It's been a long time coming for more Harley Quinn. Season 3 of the hit adult animated series, created and executive produced by Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey, had a bit of a journey to creation — almost as winding as the Harley Quinn Highway itself. After the announcement that the show would officially be moving to HBO Max for its third season, the wait was on, and through all the hints, teasers and sneak peeks we were given one question lingered: would it all be worth the wait? Well, anyone who thought that Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) and her newly-minted girlfriend Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) wouldn't come back with anything other than a bang would be very mistaken — actually, it's more like the Eat, Bang, Kill Tour, to be precise.

Season 3 of Harley Quinn picks off mere days after we last left off with these two lovebirds having ditched the explosive aftermath of Ivy's narrowly-thwarted wedding to Kite Man (Matt Oberg), and the girls are making the absolute most of their alone time together — flying Wonder Woman's invisible jet to exotic locales, stealing Commissioner Gordon's (Christopher Meloni) credit card info and maxing it out to its limits, even rolling around naked on a bed covered in money. But when they learn that their teammates Clayface (Alan Tudyk) and King Shark (Ron Funches) have been wallowing behind bars while they're gallivanting around the world, the ladies decide it's time to return to Gotham and bust their friends out of prison — and maybe put some other, bigger plans for the city into motion while they're at it, especially once Ivy's loyal plant Frank (JB Smoove) gets kidnapped.

While the first two seasons of Harley Quinn were very firmly rooted in Harlivy's will-they-won't-they tension, Season 3 finds these two BFFs-now-GFFs more rock solid than ever — but of course, there are the natural growing pains in any new relationship, including the very real factor of how to cope when your partner's biggest aims and dreams might contradict your own. There's never any fear that these two will choose to split over these concerns — and what proves more refreshing is the fact that they're willing to go to the mat in honesty with one another, even if said candor happens to go down at the most random sequences in the entire series. Maybe it wouldn't be Harley and Ivy if they didn't decide to have a come-to-King-Shark-Jesus talk about their relationship in the middle of an orgy put on by the Court of Owls, which is a very real sentence that accurately describes just one of the fantastic 10 episodes this season.

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Image Via HBO Max

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Therein lies the brilliance of Harley Quinn, though, and serves as one of the many reasons this show absolutely shouldn't work but does almost in spite of itself. The irreverence through which the series approaches any well-known comics beats and immediately lampoons them to their greatest potential results in some of the best comedy throughout the season. One episode, very intentionally rendered in the stylistic vein of Batman: The Animated Series, implies that Bruce Wayne (Diedrich Bader) isn't just haunted by the murder of his parents in Crime Alley; he's practically forcing himself to relive it, much to the annoyance of a group of characters who find themselves in the memory with him. "So, uh, were his parents murdered? I'm still not quite getting it," one of them says dryly, successfully undercutting a moment that is practically baked into the knowledge of all moviegoers whether you consider yourself a Batman fan or not. The aforementioned Court of Owls orgy, which begins almost as an initiation scene taken right out of Eyes Wide Shut before devolving into naked moaning and realistically uncomfortable squishing noises, lands on the slightly more adult side of the show's humor — but it also makes the obvious behind-the-scenes adjustments that had to be made after the powers that be said the Bat wasn't allowed to eat the Cat even more glaring.

Those viewers who were also hoping for more Bat-shenanigans this season will be in for a treat. With the return of Dick Grayson, aka Nightwing (Harvey Guillén), to Gotham (coincidentally on the same bus as Harley and Ivy), the safety of the city isn't just placed in Batman's hands, and that might be for the best, especially since the patriarch of the Bat-fam is dealing with his own personal relationship turmoil, through all its ups and downs. While Bruce alternates between crowding too close to Selina Kyle (Sanaa Lathan) for her own liking and wallowing in bearded, beanie-clad misery while playing an acoustic guitar in the Batcave, it's up to Nightwing, Batgirl (Briana Cuoco), and Robin (Jacob Tremblay) to keep an eye on things.

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Image Via HBO Max

Guillén plays his version of Dick Grayson as someone who's initially convinced he needs to step up and be an authority figure, an equal to Batman — right down to testing out his own gravelly voice — but his journey also ties into what feels like the overarching theme of this season: figuring out your sense of self and what kind of place you can have in the world. Coincidentally, Harley also has something of an identity crisis this time around as it pertains to her supervillain status. Maybe she doesn't want to run around causing random chaos and killing without thought anymore. Maybe, just maybe, she might actually be more of a hero than she initially realized — and it's just taken her being in a supportive relationship with the right person to figure it out.

Cheeky poking at the comic realm aside, Harley Quinn hasn't lost sight of the other way in which it has given more dimension to its titular character — and it's a strategy that has also benefited her appearances on the page and in live-action too. Once Harley broke free of her ex the Joker (in Season 3's incarnation, also played by Tudyk, he's a doting stepfather and unexpectedly prepping his mayoral campaign of all things), it was a move that allowed creators to find her her own independent voice, but it also served as the indication that she's always been more complex than may have been immediately apparent. There have been glimpses of it before, but here, in scenes where she can bust out knowledge from her time as a psychiatrist at a moment's notice, or use doctor-patient confidentiality to keep one of the biggest secrets in the DC universe, it's clear that Harley's finally reached the best and most fully realized version of herself. By the time Season 3 ends, you may be left with the sense of not knowing what could come next for her — but that kind of open-ended question is as unpredictable, and as exciting, as the show's leading lady.

Rating: A+

Harley Quinn Season 3 premieres with its first three episodes July 28 on HBO Max, with new episodes released once per week until the finale on September 15.