Harley Quinn has revealed that she has the perfect disguise – Acting so crazy that no one believes she’s the real Harley Quinn.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from Detective Comics #1056, on sale now.
The Bat-Family has been infiltrating Arkham Tower ever since construction ended. Readers watched as Bat-family members and handpicked operatives entered the patient population, the line staff, and even the administration. However, one very clever undercover specialist likely escaped all but the keenest of observes.
A woman claiming to be Harley Quinn was repeatedly dismissed as a lousy imitation and diagnosed as delusional. It seemed a dark, funny joke, a delusional patient enough to believe herself to be Harley Quinn but so poor at acting the part. The staff and other residents mostly treated her with pity or just steered clear as a result. It turns out the joke was on the readers.
As revealed in Detective Comics #1056 (by Mariko Tamaki, Amancay Nahuelpan, Jordie Bellaire, Ariana Maher), the woman actually is Harley Quinn. She’s Batman’s final operative, the one buried so deep not even the likes of Nightwing or Batwoman had a clue. Her presence points out both Quinn’s considerable talents and the flaws of mental healthcare. If the doctors and line staff don’t even realize they have the real deal, not a delusion Jane Doe, well, that doesn’t speak volumes for their powers of deduction or diagnosis.
Quinn’s efforts were so effective that Doctor Meridian remained skeptical and confused even after she revealed herself. As Harley communicated with Batwoman on the outside, Meridian found herself debating if Harley had truly saved her and was coordinating efforts with another member of the Bat-team or this delusional patient was experiencing auditory hallucinations and talking back to the voices in her head. It’s only through the anti-hero’s impressive gift for violence that Meridian finally understood that the real deal stood before her.
The disguise was simultaneously brilliant and yet shouldn’t have been functional. Patient records should have flagged Quinn from the moment she was admitted. After all, she had been both an employee and a patient in Arkham previously, and that latter she had done multiple times. Pictures, fingerprints, handwriting — any and all of it should’ve given the game away. And yet she moved through the patient population for days, entirely below anyone’s notice.
This points out the shortcomings in mental healthcare in Gotham City. Not just the lack of security to make sure that they weren’t housing a lucid yet highly dangerous woman, but the fact that its medical staff couldn’t even distinguish the difference between genuine mental illness and someone who was merely acting the part. Granted, the team at Arkham Tower existed to be little more than a floor model for Tobias Wear’s scam, but Meridian is a trained professional, and even she didn’t pick it up.
To place it all on the backs of an inadequate system or inattentive employees, however, underestimates Harley. After all, the fact that she was a multi-timer at Arkham doesn’t just mean a file on her. It also means she likely knew a lot about how the Asylum worked, even in a new location. Moreover, as a mental health professional herself, Quinn was uniquely poised to know the shortcomings and cracks in the mental health system to exploit. She would understand the protocols and methods the doctors would employ. She has also spent years around people with much more significant and persistent mental illnesses, so mimicking their behavior wasn’t difficult. All that made her the perfect infiltrator.
In the end, it’s the kind of move that another frequent Arkham guest, The Riddler, would’ve loved. Who’s the only person unhinged enough to convince an entire asylum she can’t possibly be Harley Quinn despite her claims? Why, Harley Quinn, of course.
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