Harley Quinn Highway

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"Harley Quinn Highway" is the eleventh episode of the first season of Harley Quinn. It is the eleventh episode of the series overall. It was released on February 7, 2020, on DC Universe.

Synopsis[]

Harley must rescue Ivy from the clutches of Scarecrow, who's trying to harvest her pheromones to make a super toxin that turns plants into sentient monsters.

Plot[]

Inside the PlanetWide Pavers factory, Poison Ivy wakes up as she is being rolled in for "surgery." Although she escapes and dispatches the guards around her, she is recaptured at the factory's exit by Scarecrow. Outside, Harley tries to plot a rescue, but the guards are so numerous that Frank the Plant says she'll need her old crew's help.

Harley finds Clayface working for an aggravated Riddler, Doctor Psycho working as a psychic, and King Shark working as an IT guy. They are still angry with her and only agree to help when Frank says that Ivy needs help. Sy Borgman tags along as drivers, and they all head to PlanetWide Pavers.

The group infiltrates the factory by tricking the guards with snacks and stealing their uniforms. At this time, Scarecrow has just finished harvesting Ivy's pheromones for a new toxin. To incapacitate (and ultimately kill) Ivy, Scarecrow also creates a special fear toxin engineered from her DNA to bypass her natural immunity to poisons.

Ivy is sent into a state of terror, and Harley's group finds her by the sound of her screams. Assessing the lethality of her condition, Dr. Psycho takes the crew inside Ivy's brain to treat her, while Sy stays behind to protect their bodies. Ivy's mindscape appears as a dark, misty swamp, already plagued with her greatest fears, such as a murderous wood chipper. According to an avatar of Frank, they must seek and subdue Ivy's greatest fear to purge the fear toxin.

Frank directs them to a mansion — Ivy’s childhood home — where they find a young Ivy sitting at a birthday cake alone and her father taunting her lack of friends. Harley presumes Mr. Isley to be Ivy's biggest fear, but when she attempts to attack him, he laughs and transforms into a giant mouth that consumes young Ivy. Mr. Isley tries to eat Harley, but King Shark bites a chunk out of his tongue, defeating him.

Outside the mansion, Frank — who originally directed them to the mansion — clarifies that Ivy's father is not her biggest fear after all. Kite Man appears before them, on the run from something. He tries to take flight, but gets incinerated by a fireball. A Grim Reaper-like figure, Death, emerges from Ivy's mind's mists and launches another fireball at everyone.

In the real world, Sy keeps nodding off and eventually falls asleep on an alarm, prompting a group of guards to storm the room. Meanwhile, everyone in Ivy's mind keeps frantically dodging Death's fireballs. On Harley's request, Clayface morphs into a bat, which Harley uses to bludgeon Death to death. However, when Harley pulls Death's hood off, she sees her own horribly battered face - Harley herself is Ivy's greatest fear.

Sy Borgman after murdering all the guards

Before they can ruminate on it, however, Ivy's mind abruptly corrects itself and ejects everyone from it, her greatest fear having been defeated. Everyone wakes up surrounded by a mass of bloody gore from a half dozen corpses — Sy had personally slaughtered all of the arriving guards with various mechanical appendages.

Harley demands to know why Ivy fears her, but Ivy brushes it off due to Gotham's impending doom. They discover that the Legion of Doom was behind Ivy's kidnapping. Harley's group pursues Scarecrow, but he and his goons are already driving away. With their own truck towed, Sy literally transforms into a car — with his human head on the hood like an engine block — revealing that he was turned into a "transchanger" by the CIA in 1984.

Harley Quinn Highway2 — Harley Quinn Highway

Harley and company catch up to Scarecrow's trucks just at the entrance to Harley Quinn Highway. It turns out that Gotham City let Harley design it when she threatened to nuke the city, and she created a Mario Kart-esque track that went above the city and included several loop-de-loops, jumps, and even a massive statue of Harley Quinn herself, which the end of the highway wrapped around.

As they start to take out Scarecrow's trucks, Harley keeps pressing why Ivy fears her. Ivy divulges:

❝ Fine! You wanna know what my biggest fear is? Finally allowing myself to count on someone and then having them ditch me! [...] You were my one friend, and I asked you for one favor. But instead, you ditched me for the Joker, who treats you like shit! I thought you could change, but I was wrong! You still live your entire life based on what he might think! ❞

— Ivy on how Harley hurt her

Before the girls can reconcile, the truck Harley is on loses the momentum it needs to make one of the loop-de-loops. At the apex, it starts to fall, but Harley maneuvers through the air and is cushioned by Clayface in Sy's car.

On the road, Ivy lands on the convoy's penultimate truck, having let the previous truck veer off and blow up. Ivy uses a leaf in the window to slit both drivers' throats, but an abrupt turn in the road sends the truck flying off the highway. Sy leaps after them and successfully intercepts Ivy. Realizing that Scarecrow is taking the Gotham Park exit and that they cannot catch him before then, Harley has Sy drive beneath the Harley Quinn Highway weapons cache.

❝ Ivy, you're right. I let Joker get to me. I turned my back on my friends and on you. But that's the old me. Time to blow 'er up. ❞

— Harley before destroying the statue of her old self

Picking out a rocket launcher, Harley blasts her “old self’s” statue, causing its head to fall onto the highway and blocking Scarecrow's truck. Not to be outdone. However, he drives his truck off the side of the highway and into the reservoir below, mixing Ivy's pheromones with the water supply. Trees throughout the park then transform and begin attacking the populace.

Cast and Characters[]

Main Cast[]

Guest Cast[]

Trivia[]

The minor characters of Daniel and Denise are uncredited despite ample lines of dialogue.
Doctor Psycho compares the appearance of Death with The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from Charles Dickens's novella A Christmas Carol.
Clayface and Frank each reference films in relation to the discovery that Ivy's greatest fear is none other Harley herself.
- Clayface compares the reveal with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, specifically the scene inside the Tree of Insight, wherein Luke Skywalker murders an apparition of Darth Vader, then finds his own face underneath Vader's visor.
- Frank compares the reveal to director M. Night Shyamalan's famous plot twists, in which the main characters of his films discover a hidden secret about their lives by the end of the film.
Sy states that a toy line from 1984 inspired his vehicle transformation, an allusion to the first Transformers toys.