YMMV / The New Batman Adventures E21 "Mad Love"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the Joker deliberately lying about his past, or does his memory of it change due to his insanity? Which, if any, of his stories about why he does what he does contain any truth?
  • The Joker is laughing madly as Harley drives him out from Arkham. Is he laughing at the situation at hand, or is he laughing at Harley? As in how easy it was to manipulate her into becoming his henchwoman.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Harley's desire to settle down and start a family with the Joker is often portrayed as a sign of how divorced from reality she actually is, usually played for laughs. Then the Joker warms up to the idea...
  • Batman taunts the Joker that Harley comes closer in killing him than he ever would. Come Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Harley Quinn ends up being the one to kill the Arkhamverse Batman, who has survived the likes of the Joker, Hugo Strange, and Scarecrow in the darkest nights, in an undignified fashion of shooting him in the head while he's tied up and under Brainiac's brainwashing. She even mocks Batman for not expecting her to be the one to finally did him in. And that game happens to be one of the last times Kevin Conroy would play Batman before his untimely death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Joker dismisses one potential scheme for being too similar to what the Riddler would do. Years later, an episode of Justice League Action saw the Joker (once again voiced by Mark Hamill) completely co-opting the Riddler's gimmick for a scheme. "Too Riddler" indeed.
• Jerkass Woobie: Harley. Before her career as a super-villain, she was a brilliant young psychologist who was starting out in Arkham. When she encountered the Joker, he played off her feelings for him, making her develop Lima Syndrome. After a brutal beating from Batman, she cries over him and becomes his main henchwoman. Years after their team-up, Harley tries to provide comfort and romance for him, but he coldly pushes her aside. Then one day, she tries to carry out a plan to efficiently defeat Batman (in hopes of spending more time with the Joker). Instead of praise, the Joker hits Harley and pushes her out of a window. The overhead shot of Harley on the ground just adds to the tragedy.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The Joker shoving Harley out the window (quite possibly intending to kill her). While the whole deal with smiling piranhas seems like a typical silly supervillain plot, him shoving her out seems too plausible, especially how it's played completely straight and realistic (with her lying on the ground with blood coming out of her mouth, and later having multiple casts on when she's sent back to the asylum.)
• Suspiciously Similar Song: During the flashbacks depicting the lead-up to Harley Quinn's debut, the Background Music sounds a lot like "Making Christmas" from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• Tear Jerker: Seeing Joan Leland's mentorship of Harleen Quinzel. Dr. Leland is one of the few female doctors at Arkham, and one who gently tells Harleen that she better think again if she thinks she can just write a tell-all. This is heartbreaking when in the present Dr. Leland is Harleen's main doctor in the asylum, clearly disappointed in her protege's Horrible Judge of Character.
• Values Dissonance: The whole detail about Harley sleeping her way through college likely wouldn't be included today, due to the accusations it would no doubt attract (to name just one, there would be charges that it was done just because she was female, as it's hard to imagine Victor Fries or Jonathan Crane bribing their teachers with sex). While it is excised from the episode, that was likely just because they couldn't talk about that kind of thing on a kid's show. Even the writers seem to regard it as something of an Old Shame, as some of the comic books strongly imply she really did earn her degrees.
  • Birds of Prey (2020) runs with both. It's implied that Harley did sleep with many of her professors, but was legitimately a strong psychiatrist. The audience can infer that either Harley has a type (figures she admires on some level) and/or that these people manipulated her in a way that Joker would later use to break her.
  • Harleen gives this piece of Harley's backstory a deconstruction: she only slept with one of her professors, because she legitimately liked him. Her grades were stellar and she certainly didn't need to sleep with the faculty to graduate—but once the relationship was found out, everyone assumed that was what was going on, and Harley was branded a slut. Also reconstructed, as Dr. Leland, having heard about the scandal, hires Harley anyway, noting that her grades were so good in every single class she took, there was just no way she hadn't earned them (after all, she couldn't be sleeping with the entire faculty). Harley is shown to be ashamed of what she did, citing it as her being a naïve kid at the time.

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