An analysis of Harvey Dent--best friend, romantic idiot, and plant murderer--in "Pretty Poison"
Click to viewAs we've already learned, the original intention of the B:TAS writers was to establish D.A. Harvey Dent and the Batman as allies who become friends just before everything goes to hell, in keeping with the original Golden Age origin all the way through to Frank Miller's Batman: Year One.
While this never panned out, it was apparently decided to modify that element so that the friendship would be shifted to Harvey and Bruce, not Batman. This too was already done just a couple years earlier, and in both cases, it gave Batman/Bruce a much deeper level of personal investment in Harvey's loss and the hope for redemption. This wasn't just an ally, a casuality in the war on crime, this was Bruce Wayne's best friend. This is huge, because Bruce Wayne and friendships of any kind don't mix.
Apparently, Harvey REALLY likes pudding.
That friendship became the main focus of Harvey's only major appearance in the show before the Two-Face origin, overriding any other aspects of his character. We don't see the District Attorney in action, nor the man battling demons, and we only get a glimpse of the man as speechifying politician and crime-buster. Instead, the first real introduction that most got to Harvey Dent in the DCAU was that of the good-hearted (if short-sighted and oblivious) best friend. Of course, when it comes to the episode itself, the friendship is entirely secondary (no pun intended) to the plot, which introduces Poison Ivy to the DCAU.
If you haven't seen Pretty Poison or if you need a refresher, this episode can also can also be watched at theWB.com. It's not a good episode, but you might be good to get a more objective view of it before we launch into my own Harvey-centric review, since that's pretty much all I care about. That said, it will also be necessary to explore Pamela Isley's character and motivations. Or rather, the utter lack of both.
Pretty Poison opens five years in the past, right after Harvey Dent has been elected District Attorney. Before we talk about where he is at this point and what he's about to do, I'd like to first bring up the fact that Bruce Wayne is right by his side. While this is meant to establish right away that Bruce and Harvey are not just best friends but also presumably partners in philanthropy, Bruce's mere presence raises several questions!
Think about it: if Bruce is there in Gotham with Harvey five years in the past, then what does that mean for Batman? If Bruce is already Batman at this point, that means he was active for five years before Harvey became Two-Face. But no, that can't be the case, as On Leather Wings--set in the "five year later" period--treats Batman as a relatively new phenomenon. That's how it seemed to me. But if Bruce is in Gotham five years before he becomes Batman, then where is he at with his training?
I assumed that this meant they were going for the Pre-Crisis version where Bruce stayed in Gotham to train himself rather than the Post-Crisis "jaunt around the world, train with master martial artists, and generally find myself" origin, but Henchgirl pointed out that this could just as easily be Bruce making a brief return to support his friend in his moment of triumph. Or, conversely, this could be young Bruce from around the time of the flashbacks in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. If that's the case, then man, I wish we'd seen young Harvey in the film, where he and Bruce could have--
Okay, okay! I'll stick to the episode review, I swear! No more continuity wanking! Instead, let's continue with our regularly-scheduled normal wanking!
From the opening of Pretty Poison, it's implied that Harvey's first act as D.A. is to break ground on what would become Stonegate Prison (Blackgate Prison in the comics, no explanation for the name change). This is clearly Harvey's big day, a moment of triumph celebrated not just by the press but also by Mayor Hill, Bruce Wayne, and the stoic presence of Jim Gordon, who seems to be sporting his Year One reddish hair. Between that and the sepia tone, that's how you know this takes place in the past! Meanwhile, none of the men realize that they're being watched from afar by someone saving one of the island's roses from its eventual destruction.
In fact, even though Harvey and others clearly see the flowers in their midst, they don't give the plants a second thought. Right before giving the first symbolic dig, Harvey brandishes a spade and declares, "From this field of weeds and wild flowers will grow a new institution to build a better, safer Gotham!" It's such a politician's soundbite, but I'm sure that this Harvey is an idealistic crime-buster who means every word. I can't tell if that makes him painfully naive or if maybe Gotham wasn't quite the hellhole it was five years ago.
Either way, the episode offers its own commentary on Harvey's remarks in a wonderfully dry manner, showing us the fruits of Harvey's labor and bringing us into the present day:
In case that wasn't enough to drive the irony home, the scene soon becomes a jailbreak. Because Gotham. What's sad about this irony is that Stonegate seemed to be more than a campaign promise by Harvey Dent to clean up the city. In fact, the papers went out of their way to characterize the prison as "Dent's Dream," which we see in the greenhouse of our mysterious rose-saver, pinning it to her corkboard as a "to-do" reminder for revenge:
By the way, that above scene happened right before the "5 Year Later," but unlike the rest of the flashback, you can see that it was in color rather than sepia! Is it still flashback? Is it modern day? HOW CAN WE TELL WITHOUT THE SEPIA TONE?!
So while the modern day focuses on an action-packed sequence of Batman attempting to thwart a jailbreak, all I can think about is poor Harvey Dent. I mean, this character is destined to snap soon, just as Bullock predicted that Batman himself would snap, and surely the jailbreak has to be a harsh blow: it's solid evidence of how he's failed to make Gotham a better, safer place where the criminals run rampant. If you're going to show Harvey Dent before he's become Two-Face, then naturally, you'd expect to see the cracks under the surface, the frustrations, the anger, and thus, this jailbreak must be the foremost thought weighing on Harvey's tortured, tortured mind.
Either that, or sex:
Yeah, if Harvey wasn't already aware of the breakout that early on, we never see any reactions either way. Instead, the Harvey we see seems suave, calm, and pretty damn carefree. He's also not nearly so skeezy as the screencap I took would lead you to believe, but I just couldn't resist. From what we see, this Harvey is a gentleman through and through, not to mention pleased as punch. And no wonder why:
While Poison Ivy is perhaps the biggest sex symbol in the show, I think that she might have been even more "va-va-voom" in the first half of this episode before she puts on the green tights. Not that Timm hasn't drawn Ivy gorgeously elsewhere (far more times than I can link, so just google it and see what comes up), but something about her in the red dress as she puts the moves on Harvey really lets the animators play up Ivy as something between Red Hot Riding Hood and Jessica Rabbit.
We meet up with Harvey and Pamela Isley having dinner together, waiting for Bruce Wayne's arrival. Why Bruce is showing up to their date is never explained, although I'm sure some of your imaginations are running wild with a few ideas. Not me, though. I'm totally innocent and not at all commissioning fan art in my head. *cough*
Seriously though, we all know that Bruce and Harvey aren't that close as friends, but this scene raises some questions about how close they really are. Because the reason Bruce is running late, as we viewers know, is because he's out as Batman, battling an escaped convict. From YOUR prison, Harvey!
"Yeah, Bruce runs with a very high class crowd!" CUT TO: IRONY. BACK TO HARVEY: "But he still manages to get his kicks!" CUT TO: IRONIC ACTUAL KICKING. You get the idea.
It's a nice bit of dissonance between the Batman action and Harvey's descriptions of Bruce Wayne. Every comment of Harvey's about Bruce's frivilous playboy nature is juxtaposed nicely with scenes of Batman doing battle with the lowlife criminal, which in of itself plays with the idea of duality and a man living two lives. Not sure if that was intentional because of Harvey (and thus subtly playing up how Bruce and Harvey are mirrors to one another), or just a neat coincidence. Either way, it builds up to Harvey's kicker line, which he delivers with confident assertion:
"There's nothing that we don't know about each other."
This, of course, proves to be doubly ironic. Even Bruce's own best friend only sees the carefully-manufactured façade of Bruce Wayne. Man, how sad is that? Consider: their friendship, in part or in whole, is based on lies. While the same could arguably be said about any superhero with a secret identity who still tries to have a normal life, few go quite to the extent that Batman does to cultivate his "Bruce" persona. Poor Harvey doesn't even really know his own friend! But then again, there's a whole other side to Harvey that Bruce himself doesn't see, and won't discover until it's far too late. Until then, EVERYBODY'S FRIENDS AND HAPPY AND EVERYTHING IS GOOD FOREVER YAY.
We fast-forward to Bruce finally joining Harvey and Pam, delighting them with a story with the entirely-not-foreshadowing punchline, "You should have seen Harvey's face! *Delighted chuckle!*" Ahhhh yeah, that won't be awkward at all soon. Pam excuses herself for the evening, but not before giving a looooooong kiss that's totally out of passion and not making sure the poison lipstick really takes:
With Pam gone, Harvey makes a stunning announcement: he and Pamela are engaged! Bear in mind, they've only known each other for a WEEK! Now, you'd naturally assume that Harvey is under Pam's influence, right? We're talking about Poison Ivy here! Except that there's absolutely no evidence in this episode that Poison Ivy uses pheromones at all. When you consider that Harvey's very next appearance in TAS features him discussing marriage to a whole new character we just met that same episode, the evidence begins to point towards Harvey kinda being a romantic idiot.
But just as Harvey stars defending the engagement to Bruce, singing Pam's praises, he starts to swoon and promptly passes out in his food. Because even before he goes insane, poor Harvey (and his face) can't seem to get a break.
He REALLY likes his pudding.
I like how Bruce doesn't immediately register that something's wrong. Even after Harvey's pudding face-first dive, Bruce's reaction is "Oh Harvey, you kidder, you!" It's as if Bruce wouldn't at all be surprised that Harvey would just slam his face into his dinner just to make a point about romance.
Bruce rushes Harvey to the hospital, where they learn that the D.A. is dying of an aggressive unknown poison. The word quickly spreads to Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Bullock, who seems to take the news surprisingly hard, vowing to track down Harvey's poisoner "with pleasure!" Well, after one last donut.
Really, I do like these scant hints at history that Dent has with people like Bullock, who's such a dynamic character that it makes me want to see more of Harvey and Harvey fighting crime and butting heads. That said, Henchgirl dismissed this theory of mine, pointing out that the only reason Bullock would take any pleasure in interrogating suspects is because the crime scene is a restaurant. Which, I suppose, it probably more likely. Feh, logic! I want more Harvey and Harvey! I almost wrote that as Harvey/Harvey before realizing the disturbing implications. Damn you, Internet.
Harvey Dent spends the majority of Pretty Poison--his final pre-insanity DCAU appearance--in a coma, poisoned and dying. Because even when he's not Two-Face, it sucks to be Harvey Dent. After becoming suspicious about Pam's involvement, Bruce learns that the poison in Harvey's system comes from a rare type of rose which is now extinct.
That's right: Harvey Dent wiped out an entire species of rose, and thus we have Pam's entire motivation for going to crime. When Henchgirl realized this upon rewatching the episode with me, she exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, Harvey, you DESERVE this!" This, as you might imagine, briefly caused some debate in the Hefner/Henchgirl household. No, don't worry, we're not breaking up.
I argued that Harvey, along with Hill and everyone else around him, was almost certainly unaware that the rose grew only on that particular island in Gotham Harbor. If anyone involved had known--from Harvey to Hill to Bruce to the press to anybody following the news about the new prison being built there--I'm certain that some action would be taken to at least preserve a few of the roses. I mean, it'd be one thing if we learned that the roses could ONLY grow on that island, because then it would have seemed like a clearer case of Harvey cruelly sacrificing roses in favor of THE PRISON OF HIS DREEEEAMS. But no, as we saw from the start, Pam was easily able to dig out the rose and keep it thriving in her greenhouse.
Yeah, the rose was doing just fine. This means that the roses could have been easily saved by anyone. As such, I can't imagine anybody involved in that ground-breaking (Bruce alone!) letting those flowers go extinct if they knew how endangered and rare the roses were. Hell, you would have figured that if ANYBODY knew that the roses grew only on that island, somebody would have said SOMETHING to them!
Which thus raises the question: "So, Hefner, why didn't Pam try to stop them?" Well, self, that's a damn good question! You are so smart and also handsome! One possible explanation could be that she just didn't know about Harvey's plans until it was too late, as evidenced by this scene from the Gotham Girls comic mini-series from 2003, eleven years after Pretty Poison's premiere:
Of course, this falls apart once you remember that Pam was actually there at the groundbreaking, not at home eating Chinese and watching TV. Whether it's a continuity error by writer Paul Storrie or Pamela being an unreliable narrator who's lying or misremembering, we must take the above pages with a grain of salt.
But even if she was on the island, that still doesn't necessarily mean that she was aware of Harvey's plans. Being a botanist who was aware of the rose's rareness, perhaps she was already on the island to gather a specimen, and by the time she realized what was about to happen, she was powerless to watch the destruction and plant-slaughter. But that seems too coincidental for my tastes. From the episode's opening, Pam's presence on the island the day of the ground-breaking to save the rose indicates that she KNEW about Harvey's plans in the first place.
So again, why didn't she try to stop them beforehand? Why didn't she try to contact Harvey or anybody else? She could have started a protest, or alerted the media, or written a sternly-worded-letter. Something! Anything! Instead, she said nothing, just watched and fumed, saving only one of the roses, and then proceeded to fume and plot her revenge... for five years.
I so wish I had a .gif of Pam's hilariously awkward "GRR! ARGH!" moment here.
Geez, that's another thing! Why wait five years to exact your revenge on Harvey Dent? Was he already involved with somebody else at that point (hey there, prime excuse to bring Gilda into the DCAU!), and was seduction Pam's only plan of attack, so she had to wait it out until Harvey was single? Or was she just lazy? Most likely, perhaps Pam didn't immediately set out to kill Harvey Dent after the roses were bulldozed. Sure, she was pissed, but it wasn't the breaking point that pushed a botanist to the point of wearing green spandex, plotting to eventually kill the District Attorney, and grow man-eating plant monsters for some undisclosed reason.
SUBTEXT.
When it comes to figuring out anything related to Pam in TAS, we have to rely on supposition and theories. Hell, even her decision to call herself "Poison Ivy" is inexplicable and awkwardly-delivered. Bad enough that Pam has STILL not gotten anything in the way of real character footing in the comics, but the show doesn't even give her an origin in her first episode, essentially plunking her into Batman's world with a half-baked revenge subplot.
Now, the revenge could have been more sympathetic if only Pam weren't written to be an overwrought cartoon villain who laughs maniacally and delivers Schumacher-worthy lines such as "Awww, what's the matter, Batman? Do I have cooties? AHAHAHA!" She's shriekingly cartoonish and over-the-top, to the point that I found myself instead longing for Uma Thurman's "Mudda-NAYTCH-ya!" In the end, what could have been another in a long line of the show's sympathetic villains with compelling motivations feels more like a bad guy who can just be dismissed as "that crazy plant lady."
Using his wit, weapons, and threats to destroy the rose and thus finish the job Harvey started (like a good friend should!), Batman defeats Poison Ivy, and is able to the antidote for Harvey Dent. Hell, even Bullock seems pleased pleased as one of Auntie Em's farmhands that his fellow Harvey has pulled through! And he should, because damn it, they are crusty buddies in my head and you can't tell me no different! *nods*
Aw, it's a happy ending for all! And nothing bad ever happened to Harvey Dent again! ... Wait.
Hmmm, maybe it would have been better for everyone if Batman hadn't won this one. But again, there are no hints about Two-Face to be found in this episode. Really, if you didn't already know Harvey's fate while watching Pretty Poison, you could be forgiven for thinking that there's nothing bubbling under his surface. The Harvey of Pretty Poison, as well as all these other appearances, shows no hint of anger, rage, angst, no darkness nor instability, nothing to foreshadow his psychological unraveling.
Do you think the writers of TAS made the right choices? Are the events of Two-Face, Part I and II more shocking this way, seeing THIS amiable Harvey Dent transformed into the humorless and monstrous Two-Face? Or would you have preferred an even slower build towards his insanity in previous episodes, gradually showing Harvey's psychological strain even as they established his character and relationships? Obviously, I opt for the latter, but I can see an argument for the first, so I'd like your thoughts either way.
So yes, the tone of Pretty Poison's ending is light-hearted, with Harvey seeming like a clueless dope and Bruce gently breaking the news about Pamela with the understatement, "I think she's wrong for you." To which Harvey responds only with a puzzled "aroo?" grunt. Wah-wah, cue sitcom laughter and theme music!
We never see how Harvey takes the news about Pamela's manipulation and betrayal. It would have been interesting to see if she shrugged it off with a relieved "Wow, that was close!" or if he was heartbroken, furious, depressed, or anything else. Now, we learn how Two-Face feels about Ivy in that fantastic scene in the classic episode Almost Got 'Im, but that's Two-Face, not Harvey, so it doesn't quite count. He pretty much hates everybody who isn't Grace and Bruce.
As for Pam's end of the non-relationship, it's a safe bet that she never felt anything but contempt for her attempted murder victim, but there have been a couple throwbacks from her perspective. First there's her reflections on Harvey after he became Two-Face in the B:TAS Young Adult novel Dual to the Death, and we also learned in the episode House and Gardnen that she kept a picture of Harvey and Bruce in her scrapbook, right alongside the rose and pictures of Harley. I guess you never forget your first time... trying to kill somebody.
But aside from those bits and pieces, the brief, one-sided romance of Harvey and Pamela is never brought up again. Damn it all, I want more character interaction and relationship developments! I mean, that's why EVERYBODY enjoys Batman, right? ... Right?
As for Pam herself, the episode ends with the ham-handed poetic note of having her incarcerated in Stonegate Prison, only now SHE'S the plant who will burst out no matter how deeply she's "buried," oh, I see what they did there. The fact that she ends up in Arkham for the rest of the series is especially strange considering that she's never written as unhinged and unstable as she is in Pretty Poison. Go figure. But okay, fitting enough that she ends up in Harvey's dream jail... until we see that they let her keep the rose plant.
Seriously. They let a poisoner keep the plant from which she derived the poison in the first place in her prison cell. She hasn't hidden it there or anything, mind you, it's out there in the open, right in her cell! Brilliant work, Stonegate guards! Well, so much for the legacy of Harvey Dent's big dream! Well, at least Harvey himself will soon make short work of his own legacy soon enough.
Note: scans have been either made by me, or have been taken from World's Finest Online or Toonzone. Gif by BigBardaFree at Tumblr.
If you'd like to read the Gotham Girls comic mini-series, all five issues can be purchased digitally on DC's Comixology app for $1.99 apiece. I sure as hell wish I knew they'd do that before I shelled out fifteen bucks for the ultra-rare Harley Quinn issue.