HARLEEN #3 REVIEW! (FINALE)1/13/2020
The issue starts right where I predicted—with Doctor Harley struggling to justify what she has already done. As a quick recap, the last issue of Harleen ended with her making a desperate move in her attempts to understand the Joker—she covered the cameras, unlocked his cuffs, and let him hold her.
It’s a crazy enough thing for anyone to want to be alone in a room with that psycho, and here Harleen is, giving him all the rom he wants to do what he wants. Anything could happen, and she was counting on that trust in him to open him up to her just that much more. Later, she goes over the incident in her head, again and again, trying to figure out why on earth she thought it was a good idea. This could mean her job! Her career! Everything she worked so hard and pushed against the naysayers for. Instead of listening to herself and backing off the serial killer, she gets closer. In her mind, she’s already broken down walls no other therapist has, so she has to keep doing what she’s doing. Unfortunately for Harley, this also gets noticed, and other Arkham employees start to get suspicious. Why is she spending so much time with the Joker? No other doctor stuck it out this long with this, and she insists on total privacy—meaning cameras off during their sessions. Before long, the reader can see that Harley’s plan to break down the Joker’s walls and be the one to pull him from the ocean of darkness that is his mind is getting out of hand—he’s even asked her to call him Mistah J. There’s a specific moment where Harley makes a choice, and in that moment she doesn’t even realize she’s already too far gone. You have to understand, Harleen Quinzel at this point in her life is a healer. There are two things she wants to do in her life: one is to make a difference in the lives of her patients, and the other is to make her mark and prove everyone wrong about her. The trouble is, she chose the Joker to use as her ground-breaking subject, and he saw her all too clearly for what she is, and what she wants. So when the Joker begins to show more positive feedback the more she eases the formality of their meetings, Harley can’t help but to take that chance and run with it. And in Harley’s mind, there was only one thing that was left to make him feel comfortable around her and open up. She plans the night perfectly. Goes home, dresses up, and returns to Arkham under the guise of a late-night session. Granted, none of the security officers at this point really believe her sessions are exactly what she says. They’re right. The Joker’s surprise is followed by immediate understanding when he sees her, and she makes her intentions known. That night, the two of the them have sex for the first time. I’m sure Harleen fancied the term “making love” when she thought back on it, but don’t forget who we’re talking about here. In a sense, her rather nontraditional methods worked. The Joker starts opening up to her more now, so she believes she’s succeeded in easing the real man out of the psychopath. One scene that was a neat bit of detail for me was when they spoke of his fall in the acid bath that has long been believed to be his origin. Joker tells Harley about how his skin was so horribly burned by the acid, the nerves on the top layers are completely dead. The only way he can physically feel on his skin is extreme pressure, roughness, or as Harley happily finds out, clawing. It makes for a good image of what their initial “love life” was like, and maybe a little idea of how the violence gets flipped on her post-Arkham. But for now, Harley feels nothing but success. There’s a brilliant page of art showing Harleen reaching into a pit of tormented souls and pulling the Joker out to safety. This is what she truly believes to be doing for him, saving this lost man from himself and from the world. Now, in the background of all this has been Harvey Dent. The series started with him as District Attorney to Gotham City, doing his best to save the city. Through the series we’ve gotten bits and pieces of his life as DA, all the way up to the marring of his face in court, leading him to become Two Face. Naturally, as a man working to convince the world how ugly and evil the criminals of Gotham are, he breaks into Arkham and sets them free. This is something Harley did NOT put into account when she began her work on the Joker. The night is a blur. Two-Face and his masked minions bring Poison Ivy bags of soil, and her powers erupt in glorious green flora. When they get to the Joker, he takes less than a moment of pause to say goodbye to his time with his plaything of a doctor, and joins the chaos of the breakout. Harleen wasn’t at Arkham when the breakout began, but rushed to the scene as soon as she heard the news. The Asylum is clearly the worst place to be when the inhabitants are breaking free (and in fact, the scene of what’s going on outside the facility while the inside gets torn apart is a great comic on its own), but the only thing on her mind is Mistah J. She rushes in to find him, and is almost immediately caught by Killer Croc in a nasty mood. Her hero of the night, however, is none other than Poison Ivy, who says she helped the doctor because Harley was the first shrink to treat her kindly. After that close encounter, she winds up in the clutches of the one-time Harvey Dent himself, who flips his soon-to-be famous coin for her fate. It doesn’t land how he hoped, but before he tries again, the Joker finds his doctor and bashes in the head of Two-Face. Harleen expects things to go a certain way. Sure, Arkham was broken up, but there wasn’t any way she was going to let her Mistah J get hurt. They’re mid-argument when a security guard walks into the scene and shoots the Joker in the shoulder. It IS a breakout, after all, and he’s an inmate. It’s all a mess. The security guard is going to call in the attack on Harvey Dent, and turn the Joker back over to the police. Harley can’t think straight. She had a plan, dammit, what happened to the plan? If everyone would just stop and listen, she could figure this out and no one would have to get hurt. But they just won’t STOP, and Harley finds herself grabbing Dent’s gun. She just wants to help Mistah J. The guard won’t listen. He won’t stop talking. She hardly even means it when she pulls the trigger and kills him. All of her hard work. Everything she put on hold. The glass ceilings she broke, the sneers she brushed off, the condescending remarks she proved wrong. Her career. Her life’s dream. Her work with Mistah J. All gone, all for nothing. The Joker is as surprised as she is to see the guard’s lifeless body at her feet. Then, she laughs. She dips her hands in the pool of blood at her feet, and writes on the wall—“Harvey, Harley”. They both just wanted to save people, to help. They both lost it all in the process, and became villains themselves. She laughs that her whole life is a joke, and surrenders to the Joker’s arms—his Harlequin. Towards the end, we get a scene with Batman and Alfred watching Arkham security footage in the Bat Cave. He views the video from the room Harley’s incident happened and the Joker taking her with him afterwards. Alfred remarks that crazy is contagious, but Bruce corrects him. He’s met the doctor on several occasions, and knew all she wanted was to help. His conclusion: the Joker took her work and her kindness and used it against her. In the end, we see Harley for what she is now: Harley Quinn, sidekick and sometimes lover to the Joker. She remarks how everything is fuzzy these days--too many tumbles, too much laughing gas. She thinks she lives in a dream, because her reality is so far from who she really is and who she worked her whole life to be. Life, now, is violent, drug fueled, sex fueled, and far more bloody than she’d ever thought. They live joke lives together where nothing matters, especially not sanity. On the last page, the new Harlequin walks care-free through a house of mirrors, no doubt the secret hideout for the pair of criminals. And in each mirror, as she goes by, we see Harleen the doctor, screaming to be saved, banging on the mirror’s glass, yearning to get free and fix this mess. But she is trapped in this life, just like her red-and-black clad counterpart, and no one is coming to save her now.
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