"Thawing Hearts" is the fourth episode of the second season of Harley Quinn, and the seventeenth episode of the series overall. It was released on April 24, 2020 on DC Universe.
Synopsis[]
Harley and crew try to infiltrate Mr. Freeze's lair only to become human lab rats for his experiments to find a cure for his cryogenically frozen wife, Nora.
Plot[]
Harley Quinn sets out with Firefly's plasma flamethrower to burn her way into Mister Freeze's Fortress, creating a vagina-shaped opening in the ice for her crew to enter through, much to everyone's amusement. While entering, Harley muses about roasting Mister Freeze "like the pig he is", but everyone else is excited about Kite Man and Poison Ivy's engagement (sans Doctor Psycho, saying that Kite Man could do better). While fighting through Mister Freeze's henchmen, Doctor Psycho insists that Harley bring a date to the wedding, with King Shark saying he intends to bring his betrothed, Tabitha. Harley brushes this off since she doesn't want love after breaking up with the Joker, and finishes off the last of the goons.
Mister Freeze himself enters the fray, with King Shark and Clayface mistaking him for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, respectively. Doctor Psycho is unable to use his telepathy to help due to the cold giving him a brain freeze, so Mister Freeze rapidly each of Harley's crew with his freeze ray, freezing them with ease, and then deftly freezes Harley as well, despite her fruitless attempts to dodge. While she and her crew are then taken into custody, Ivy and Kite Man are preparing to get the Old Gotham Corn Factory as their wedding venue, which Kite Man's nemesis Condiment King is mocking him over. Ivy supports him, and together they leave to arrange the wedding.
Rats rejoice as Mister Freeze moves to human trials
Back at Mister Freeze's lab, he places Harley and her crew in a cell before unfreezing them. He notes that he is trying to find a cure for his wife's incredibly rare and terminal blood disease, and after experimenting on rates - although every single one of them died - he now wants to move to human experimentation. Harley, being the only human female present like his wife, is his first subject. Although she insists that the dead rats indicate serious problems with his research, he assures her that it is likely because of the 2% difference in human vs. rat DNA causing the problem.
- Harley Quinn
Wait! I know how we can save your wife!
- Mister Freeze
You're only saying you'll save her life to save your own.
- Harley Quinn
So what, you don't want me savin' your wife's life? Okay, I won't.
- Mister Freeze
Hey, relax, relax. Let's not jump to conclusions. This is a negotiation. How do you propose to perform this miracle?
- Harley Quinn
My friend's a doctor and the smartest person I know.
- Doctor Psycho
Wow! That's the nicest thing you've ever said about me.
- Harley Quinn
Not you, idiot. Ivy.
- Doctor Psycho
Yeah, that makes sense.
— Harley negotiates with Mister Freeze
Harley tries to fight her way free, killing Mister Freeze's two guards, but Mister Freeze easily incapacitates her and freezes her to an operating table. He prepares to inject her with his experimental serum, at which point Harley panics and claims that she can help save his wife by having Poison Ivy, a "genius biochemist", search for the cure, saying that she would help Mister Freeze for Harley's freedom. Mister Freeze readily agrees to Harley's proposition and accepts Harley and her crew as his guests while they await Ivy's arrival, leaving to prepare lunch for them as their host, even going so far as to prepare food for them that he cannot eat.
However, Harley doesn't intend to follow through on her end of the bargain, and doesn't even summon Ivy at all because she doesn't want to put Ivy in danger. She instead comes up with a plan to take his wife Nora hostage to force Mister Freeze to surrender his freeze gun, but Mister Freeze doesn't trust his guests yet, and only lets them out of their cells with their lower bodies frozen in ice at his banquet table, leaving them almost totally immobile and unable to act on the plan. Mister Freeze then arrives at the lunch with his wife, frozen in a block of ice long ago to halt the blood disease from killing her. Harley mistakes this as Mister Freeze getting his "jollies" by "freezing women". Enraged, Harley decides to take up the standard for "ice-blocked women all over the world" and save Nora first, before killing Mister Freeze.
At the venue with Ivy, Kite Man encounters Mitchell, aka the Condiment King, his nemesis. The Condiment King spatters mustard on Kite Man's suit to make him appear unkempt and attempts to take the last reservation spot from Kite Man for his own wedding. Despite Ivy's assurances that they could do the wedding anywhere they wanted, Kite Man refuses to yield. However, the establishment disapproves of Kite Man almost immediately.
"Describe the mouthfeel of your steak"
Back in Mister Freeze's banquet, he presides over his guests' meal and hungrily watches them eat, unnerving Doctor Psycho. Because Mister Freeze can't eat cooked meat, lest it raises his body temperature and kills him, he asks Doctor Psycho to describe the mouthfeel of the steak, unnerving them even further. Things get even stranger still when Mister Freeze "feeds" his wife through a tube in her block of ice, talking to her as if she can respond, having been without his wife for so long that he began to pretend that she could. At King Shark's prompting, he tells the story of how they met, him the CEO of a multinational corporation and she the owner of a "mom-and-pop cryogenics lab" that he was sent to squash. He ended up falling in love with her anonymously online, not knowing who she was, and when he realized she was the same person, he married her.
Harley is contemptuous of Mister Freeze's tale despite his reverie, describing it as a story of a "big swinging dick coming in and ruining a woman's livelihood". King Shark calls her a grinch and excuses her as being "sour on love right now", with Doctor Psycho concurring since she wasn't even bringing anyone to Ivy's wedding. Still mildly insulted, Mister Freeze also fires back that he suspects that she's cynical because she's never experienced actual love, prompting Harley to go on an angry tirade about her relationship with the Joker and denounce love as "bullshit".
Although deeply angered, Mister Freeze continues to act as a gracious host, leaving to get spinach puffs for them and to calm down. Harley immediately tries to grab his freeze ray but only manages to knock it off the table, still frozen in the ice, as King Shark and Clayface comment on her abandonment of love. Clayface then gets out of the ice with ease to get some more food from the banquet, shocking them as they had no idea he could get out, so Harley has him give the freeze ray to her. After accidentally freezing Doctor Psycho completely, he manages to unfreeze him and then toss the ray to Harley.
Mister Freeze cheerfully walks in with spinach puffs for his guests, but Harley suddenly unfreezes herself and declares that she doesn't believe his story about Nora having a rare blood disease. Embittered after her treatment at the Joker's hands, Harley presumes that Nora, in fact, tried to leave Mister Freeze, and so he selfishly froze her in ice to prevent it. She then prepares to unfreeze her, much to Mister Freeze's shock and dismay, but Harley insists that she's freeing Nora and that Mister Freeze is a "control freak" who treated his wife like property, as the Joker did.
Mister Freeze as Nora realizes she's still sick
Terrified for his wife, Mister Freeze tries to convince Harley to stop, but her rage against men prevents her from seeing reason, and she frees Nora from the block of ice as Mister Freeze screams in horror. He catches his wife, and she wakes up jubilant, thinking that he unfroze her because he found a cure, that they can finally spend the rest of their lives together in happiness at last. Mister Freeze begins to cry when he sees her nose begin to bleed, as Nora realizes that she is not cured after all. In a black fury, he accuses Harley of condemning Nora to death, seals off the exits, and threatens to blow them all up if Ivy doesn't arrive in time to save Nora. Finally compelled by self-interest and having no other option, Harley is forced to keep her word and honor their original arrangement.
- ❝ Everyone else wanted to kill you, but I convinced them to freeze you. As you can imagine, a group of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, crime lords, they loved the idea of turning a woman into a helpless object of mockery. ❞
- — Mister Freeze explains to Harley Quinn
Once again, at the venue for Ivy and Kite Man's wedding, Condiment King has easily won over the establishment, leaving Kite Man dejected and wanting to go home. However, Ivy supports him and encourages him to keep trying, but soon has to leave when she gets Harley's call and realizes the situation. When Ivy arrives, she begins working to save Nora, with Harley apologizing for not being able to avoid calling for her help. Harley justifies herself as seeking revenge for Mister Freeze orchestrating the Injustice League hit on her, but Mister Freeze says that's absurd, that he alone convinced them to freeze her when they initially wanted to kill her; he saved Harley's life, and in exchange, she endangered his wife.
Meanwhile, Kite Man fails to impress the venue. Ivy then calls, having figured out a potential cure, and asks him to get a particular herb from her garden, and so he gives up on the venue and flies there. However, he doesn't know what "magenta" means, so he accidentally grabs the wrong flower and smells it, which happens to be a paralytic one. He plays it off and finds the right one before flying out on his kite to Mister Freeze's territory, using the vagina-shaped hole in the ice to gain entry. At the last second, the paralysis kicks in, and he crashes to the ground at Ivy's feet, giving her the flower.
One final touch
Ivy uses it to create a serum to transform Mister Freeze's blood into Nora's very rare blood type so that he can perform a blood transfusion to save her. However, when his blood type changes, he will die as his body rejects it. However, Mister Freeze is more than willing to sacrifice himself for his wife, saying that the only reason he went through life in "this godforsaken cryo-suit" was to find a cure. Although Harley is stunned at his selfless sacrifice, he insists that it is not insane, but what anyone would do for those they truly love. He then injects himself and begins the transfusion.
- ❝ My beautiful girl. Goodbye, my love. Have the life I could never give you. ❞
- — Mister Freeze's final words
As Nora wakes up, she realizes that he has sacrificed himself for her, and she says she'll never stop loving him. They try to touch hands one final time, but Mister Freeze dies just before they can, leaving Nora alone. She begins to sob in abject misery, but Harley and her crew continue to comment on the situation, with Harley saying that what they had is "nice" compared to what she had with Joker. Ivy encourages Harley, and Harley expresses how happy she was for her and Kite Man, finally noticing Nora crying her eyes out. She finally goes to try and comfort her, but Harley's crew continues to comment about how great of a guy Mister Freeze was until Nora screams at them to leave, so they shuffle out.
To top it all off, Condiment King calls Kite Man to gloat about winning the venue, using several condiment-related puns as he does. In the end, Ivy becomes so frustrated that she proclaims that he's now her nemesis too.
Cast and Characters[]
Main Cast[]
- Kaley Cuoco as Harley Quinn
- Lake Bell as Poison Ivy
- Ron Funches as King Shark
- Tony Hale as Dr. Psycho, Snow rat
- Matt Oberg as Kite Man
- Alan Tudyk as Clayface, Doctor Trap, Condiment King
Guest Cast[]
Cameos[]
Trivia[]
- Dr. Psycho sarcastically refers to Harley as Georgia O'Keeffe after she melted a vaginal shaped tunnel in the ice-walls at Mister Freezes lair. Psycho is alluding to O'Keeffe's famous up-close flower paintings that have often been interpreted as being allegorically vaginas.
- King Shark mistakes Mister Freeze for pop musician Beyoncé when the villain makes his appearance. Subsequently, Clayface mistakes Freeze for Lady Gaga, another well-known musician. Both singers are known for their extravagant stage performances.
- Dr. Psycho and Clayface both make movie references while at the dinner table at Mister Freeze's lair:
- Psycho compares Mister Freeze with Hannibal Lector, the central character of Silence of the lambs, after Freeze asks Psycho to describe to him the taste of the steak.
- Clayface believes that Mister Freeze met up with actress Meg Ryan on the internet before Freeze reveals that it was actually his future wife Nora. This is in reference to the plot of You've Got Mail, wherein Meg Ryan's character, owner of a small-time bookstore, begins dating a charming stranger online, unaware that the man is the owner of a chain of bookstores which rivals her own. Freeze's encounter with Nora is similar to the plot of the movie.
Gallery[]
- See also: All images from "Thawing Hearts"
