Ivy goes to a business conference on the moon with Lex Luthor keeping her on a tight leash, while Harley and the Bat-family see budget cuts from Talia’s management of Wayne Enterprises, forcing them to generate revenue by renting out the manor.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Wimp: When Talia repossesses their weapons, the Bat-family immediately go from competent crime-fighters to having trouble beating up ordinary goons. Harley is portrayed as being superior to Nightwing, Batgirl, and Robin in hand-to-hand fighting, to the point of having to train them to fight without weapons. Such a thing isn't the case in the comics or most other continuities where the rest of the Bat-family are perfectly adequate in fighting with or without their weapons, nor is Harley portrayed as being more skilled than them in weaponless combat. While Barbara hasn't been in the hero game for long and could be excused, the previous season demonstrating Harley was (at the time) a much better fighter, Nightwing has been a hero as long if not longer than Harley has been a villain and Damien was trained by the League of Assassins for most of his life, so there's no excuse for their incompetence.
- Blood Bath: Lex has a sink that dispenses baby seal blood.
- Brick Joke:
- The penis rocket Ivy made fun of in the first episode of the season makes an appearance here, and really is shaped like a penis, hairy balls and all. The pilot insists that there's perfectly valid reasons for all of it, not that it stops Ivy and Nora from thoroughly mocking it.
- Harley's note to Ivy mentions she's wearing a chastity belt. When Yonas goes for a Groin Attack, nothing happens because the belt absorbs the impact.
- Nightwing complains that $19 isn't even enough to pay for the electricity to run his airfryer. It becomes a moot point at the end of the episode when Harley smashes it while sleepwalking.
- One sip of each drink that Clark Kent has then makes him behave loopy, and only him. Why gets explained when he later tries to do his usual superhero thing.
- Broke Episode: Thanks to Talia liquidating their Bat-gear, the Bat-family have to resort to renting out the manor to make enough money to buy back their stuff.
- Call-Back: Back in "You're a Damn Good Cop, Jim Gordon", while in prison, King Shark sampled and approved of the "toilet wine" being made there. Alfred, who's now a prison inmate, is at MalCon marketing toilet wine.
- Celebrity Casualty: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are both killed at MalCon.
- Chekhov's Gun: Livewire is shown demonstrating an electrified golf club. During the rush for the escape pods, she tosses one to Veronica Cale to kill Elon Musk as he is trying to take a pod before her.
- Clark Kenting: Clark Kent infiltrates the villain convention, acting like the "beta cuck" Lex Luthor expects him to be by acting like a wimp in Lex's presence.
- Compensating for Something: Lex goes all-in on trying to appear manly, to the point it's obvious to Talia and pretty much everyone else that he's overcompensating.
- Compressed Vice: The Bat Family members are usually perfectly capable even without their equipment, but are portrayed as virtually helpless to do anything after Talia liquidates their gear before picking themselves back up with Harley's help.
- Continuous Decompression: Lex opens the dome at MalCon to drive everyone off the moon, but people have plenty of time to fight over escape pods and even chat casually without helmets.
- Dude, Where's My Respect?: Joker is annoyed that he's being treated as a nobody. Even Two-Face, who is presently robbing him in the mayor's office, admits it's just a dry run for a heist of the governor's mansion.
- Evil Is Petty: Lex's answer to Ivy hogging the spotlight at MalCon is to vent the entire venue into space.
- External Combustion: Joker wires the gardener's riding mower to explode because the man's lecture about mowing grass was boring.
- The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles: This episode's full title is "The First Person To Come Back From A Business Conference Without Chlamydia".
- Feel No Pain: Amelie and Yonas are so drugged out that they have permanently deadened their pain receptors.
- Female Groin Invincibility: Yonas kicks Harley in the crotch, she doesn’t feel it, however: only due to wearing her chastity belt.
- Foe Romance Subtext: Lex indulges in watching a man and woman have sex and demands that the man keeps a Superman cape on and never takes it off.
- Groin Attack: Yonas tries to kick Harley in the crotch, but her chastity belt absorbs the blow.
- Hypocritical Humor: Talia complains that Wayne Enterprises is in dire financial straights and sells off all the Bat-gear as a cost-saving measure. This is immediately followed by her jetting off in her personal rocket to the moon. Harley snarks that she could have sold the rocket.
- Intoxication Ensues: Clark in his secret identity at MalCon doesn't have his powers because Lex lined the venue with trace amounts of kryptonite, so for the first time probably ever in his life he's experiencing the effects of caffeine and alcohol.
- No OSHA Compliance: One of the benefits of being on the moon is not having to follow Earth laws. For example, not having enough escape pods on hand to cover the amount of attendees at MalCon, as the PA helpfully informs the fleeing patrons as the air is vented into space.
- Playing Both Sides: With Lex already provoking Ivy plenty, Talia further incites them both against the other.
- Portal Cut: Felix Faust is demonstrating his portals to the MalCon attendees and accidentally cuts someone in half on the return trip, quickly disposing of the body. As he's fleeing from the moon base at the end of the episode, a villain tries to follow him through a portal and gets the same treatment.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Lex unveils a machine that can restore the ozone layer, preserving the Earth from global warming so that its destruction can be prolonged indefinitely.
- Properly Paranoid: Lex has lined the entire moon base with trace amounts of Kryptonite and seemingly went so far as to spike all the drinks, too. Clark finds this out the hard way when he tries to rescue everyone and can't use his powers.
- Psychological Projection: Joker taunts Harley about wanting to be a villain again as she's beating Two-Face's goons left and right. Harley shoots back that he's projecting his own desires onto her, and is proven right at the end of the episode when he blows up his gardener for annoying him.
- Sanity Slippage: After the previous season showed how frankly un-villainous the Joker had become due to his new family's influence, this episode shows him slipping back into his old murderous habits after spending the entire episode being disrespected. His last scene has him laughing insanely after killing the gardener for lecturing him about mowing the grass.
- Shout-Out: Lex's comments about how "Lex Luthor is an abstraction" and there is no "real" him are taken from Patrick Bateman's opening narration in American Psycho.
- Sleep Walking: The episode ends with Harley knocking over and breaking Nightwing's airfryer while appearing to be sleepwalking.
- Take That!:
- Among those attending MalCon — a convention tailored to villains — are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Ivy sends Zuckerberg drifting off into space in an attempt to impress Steppenwolf, and Musk is later killed by Veronica Cale during the evacuation so she can get to one of the escape pods.
- Lex's sex double, when wearing the Superman cape, looks more than a little like Homelander, and Talia wastes no time making her sex double shove a dildo up his ass.
- Title Drop: Nora says the episode's title during the Cold Open.Nora: Oh, so you'll be the first person to come back from a business conference without chlamydia? Okay.
- Villain Has a Point: When Talia liquidates the Bat-family's gear and tells them Wayne Enterprise will no longer finance their equipment for crime fighting, she points out the Bat-family, minus Harley, relies too heavily on their gear that they let their bodies grow soft, which is proven when they struggle to handle Two-Face and his goons, forcing them to rely on Harley to take them out for them. Even Harley agrees with Talia so she has to teach them the basics on fighting without their gear and improvising using random objects as weapons.
