Birds of Prey was an hour-long CW drama in 2002, focusing on the Huntress, the meta-human daughter of Catwoman and Batman, joining with the paralyzed former Batgirl-cum-Oracle Barbara Gordon and Dinah Lance, the precognitive and touch-telepathic daughter of the Black Canary. Together, the three formed the Birds of Prey, an answer to those seeking a more bat-heavy and femme fatale filled show as opposed to the CGI-heavy villain-of-the-week boiler plate that was Smallville, even though both were shows were made by the same production team and aired back to back on the same network.
Despite its stunt fighting teams and the absurd beauty of Ashley Scott as the Huntress, Birds of Prey barely lasted one season while Smallville lasted for ten. Why is this so? Was it pure happenstance and chance? Did someone at Warner Brothers flip a coin, spawning a parallel universe where we are currently on Birds of Prey season 12? Probably not, as despite the show’s strengths, there was also a whole lot of it that absolutely didn’t make any sense. So without further ado, here are five reasons why:
5. The Huntress’ Costume
Now, with any live-action adaptation of a comic there are going to be some changes to the wardrobe. Whether it is the abandonment of blue-and-yellow spandex in X-Men or the inclusion of Bat-Nipples in Batman and Robin, changes to the established fashion are inevitable. The television incarnation of the Huntress abandons the midriff-flaunting purple and black costume of the comics — which as far as I can tell requires triple sided tape and a demonic blood-contract to actually work in real life — in favor of a black leather duster combo that looks nothing at all like Underworld’s Selene.
Uninspired promotional material aside, Huntress is the “alter ego” of one Helena Kyle, and I say “alter ego” as opposed to just alter ego because the two look exactly the same, barring a leather duster and some hair-curlers. Huntress is hounded by Oracle to not discuss crime-fighting hobbies out loud for fear of someone deducing that Helen’s secret identity is the Huntress, turning a blind eye to the fact that she never wears a mask. Seriously, when Huntress ends her bar tending shift in the first episode, she puts on a bird pendant choker to signify that she’s going on patrol. What, was she worried that someone would recognize the huntress bird pendant before recognizing her actual face? She’s fighting a predominately male group of henchpersons on nearly every patrol — not to be sexist, but it is naive to assume that the seedy underbelly of New Gotham are going to notice your kinky bird-themed belt and choker combo, and painstakingly curled locks before the beautiful face? There’s not even a domino-mask to be seen as Helena — excuse me, Huntress — introduces herself to wanna-be sexual predator Jerry (played by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) who despite one or two punches to the face and generally sketchy vibe, Huntress allows to run away, presumably to Albuquerque to get into the meth cooking game.
From a marketing standpoint it’s understandable why the Birds of Prey’s production team didn’t go for a mask — you don’t want to obscure your star’s visage from the screen, especially when that star is one so-hot-it’s-stupid Ashley Scott. However, for a team that allegedly is acting in place of Batman, it is baffling as to why not of one these women thought to at least repurpose a pair of panty hose for their war on crime.
It’s as if everyone is taking crazy pills — in flashback scenes of her days fighting alongside Batman as Batgirl, Barbara Gordon still manages to wear a mask — did breaking her spine also affect her long-term memory? When she manages to briefly heal her spine to go after a resurfaced villain named Lady Shiva, Barbara dons the Batgirl suit again — cowl and all. Batgirl is promptly unmasked when her neural implant shorts out on her. In a later scene, while discussing with Huntress on how to track Lady Shiva down, Barbara says “Wait a minute, she saw my face, she could easily figure out I’m Barbara Gordon!” In the next scene, you guessed it, Lady Shiva manages to track down Dinah as a means of getting back at Barbara. Why this isn’t a weekly recurring problem for the Birds of Prey, I’ll never know.
4. The Meta Human Factor
Quick, what is Batman’s superpower? If you answered none, or he’s always prepared, or he’s the goddamn Batman, you would be correct. For a guy who knows gods, Martians, and Scooby-Doo, the Batman’s most impressive quality was the fact that he never needed superpowers to be one of the most feared heroes of the DC Universe, inspiring others to live up to his standard. Birds of Prey however, abandons this human aspect in favor of a meta human one.
Dinah is the daughter of Black Canary, imbued with touch-telepathy, prophetic dreams, and eventually telekinesis as opposed to a supersonic scream of her mother (because that totally makes sense…). Huntress, on the other hand, gains all of the cat-powers of her mother, because in this universe Catwoman has superpowers for some reason. I’m not a meta-geneticist — couldn’t get past Calc II– but some consistency with passing down powers could be observed.
When you think about it, retroactively giving Catwoman superpowers is insulting to her entire character. Part of the reason why Batman was so attracted to Catwoman in the first place was because she was essentially his equal, a woman able to bypass and unlock the deepest treasures and locks of humanity with just her human intellect and physical abilities. Though she may have used her abilities for evil, it is the impressiveness of these abilities that drew Batman to her. To instead say it was all because she was meta-human is insulting.
Consequentially, this meta human Catwoman also sort of makes makes Catwoman, the movie, canon. Do you really want to be remembered as the show that borrowed an idea from Catwoman?
3. The Rogue Gallery
Of course any hero, be it Achilles or Ambush Bug, is ultimately defined by their villains. Though I may have stressed the human nature of the Batman being a major part of his appeal, Batman’s rogue gallery was a distorted reflection of the Bat’s nature, as most of Batman’s villains at the end of the day are (primarily) human as well. Yeah, Mr. Freeze used a freeze ray, but it’s still based on cold fusion. Every other Bat-rogue is just some guy who got scarred in a freak accident and decided to make a career out of it. Really, the only meta humans are Clayface and Killer Croc. The only Batman villain other than the Joker and Harley Quinn to appear in Birds of Prey is Clayface, doing his best homage to The Silence of the Lambs when Helena questions him in Arkham Asylum. It sort of makes sense actually, as Clayface used to be an actor before his freak chemical accident, explaining why a guy whose face looks like a scrotum would need to emulate Anthony Hopkins, but with a Cajun accent interestingly enough, for as many villainy points as possible.
As ridiculous as it all sounds, this scene with a legitimate Batman villain is actually not half-bad, which is a shame as it is entombed in an episode following Clayface II, the son of Clayface, who can inexplicably turn people into clay by touching them. Just when we thought we were getting some solid villainy we fell right back into the villain of the week trope that served Smallville so well. Random corpse found murdered in a freaky way, track homicide method to the only individual in the world that kills people that way, fight scene to something by tatu (or something by Michelle Branch if you’re stuck with the iTunes version), repeat. Incidentally, some of the Birds of Prey villains were literally leftovers from Smallville, as meteor showers are one of the most common causes of the meta-human gene here as well. Pair this up with the obligatory clock tower self-contemplation scene tacked onto every episode standing in for Clark’s barn and it’s no surprise that the two shows had so much in common.
But hey, if the meat grinder villain-machine worked for Smallville, why didn’t it work for Birds of Prey? Part of the appeal of Batman has always been in the exploration of the limits of humanity, both in himself and his villains. To strip this explanation away in favor of a meta-human X-factor detracts from this exploration in it’s entirety. Villains here don’t have an interesting origin story, just one line explaining they ingested something that should’ve killed them or are simply insane, and that’s it. It’s one thing for the meteor freaks of Smallville, as Superman is an alien, thus raising the bar for potential nemesis formidability. Yeah, the Huntress has a super human gene, thus requiring meta-human foes as well, but cat eyes, an ability to scale and descend buildings with ease (which I honestly think was included so that no one had to develop a working bat-grapple) and increased fighting abilities aren’t exactly “super” powers. This is probably why every meta-human fight in the show, even with totally-not-hydro-man Slick Waters (played by an always appreciated Silas Weir Mitchell) always devolves to a fist fight.
2. It’s A Show About The Batman Without Having The Batman
From the very first second of Bat-butler Alfred’s expository monologue in the pilot, to the mysterious phone call with Bruce Wayne at the end of the series, we are painfully aware that Birds of Prey is a show about Batman, without actually being about Batman. How can a Batman themed show not feature the Batman, you ask? Well all of the Bat accoutrements are still here — being the heir to the Wayne estate, Huntress inherits Wayne Manor, and indentured servant Alfred Pennyworth (whose long life must be indicative of some sort of meta-human gene), Mark Hamill lent his voice to the Joker in the unaired version of the pilot, and even Barbara Gordon is able to utilize bat-tech to enable her to walk around and fight crime as Batgirl for two episodes, or when convenient to the plot. Birds of Prey banked off of Batman fans seeking an additional fix without ever actually featuring the Batman himself beyond the opening credits. You can’t just sell us awesome high-grade Batman bits cut with the proverbial flour that is the Birds of Prey. Either go fully committed and give us the Batman, like Young Justice featuring Batman in a drill instructor role, or insist that we don’t need our fix and make us go cold turkey a la Teen Titans.
It’s as if the show wants fans to care about someone other than the Batman, and yet the caped crusader is the first image that we see in the preamble to every episode. For legal issues however, and the fact that Batman Begins was still in production at the time, Batman doesn’t appear on screen, beyond the opening, which in and of itself is fine. This article isn’t about why Birds of Prey should’ve just been about the Batman, however even the constant allusions to the Dark Knight paints a picture of a Batman who isn’t very Batmanly.
Allow me to explain myself with a timeline of the Birds of Prey universe. First, there was Batman and Batgirl fighting The Joker and his empire of crime in New Gotham City. The Joker is able to get away, hiring a henchman, later revealed to be Clayface, to kill Selina Kyle right in front of her daughter Helena, before the clown prince himself shoots Batgirl in the spine. Joker is apprehended, placed into a “prison that is very far away” (as we’re told in “Slick”) and the Batman leaves New Gotham for some reason. Seven years later, we are at the first episode of Birds of Prey, with Helena(now in her twenties) and Barbara fighting crime for presumably already a few years as the Birds of Prey. This means that Helena is at least a teenager or so when she saw her mom gunned down in front of her. A teenager, living with one of Batman’s only hookups in his war on crime and the queen of Gotham’s underworld. How did Batman, the master detective, not know that he had a daughter? He would have had to know about Selina’s death, as the Joker targeted her to specifically get back at the Batman, and even then, it’s absurd to think that the Batman wouldn’t have kept tabs on the head of Gotham’s criminal empire, even if Selina went legit for the sake of being a mother.
Now some of you may argue that Batman, or at least comic book Batman, didn’t know about his son Damien Wayne for years, but Damien was raised by the League of Shadows, with an emphasis on shadows, halfway across the globe. Selina was gunned down in the middle of a busy Gotham street, with Barbara later adopting the now-orphaned Helena. Batman, not knowing he had a kid without some sort of crazy explanation — robo-sperm holding Bruce Wayne’s genetic material in Batman Beyond for example — seems like a pretty glaring lack of sleuthing for a guy who once went back in time to out-detective Sherlock Holmes.
1. Harley Quinn
Yeah, I know that the villains of Birds of Prey got their own topic already, but Harley Quinn’s presence as the Big Bad Evil on the show takes the cake for its insanity. Harleen Quinzel, or Harley Quinn, operates as a psychiatrist even though she essentially inherited Joker’s meta crime empire. Now, Quinn’s day job, while somewhat unnecessary given the fact that she’s the head of all organized crime in Gotham, is explained as merely being a hobby of hers, as she urges her patients to take more psychotic and suicidal responses to their day-to-day problems. Fair enough, as I suppose this helps reinforce Quinn as an agent of chaos, however what I have a problem with still is the fact that Harley Quinn is still employed as an in-house psychoanalyst at Arkham Aslyum.
How would a former inmate of Arkham Asylum — home for the criminally insane — not get her psychiatry license revoked? Because no one can figure out that Harley Quinn and Dr. Harleen Quinzel are the same person. Seriously, the Huntress has like ten sessions with Dr. Quinn and neither of them figures out that they are one another’s respective nemesis until the season one cliffhanger.
Perhaps I’ve mentioned it to death already, but how can’t anyone figure out that Helena is Huntress? In fact this may be a trope on a show, as even Huntress’ Commissioner Gordon stand-in, Jesse Reese, begs Huntress/Helena to tell him who she is even though she doesn’t even wear a mask. A Gotham detective and a self-proclaimed Queen of Gotham Crime can’t figure it out, and mind you Helena is in weekly, Gotham legal system court-mandated, therapy sessions with Harley. I mean Clayface told his son that Helena’s father was the Batman, and Clayface is locked up in Arkham right where Harley moonlights. She can employ Clayface once but she can’t check back in on him for that vital information?
We are never told how Harleen Quinzel MD turned into Harley Quinn explicitly, however this is a universe where Jason Todd’s Robin exists and Halle Berry’s Catwoman is established canon. We can go off of Harley’s origin story originally established in Batman: The Animated Series— psychiatrist Harleen Quinzel, at the top of her game, is assigned the Joker as a patient, and gets seduced by the most insane man since Han shooting second, and busts the Joker out of Arkham to become his Gal Friday of Fatalities.
Even if it were a different prison that she initially met the Joker in, Quinn became infamous as Joker’s girlfriend after breaking him out. So how does she still retain her psychiatric license after all of that? Her damn name is already incredibly similar to her super villain alias, and she even asks people to call her Harley. It’s only fitting I suppose that the most insane character on the show is its most absurd one as well.
But perhaps my brain has been burnt out from re-watching too many episodes of Birds of Prey. While there are some holes in logic and cornball villains, for the most part the show is actually entertaining when taken with a grain of salt. What do you think though? Should there have been a Birds of Prey season 2? Is a super-powered Catwoman necessarily a bad thing? Let us know in the comments!