Episode 50 Review
Harley Quinn
The fiftieth episode of Harley Quinn is upon us. Five plus years in the making. What a milestone. How will they celebrate the occasion? A nostalgic look back at the highs and lows of Harley and Ivy's journey? The greatest triumphs. The pain and despair. Nope! A 15 minute origin story for Brainiac, of course! "Breaking Brainiac" hits the rewind button on current events and reveals in full how our season five Big Bad came to be so hyper-focused on Metropolis. Because he's a sad dad and can't move on.
When it comes down to it, he was just a company man with a family. A traveling salesman who came home from his last business trip only to find everything and everyone he knew is gone. Instead of processing and moving on, we're shown in detail that, perhaps out of guilt, is inspired his late son to bottle up "perfect" cities taken from a challenged planet. And no, not even Brainiac is safe from this show's sex jokes. I'm not sure it's comforting Koko is long dead and thus Brainiac has gone off the deep end or if it's more concerning he's gone nuts. Harley Quinn is going to have a new patient soon methinks.
A Luthor and a Brainiac working together was predictable. I'm glad they spent just under half the season before they dropped all pretensions and confirmed it to the audience. But that's it. We still have the question of what's in it for Lena? And ding dong, Brainiac can erase memories. Naturally, our titular lead character Harley somehow retains some memory of her encounter with Brainiac on the subconscious level. But can she and Ivy recover their memories and save Metropolis? The former sounds like a reason for Doctor Psycho to show up. But given how things happen, they'll be conveniently distracted by Nightwing showing up to exact his revenge for a few episodes and stopping Brainiac will be come down to the wire.
For the diehard DC fans, keep an eye on Brainiac's screen as he travels through space. After Colu, he passes Tamaran, Htrae, and Czarnia on the way to Bryak then after Colu's fall: Zur-En-Arrh, Daxam, Bismoll, Rann, Thanagar, and Krypton. The Krypton screen also notes some places like Surrus from Superman #236, Orvai (a lakeside city mentioned in World of Krypton Volume 3 #5), Argo City, Kryptonopolis, and Fort Rozz. The screen of Earth notes Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Sao Paolo, Reykjavik, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Philly gets burned. -67%, ouch.
There is also a neat hat tip to the Computer Tyrants of Colu. Brainiac's supervisor Mr. Starr is an alias of the Computer Tyrants in the comics. Vril II and Lysl Dox also appeared in the comics. The callback of callbacks was Ivy mentioning Joker blew up Howie Mandel. That happened all the way back in season 1, episode 2 "A High Bar".
Happy 50th episode, Harley Quinn show. And Harley and Ivy are in it for five minutes. Barely. Shrug. But hey, when was the last time you saw a tragic, deep back story for Brainiac of all people?
Rating: 9.2 out of 10