Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Harley Quinn Season 4 Episode 6.
The Big Picture
- Harley Quinn‘s success is largely due to its supporting cast of often-sidelined DC characters, who are likable and relatable.
- The show contrasts the normal, relatable problems of its goofy characters with the one-note caricatures of big-name DC characters like Clayface and King Shark.
- Season 4 of Harley Quinn seems more focused on jokes about DC’s main characters like the Bat Family, rather than the depth and development of its own supporting cast.
Though Harley Quinn is primarily a show about the titular Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco), it owes a lot of its success to the cast of other often-sidelined DC characters it’s surrounded her with. While Harley and her BFF-turned-girlfriend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) are both big names at this point, the show has managed to keep feeling like an underdog story because of its supporting cast. Characters like Kite Man (Matt Oberg), King Shark (Ron Funches), Bane (James Adomian), and Sy Borgman (Jason Alexander) have rarely (if ever) been characters outside their relationships with the heroes they fight. But Harley Quinn gathered them up around its heroines and made them all into characters that were likable and relatable–characters that felt like real people. So, it’s a shame that Season 4 seems more focused on its jokes punching up at DC’s big-name characters than on the delightful style of character that’s made it such a success.
Why ‘Harley Quinn’s Supporting Cast Is So Important
Season 1 began with Harley finally breaking up with the Joker (Alan Tudyk) and going off to make a name for herself. She and Ivy assembled a crew of minor villains that consisted of Clayface (Alan Tudyk), Dr. Psycho (Tony Hale), King Shark, and Sy Borgman. The cast was rounded out by Ivy’s mutated Venus flytrap roommate Frank the Plant (J. B. Smoove) and, eventually, Ivy’s boyfriend Kite Man. The show pits this crew against some of the biggest names in DC as they try to make a name for themselves. Harley tries to get multiple major DC heroes — including Superman (James Wolk) and Robin (Jacob Tremblay) — to be her nemesis, Joker regularly attempts to undercut Harley’s independence from him, and their entire team is overlooked by Lex Luthor’s (Giancarlo Esposito) Legion of Doom.
This juxtaposition is the heart of the show. On Harley Quinn, goofy characters like King Shark (shark-person royalty who is also a computer genius) and Clayface (a largely unsuccessful shape-shifting Thespian made of clay) have normal problems. King Shark has a strained relationship with his parents, Clayface is unable to live his dreams of stardom, and Sy Borgman is estranged from his sister-turned-basement-dwelling-tentacle-monster after a falling out years ago. Their problems are mundane despite the inherent absurdity of their characters, which contrasts nicely with how the show presents big-name DC characters. Characters like Lex Luthor, Batman (Diedrich Bade), Joker, or Nightwing (Harvey Guillén) are often one-note caricatures of their more developed comics counterparts. Harley Quinn has flipped the script, making those big-name characters the butt of the joke to the benefit of characters who rarely get a chance to shine, instead of the other way around.
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s a hard and fast rule. Harley Quinn’s main cast is still delightfully absurd and funny, even when the show tells more meaningful stories with them. And both Joker and Batman have had their own stories on the periphery, with Seasons 2 and 3 exploring a new side of Joker as a dedicated family man, and Season 3 (literally) digging into Batman’s psyche to help him start to move on from the death of his parents. But the balance always skews toward the underdog characters, and that’s what’s made Harley Quinn so good in its first three seasons.
The Bat Family Lacks the Depth of Harley’s Crew
At the start of Season 4, Harley has turned over a new leaf and is fully dedicated to becoming a crime-fighting hero alongside Nightwing, Batgirl (Briana Cuoco), and Robin. And while the show gets some good jokes out of juxtaposing Harley’s chaotic antics up against the Bat Family’s strait-laced approach to their heroism, none of them are fleshed out enough to build a meaningful rapport with her. Robin (the Damien Wayne version) is a petulant brat of a boy, and not remotely adult enough to meaningfully engage with the show’s themes and more mature content. Nightwing’s characterization is one of the few stumbles the show makes with its big-name DC characters, reducing him to an emotionally immature man-child with none of the positive traits that have made him such a fan-favorite character in the comics.
Alfred (Tom Hollander) spends most of his time this season fixating on being apart from Bruce Wayne (who was arrested at the end of Season 3), ultimately fading to the background once he gets himself arrested, so he can join Bruce at Blackgate Penitentiary. The best-developed character of the bunch is Batgirl, who has been a recurring character since Season 2. But Harley Quinn never gives her enough focus to meaningfully dig into her character, despite the potential she has. This version of Batgirl has to deal with both her parents constantly failing her, even as her adopted family is falling apart in the wake of Bruce Wayne’s arrest. Without none of these characters having anything close to Harley’s level of development to interact with, her side of the story for the season feels shallow.
Ivy’s side of the story fares a little better, but not by much. As the new CEO of the Legion of Doom, she’s given a wide cast of DC villains to interact with. Lex Luthor serves as an antagonistic force for Ivy to overcome, as it becomes clear that he only offered her the job because he wanted the optics of having a woman CEO. But as for characters that are on her side, she’s struggling almost as much as Harley. She’s been cut off from Frank by her PR team, Nora Fries (Rachel Dratch) is still a one-note character who spends most of her screen time hitting on any guy around her, and the other main or recurring characters around her mostly don’t interact with her directly (Commissioner-turned-Security Guard Jim Gordon (Christopher Meloni) and Bane mostly interact with Nora, who is Ivy’s secretary).
And unfortunately, most of the original supporting cast has been pushed to the side. King Shark is the most prominent, returning from the ocean as a single father of 9 shark babies to work at the Legion of Doom’s IT department. But Clayface has had only a single appearance this season, having moved out to LA for a new gig. Dr. Pyscho, Sy Borgman, and Kite Man are nowhere to be seen. These characters don’t have to stick around indefinitely, and as the show has shifted to tell stories about its characters finding success in their endeavors it only makes sense that some would move on to bigger and better things beyond the scope of the show. But it’s a shame there haven’t been any characters to step up and fill the void they’ve left behind.
There’s Still Hope for A Turnaround in the Final Episodes
Despite all that, there’s still hope that Season 4 can still turn this around. Ivy’s mentees, a team of three supervillains called the Natural Disasters, have a similar underdog energy to Harley’s original crew. Time will tell if these three have the depth to match their obscurity like other successful supporting characters, but the fact that they’re a group of minor villains looking to make a name for themselves calls back to the earliest days of the show in a good way. As of Episode 6, “Metamorphosis,” Ivy seems ready to focus primarily on helping the three of them rise within the Legion of Doom, a storyline that would give the Natural Disasters a lot of time to develop as characters.
There’s also the fact that by the end of Episode 6, the Bat Family has been stripped down to just Harley and Batgirl. This is the perfect opportunity to dig into Batgirl’s character. We’ve already seen her breaking down in the aftermath of Nightwing’s murder, and with Robin kidnapped by his mother, nothing is stopping the show from exploring her character more deeply. This development also frees Harley to spend more time with the rest of the show’s cast, potentially giving characters like the Natural Disasters even more time to shine.
None of this is to say that Harley Quinn Season 4 has been bad — it’s been pretty good so far. The jokes are funny, Harley and Ivy are as compelling as ever, and their recent successes are the kind of changes to the status quo that keep a show feeling fresh even after several seasons. But it would be better if it remembered how important the characters around Harley and Ivy are to the show. These one-note iterations of the Bat Family and the Legion of Doom may be funny, but they don’t add to the emotional stakes of the show as Harley’s old gang did. Either these characters need a chance to demonstrate some real character depth, or the show needs to move on from them in search of more compelling ones.
Denial of responsibility! TechCodex is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
