Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Harley Quinn Season 5 finale.
Five seasons in, and Harley Quinn has proven that it’s still just as capable of embracing all the chaos, mayhem, unexpected emotion, and irreverent superhero humor that made this R-rated animated series so memorable in the first place. While Season 5 shakes things up even more by taking our favorite power couple, Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) and Poison Ivy (Lake Bell), to Metropolis, things aren’t as perfect as they seem to be in this new environment — especially once Harley talks Superman (James Wolk) into taking a little time off. Between the looming threat of Brainiac (Stephen Fry) and Lena Luthor’s (Aisha Tyler) dangerous power trip, Harley and Ivy have a lot to deal with, and not all of the members of their motley antihero crew make it through in one piece. Yet as the Season 5 finale, “The Mess Is the Point,” reveals, sometimes there really is no place like home — after taking down Lena, the real mastermind behind everything, Harley and Ivy move back to Gotham and into their original rooftop apartment in what truly feels like a full-circle moment for both the characters and the show.
Ahead of “The Mess Is the Point,” Collider had the opportunity to have a long-running conversation with showrunner Dean Lorey spanning some of the season’s most memorable moments. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Lorey discusses why they decided to move the show to Metropolis for Season 5, why he remains committed to the promise that Harley and Ivy are still a rock-solid couple, and standout installments like the Brainiac-centric episode and the murder mystery episode. He also delves into why they decided to kill off Frank the Plant (JB Smoove), how Harley and Ivy embrace their more mothering sides this season, whether there’s a plan in the works for Season 6, and more.
COLLIDER: What fueled the decision to take the show to Metropolis this season? Was it needing a change of scenery, shaking up the characters?
DEAN LOREY: We thought that a change of scenery would be really nice for the show, and we also wanted to go back to basics a little bit to re-emphasize Clayface and Joker and Bane and King Shark, these supporting characters. We thought it would be great. We also wanted to go back to basics with the characters because the show had gotten really big, and we were trying to pull it down a little. It seemed like setting it in Metropolis would be fun. That also led to the idea that Harley is an agent of chaos, and she’s been in Gotham, which is a chaotic city, but what if we took her, and we dropped her into essentially this perfect, beautiful city that follows law and order? Superman’s there keeping an eye on things and all that, so that might be interesting. That’s where it came from.
We’ve gotten Harley’s backstory before, at least this version of her story — being Harleen Quinzel, meeting the Joker and everything — but this season is really the first time we get to see who Ivy was before. Why did it feel like a good time to finally dive into her? It’s a heartbreaking story, too.
LOREY: I had always wanted to do the Ivy origin story. I did Seasons 1 and 2, and then 5, and I sort of thought 3 and 4 might have addressed Ivy’s origin, but they didn’t, so I was like, “Well, great. Now I have an opportunity to jump into it.” It was a story that we were excited to tell, and we knew that we wanted to tie it into her relationship with Frank because there was always a question of, “Where did Frank come from?” So, we thought that that would be kind of fun. Also, it just felt like you did want to know more about Ivy.
There are several origin stories that we’ve seen in the comics, and we’ve always told our origin stories for our show to fit the show, so they’re not exactly like the comic stories. We really liked the idea of going back to her having a relationship with her professor at university and having that go awry, but giving her a lot of agency in that as opposed to just being a victim. So, that was a big part of it. Really, we just wanted it to be emotional and to also help draw Harley and Ivy even closer together on an emotional level, because it’s something that Ivy hadn’t shared with Harley prior to this. It’s a big part of her history that we’re hearing for the first time, but Harley is as well. And being that this was a season about them starting in a rut and trying to get out of it, it felt like something like that might be good early in the season to kickstart that.
‘Harley Quinn’ Showrunner Dean Lorey Still Has No Intention of Breaking Up Harley and Ivy

Image via Max

You mentioned Harley and Ivy feeling like their relationship has hit a rut, but the season does make a point to show that they still have a healthy sex life, and they’re not shy about showing that they’re interested in each other and prioritizing that part of their relationship. How important was it for you to really make sure that the romance still felt like it was front and center for them?
LOREY: It was hugely important. As you might imagine, we spent a lot of time at the beginning talking about, “What is this rut and what does it look like?” One thing that I never really wanted to do, and Justin [Halpern] and Pat [Schumacker] had never wanted to do, was break up Harley and Ivy or even really show them heavily on the outs in a true way. So, this was meant to be more of the way that people get into ruts in relationships—just taking each other for granted a little bit and all of that. But it wasn’t meant to be like, “Oh my god, they’re going to break up!” We never wanted that.
We also love the fact that the two of them have a very healthy sex life. They still love each other very much. It’s not that. It’s just that sometimes you fall into complacency. We felt like keeping them in love and excited with one another didn’t conflict with complacency, which sometimes, many times, happens in a relationship. It wasn’t meant to be dire. It was meant to be that they’re in need of a change of scenery, basically, to learn about each other some more.
One of the character pairings you briefly mentioned earlier that I was really delighted to see was Clayface and Bane. Whose idea was it to team these two up, especially once they get to the Daily Planet and they’re just writing all kinds of wild articles?
LOREY: That was mine, but it’s because Bane and Clayface are probably my two favorite characters to write. I’ve loved them from day one. We had the notion that Clayface was pissed off at Perry White for giving him a bad review for… we didn’t know what it was going to be, but some sort of bad performance of his, and what that then ultimately turned into was the idea that Clayface is pissed off at Perry White. He kidnaps Perry, he takes over as him, and this then escalates to he’s got an opportunity to put on a Broadway-style show by orchestrating things behind the scenes at the Daily Planet — and that Bane, who was the last person on Earth whom you would imagine who would want to write a musical, becomes his go-to guy.
Putting the two of them together just felt like it was going to be really funny, and it also, in a way, allowed us to, hopefully, with a spoonful of sugar, get out a bunch of exposition about what occurred on Brainiac’s ship to do it through song and through this performance that had other ramifications, rather than just making it fully expository. That’s partially where all that came from.
‘Harley Quinn’ Showrunner Dean Lorey on Season 5’s Deep-Dive Into Brainiac

Photo via Max

Episode 4 is mostly told through Brainiac’s perspective. We get the backstory, and it’s still funny, but the tone, the style of it bring the main story to a halt, and then we get an explanation for this very complicated character. What prompted putting that episode where it was, and why did you want to shift the focus of the season to jumping back and telling that story?
LOREY: In the past, we’ve done these one-off episodes, like Batman’s origin story, and stuff like that. We just go and tell the story of one person throughout the whole episode. So we knew that we wanted to do it with Brainiac, and a decision that we made early on was instead of just treating Brainiac as the big bad, we wanted to give him the kind of death that we did with Mr. Freeze in Season 1, where he was sort of a tragic villain. We did not want to play Brainiac as a tragic villain, but we did want you to emotionally connect with him and understand where he was coming from because when we started to break it apart, it was really interesting. Like, why would he want to make everything in the universe perfect? What would lead to someone wanting to do that?
Then, as we got into it, we were so in love with the Brainiac character, and Stephen Fry was amazing. We really gave him the biggest character arc of anyone in the season because he sort of has the most change where she comes into this wanting to protect the universe in a way to fix his failures in life that caused him to lose his family. By the very end of it, he comes to realize that perfecting things isn’t a life, that the mess is the point. The mess of things is what makes life worth living. And so, in doing that, it allows him to make peace with his past. And he’s been going a little crazy, so even though he dies at the end, he dies thinking he’s with his family and that things are solved for him.
It came organically out of just asking the question, “But why would somebody want to make things perfect?” It was always a struggle when we were working on it for. What’s the definition of perfect? Because it’s completely subjective, really. So, we tried to figure that out. Katie Rich wrote the “Breaking Brainiac” episode, a sort of one-off episode, and she did a great job really trying to ground us with him.

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The murder mystery episode is such a great installment, not only because you get everybody in the room together, but also because we get a surprise reveal in the form of Red X. Were there ever plans to make Dick a more significant part of Season 5, or was it more like, “We’re just going to check in with him and how he’s clearly a little messed up from that whole death and resurrection thing?”
LOREY: The season ended up being really stuffed. The Brainiac stuff took over a lot, but we did want to… not resolve it, but at least check in on that storyline from last season. So, this is how we chose to do it. There was some discussion about, like, “Is he going to factor in in a bigger way as the season goes along?” By the way, this has happened in every season of all of these shows. By the time you start to enter the midpoint of the season, it’s like, “Oh my god, we’ve got to simplify because we’ve only got five episodes left.” So, it all got put into this episode, which started as a completely different episode.
It was originally going to be about a prom with the Teen Titans. My concern with that was that it didn’t involve our main characters a lot. It felt like another “Breaking Brainiac” episode that came right after, and I was concerned about getting away from all of our main characters for too long. So, we reworked it and spent a lot of time on it, and eventually, we hit on doing a murder mystery episode with our main characters, but locked in a single location. Jamiesen Borak wrote this. He’s been a great writer for us, and he did a great job on this. But like all these episodes, it went through a million permutations.
‘Harley Quinn’s Showrunner Explains That Shocking Season 5 Death (and Why This Character Will Stay Dead)

Image via Max

Like Ivy, I was devastated when Frank died. By the next episode, when you get the funeral, he has a funny way of signing off, but how early did those conversations about killing him off start? Did you know you wanted that full-circle moment of having both Frank’s birth and death?
LOREY: It was after we leaned so heavily into the birth of Frank, an origin episode, and you really got a sense of the longevity of the relationship between Ivy and Frank that we started thinking about, “Well, we’ve invested so much in this relationship that it would be a big and unexpected journey to pull the rug out from under that and let him die in the episode.” We took a big gulp when we did that because even telling people, like Warner Bros., that we were going to kill Frank, everybody was… they weren’t against it, they just were very surprised. But I thought it was valuable to us, not really just because it’s something unexpected, but because I thought it allowed Ivy to show how much she loves Frank in that moment, the moment of his death, and her anger afterward and wanting to get revenge.
It also allowed us to bring in Frankette, which we thought would be really fun to see this new character that’s a lot like Frank and sort of restart what we saw in Ivy’s origin story with baby Frank with Frankette. That seemed like it was going to be kind of fun. Also, I know Frank’s dead—and he is dead; we’re not planning to bring Frank back—however, in the Green, that’s a place where, if you have the ability to access the Green, you have the ability to meet characters that have passed.
That’s true.
LOREY: We did not want to say goodbye to J.B. Smoove, and that actually does come into play, as a little later in the season. We didn’t feel like we were losing him for forever, but we felt it was a very fair turn.
Talking about Frankette also got me thinking about how often Harley and Ivy find themselves in various parenting roles this season — first with King Shark’s children and then with Frank, and now with Frankette. Ivy basically has to step into the role of a mom, and not just because Frankette is part-her. Was that something that you were thinking about, too, in terms of evolving both of them as characters?
LOREY: Yes. We thought it was just part of their growth as characters. We did want to explore a lot of different versions of motherhood, and that’s why Sharon becomes a significant character towards the end of this season, Harley’s mom. What we really wanted to get to was that moment in Episode 10 where they’re going to die. They’re in this ruined spaceship, and through there, it’s Sharon and it’s Harley, and it’s Ivy and it’s Frankette. It’s moms and daughters across the board, and so we really wanted to explore that dynamic, and it paved the way for maybe future stories.
‘Harley Quinn’ Showrunner Dean Lorey Has a Plan for Season 6

The end of the finale does feel like another full-circle moment — not just for the characters but for the show, because you have Harley and Ivy back in Gotham in their original apartment. You could even argue that it feels like a natural place to end the show, too, in a way. Was that something you were thinking about at all? Are you interested in doing another season if the stars align?
LOREY: We were only thinking about it mostly in the sense of not wanting it to feel too much like the end of the series, because we would like to do more. We realized that if the show were to end there, it was a nice ending for the show, but we have every intention of doing more, and we’ve done a lot of work figuring out what that will be. So, I hope we’ll have some exciting news soon.
Is there an ideal number of seasons that you have in mind, or is it more like, “We’ll just keep doing it until the wheels fall off”?
LOREY: Well, I hope we stop one season before the wheels fall off. There’s no overall plan. There really never has been, other than a very basic desire to keep Harley and Ivy together through thick and thin, but to allow them to grow and all that. But we do have a pretty wonderful idea for what Season 6 would be if we get so lucky. We’re excited to continue.
One thought I had while watching Creature Commandos was that it’s a show that feels like it might not have been possible if Harley Quinn hadn’t paved the way first. Maybe you could have had a version of that show, but Harley is a show that proved that you could tell R-rated stories in DC animation in a way that a lot of people hadn’t seen before. Now that we know that Commandos is coming back for another season, do you have an update on where you guys are in terms of Season 2 planning?
LOREY: The only thing I have is that it’s early, but we’ve begun to get into it. I know there’s a desire to aggressively pursue making the season. A lot of times, these things take years and years, but hopefully, it won’t take that long. We’re definitely into it at this point.
Harley Quinn Season 5 is available to stream on Max.

Harley Quinn

Release Date

November 29, 2019

Network

DC Universe, HBO Max, Max

Showrunner

Dean Lorey, Chrissy Pietrosh, Jessica Goldstein

Directors

Juan Jose Meza-Leon, Vinton Heuck, Joonki Park, Cecilia Aranovich, Ben Jones, Colin Heck, Tom De Rosier, Brandon McKinney, Frank Marino, Mike Milo, Matt Garofalo, Christina Sotta, Michael Moloney

Writers

Tom Hyndman, Sarah Nevada Smith, Jamiesen Borak, Ava Tramer, Connie Shin, Jess Dweck, Jane Becker, Laura Moran, Sabrina Jalees, Jordan Weiss, Jimmy Mosqueda, Rachel Pegram