Only Harley Quinn could produce an episode like “A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special.” The animated HBO Max comedy has become a masterclass in tone, as it balances the earnest love its protagonists Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy share with an irreverent adoration for blowing things up.
This new special, which you can now stream, puts that highwire act on full display, as an excruciatingly horny, chemically supersized Bane tramples through what could otherwise be mistaken for a Norah Ephron movie with superheroes. Is it just me, or is poor Bane—a socially awkward sad sack whose efforts to fit in can blow up in his face—slowly becoming the Ross Geller of Harley Quinn?
“Norah Ephron movie with superheroes” might admittedly be a bit of a stretch to describe this special, but like Ephron, Harley Quinn’s writers seem to share a gift for emotional intuition.
As Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, actors Kaley Cuoco and Lake Bell have developed an electric opposites-attract chemistry that only grows stronger when their characters argue and then, reliably, make up through tender conversation. The special also directly references Ephron and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally by featuring couples’ interviews with superheroes modeled after those that punctuated the 1989 film.
There’s all that beauty, and then, in stomps a ’roided-up Bane, swollen to giant size and humping half the town all because he wanted to buy a penis enlargement potion. It’s like the time a certain Friends character bought leather pants and got stuck in them, or the time he tried to whiten his teeth and they began to glow in the dark, or the time he went to a tanning booth and came out far tanner than he’d planned.
While Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy spend the special reconciling their extremely different romantic vibes—Harls likes to go big, and Ives likes to stay home—Bane is just looking for someone to love. Truthfully, he’d even settle for a platonic hang, but no one’s biting.
As Bane tells us during the special, he’s on all the dating apps, but everyone’s horrible grammar keeps him from swiping right. “Nothing turns me off more than reckless disregard for language!” he grumbles. “It appears I'll be spending Valentine's Day alone, in darkness and solitude, where I was born.”
Eventually, fate intervenes and Bane does manage to meet a nice woman named Betty who’d like to take him to bed. (True to Harley Quinn form, the two meet after the professional dominatrix mistakes the masked Bane for a fellow sex worker; he seemed to have a real knack for it!)
Things go awry, however, when Bane decides to procure a sex potion to help enlarge his, erm, little luchador. The bottle contains a warning not to mix the potion with HGH, but Bane doesn’t notice until it’s too late and his entire body has swollen to the size of a large building and he’s bellowing into the sky, “Bane, you impetuous fool!”
Bane’s night is ruined not only by the consequences of his actions but also Harley’s. She, too, bought a sex potion in a moment of insecurity with Ivy. While the potion did facilitate some otherworldly sex, Ivy’s pheromones also exploded into the air, making everyone in Gotham—giant Bane included—painfully horny. And when Giant Horny Bane catches sight of a billboard for Ted Lasso star Brett Goldstein? It’s game over.
As always, everything works out in its own way, but the beauty of Harley Quinn is how the show arrives at its solutions. Bane’s night turns around when Harley and Ivy manage to calm his libido with a stream of bad grammar. Just in time, Betty shows up to let him know he has a sexual magnetism “of which I’d like to be a part.” (What bigger turn-on could there be than a woman who knows not to end a sentence with a preposition?)
And in the end, Harley and Ivy’s argument over Valentine’s Day gives way to a more vulnerable conversation about Harley’s insecurities, which offers Ivy the opening to remind her of a sweet moment that helped ignite their love. They might have started out as supervillains, but as we’ve seen for three seasons now, love was these two’s true reckoning. (Sorry.)
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