The story reads like an autobiography
We start with Harleen in dream sequence, she dreamt this dream before but keeps hoping it will end differently.
The dream ends with a Batdemon trying to attack a Joker lying on the floor, and Harleen protecting him, with the bat demon warning her he is beyond help and her insistence that she can do it.
There’s a voiceover where she tells us she started with the best intentions...and that's what the road to hell is paved with.
We switch to a past scene, where a former soldier tells his story how he went from soldier to killer ,then a time switch to two years later, where she is presenting to donors for a research grant. Her theory is that empathy is part of the mental immune system, and that with extended and sufficient stress, we lose that empathy. If she identify the triggers, we could predict sociopathy in the making..Donors start leaving.. one of them being Lucius Fox
She goes out drowning her sorrows and when leaving has her first confrontation with the joker, pulling a heist. He has a gun drawn on her, but decides not to kill her
We get to read everything that goes through her, how she decided to become a psychiatrist, how she had a thing for older men, had a relationship with a professor and what that did to her reputation in school, earning her the nickname Harley, and how it haunts her in her current job as well.
Joker tells a henchman he didn’t kill her cause her eyes promised him he would be in her nightmares every night from then on.
when she gets back to work, she gets attacked a coworker asking her who she(censored) to get it (side note, there are several instances of the word fuck in the comic, but never to describe the actual act)
She goes into her boss' and is surprised to find Lucius Fox there..Mr. Wayne wants to give her a grant for her research. With that she gets access to Arkham, and the inmates.
She stops having nightmares about Joker. In a beautiful scene, she's smiling brightly while walking into arkham, towards a bright future, while her voiceover reminisces about walking towards the light, meaning you can’t see your own shadow. Her shadow is an outline of Harly Quinn.
On her first day Joker is brought in, and she sees him again, she reminisces about how they arrived on the same day, doing the same things for different reasons., getting checked over, a mugshot/id picture, and then she's off to meet Dr. Strange, who doesn't think to highly of her or her ideals. But she gets permission to start.
We see her interviews with Zsasz, Ivy, Riddler, Croc and Mad Hatter. She doesn't want to deal with Joker yet, but he's back in her nightmares, keeping her awake, to the point she decides just to stay awake as much as possible.
She finally decides to view some interview tapes of joker and is underwhelmed. The monster she was looking for isn't there, until she looks at a tape named the real joker, where a bystander calls to the cops to kill the monster. He says: we're all monsters in a cage, it just takes the right kind of pain to break the box..
She then decides she has to interview him, but is scared of him, her nightmares getting worse and worse, and her trying everything to get to sleep. Sleeping pills, alternative meds, alcohol, etc.
She gets called to a meeting with Harvey Dent, who wants her to refuse the grant, and end her research. He's lost his ideals, and see's her research as a threat, giving every defense attorney a perfect defense. Harleen counters that the result will be a greater rehabilitation percentage, which is better then longer incarcerations that solve nothing.
They part ways, Harleen determent to continue, while the voice over remembers that for both their moralizing, in five months they would both be murderers
In her anger and rage she heads back to Arkham, for her interview with Joker who remembers her.
She tells him she already knows his lies, and she wants to hear his stories about Gotham, city of monsters
He tells her, please docter, call me Jay.
The voice over says: i remember thinking, this is fine, i can control the situation.
it was neither the first nor the last time i was wrong about that
Her final words are:
Very well, Mr.Jay |