and is forced to go deal with another complication; namely that the city has classified Joker's hideout as a residential area, even though it is an abandoned amusement park on the end of a rotting pier.
While it's obviously silly to expect an anarchist like The Joker to care about adhering to building codes, or that Gotham City would strictly regulate the building of deathtraps, this conceit is half the fun of the show. More than any animated series since The Venture Bros. Harley Quinn tries to explore the realities of how a society with real costumed criminals and superheroes would function while still adhering to the innate absurdities inherent to the superhero genre. This results in a level of humor that is far deeper than one would expect from a mere animated series focused on a Batman villain. Although the show still takes a number of cheap shots at Kite Man, so it evens out in the end.
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