Birds of Prey episode 4: Three birds and a baby

This episode opens up with a screaming yet obviously fake baby in it's mother's arms, she is also screaming and running from a bad guy on one of those classically American fire escapes.
Those things never look safe to me. Anyway, in protecting her child from some weirdo thug - is this guy really going to change dem nappies? I don't think so! - they drop the child over the edge.

Fortunately, Huntress is there and catches it, rather like a football.. actually but no matter. I'm sure this baby doll's fragile body is fine with that and being shaken around while Huntress fights off more conveniently hidden until now goons.

Hang in there, baby. 

It goes slow-mo for a bit which just makes the whole fake baby thing even more painfully obvious.. I mean, they could at least pretend to give it some neck support and change the repetitive crying track but no. I mean, shit, Huntress does like three or four flips. Is this child okay??

Anyway, she wins and then for some reason goes to hold out the child to the mother (even though she's like, how many stories up?) and sees she's been stabbed. Ungrateful baby continues crying but that's fair enough considering she's now an orphan and probably has some sort of neck injury.

Back at the clocktower, there's a scene of the girls looking for too long into the diaper to check the sex of the baby so they don't have to keep calling it... IT.
Dinah wants to name him but Helena decides she's happy with calling it 'Boy' and then prods him with a pencil. She gives Barbara severe stink eye when she's told not to poke the baby.
Like, what else do you do with infants, right?

Fortunately, Dinah was a pro-level babysitter back in the day. She names the baby 'Guy' and shows proper carrying techniques which means this child may even survive the episode if they can keep him away from Helena.

Helena's like 'what? you guys want to look after this thing? ugh!' like it's completely unreasonable even though she has literally just come from a murder scene where at least ONE parent has been killed and there was obviously no one else to leave Guy with. Plus, as they're not even sure why the mother was killed, this baby could be next in line.

Sadly, after jinxing everyone with a casual 'how hard can this be?', Barbara makes the call of throwing the baby at Helena once he starts crying. Showing her competitiveness, Helena starts yelling about the baby crying. Now, I'm no expert on the childrens but I'm fairly confident that this is the best way to calm them down.

This somehow works because the baby seems to like Helena? Now I know all that shaking and flipping shook something loose!

Aha! So the mother wasn't the mother at all! Turns out she was a lab assistant who broke in and stole the child, hence her being killed by the other.. assistants? On call ninjas? I don't know.
I'm kinda confused though.. is this supposed to be an IVF thing, have they straight up taken some child and added things to their DNA or have they literally grown/cloned this thing?
The kids like, at least a year old! (I don't know babies but he's not a new born!)

Harleen wanted this child because she fancies her green eyes and the Joker's amazing green hair in a child. I would have figured this differently because green isn't his natural hair colour (plus Harley's eyes are meant to be blue) but apparently the Mr. J in this universe wanted kids.
Jury is still out on whether or not he wanted kids like Batman has proteges a'la Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker but there you go.

Either way, Harley gets out of doing the deed herself!

New Gotham City apparently has a morgue that looks like a Victorian era back alley way in London.

Somehow, Reese is able to sneak in behind her when she's about to start chopping up a corpse.

This is practically foreplay for these two.

He doesn't even care that she's sneaking around, cutting into cadavers and not giving him her phone number... but he does question why she brought nappies to a morgue.
Look, that's a fair question. There was an Australian advert for Libra sanitary pads back in the nineties that I used to love. It featured a woman getting away with murder because her pad literally got all the blood away from the crime scene. Maybe this is a similar thing?

Huntress gets called back to the clocktower for a baby emergency, which appears to mostly Alfred appearing to have a biscuit and drink tea sassily. Damn baby looks like it's older or a different baby entirely. Yep - in the time Helena went to speak to Barbara and came back the child is like three years old and can talk. We had trouble getting nappies for a few hours so Barbara was trying to use frickin' absorbent towels on his butt but now four years old and they have a complete outfit for him.

There's been a reason why I haven't done a Birds of Prey recap for a while. This episode keeps doing the baby drama. As in, a female character doesn't want/like kids but the kid likes her so she feels pressured to engage with them. Another professional female character tells a male character that her entire career means nothing to her, she's unfulfilled without having a child. Three women can't handle one baby and they discuss who amongst them was more maternal/expectations re: rearing for example a male character tells one of them that he never considered her the motherly type.

It's a decent story-line I guess but it's a pain because as a woman myself I've been through a lot of this. Previous boyfriends have tried to "test" my mothering instincts (I was frickin' 15 and he challenged me to keep goldfish alive. Mine lived for almost a decade, his died the same year.) People have harassed me about WHEN I will AND WHY I haven't popped out a kid yet, like I owe them something. Not even caring to ask if I wanted children. One person insinuated that I should have a child purely because my sister in law would like it.

This annoyed me because um.. I'm not comfortable bringing life into the world for the benefit of anyone else. I feel that I myself and my partner need to be prepared mentally and financially to create life, and it's done because we will love this child - not because someone else in the family 'might' want to spend a few hours playing with them as a novelty.

I've had employers question me about it during interviews - which is illegal, by the way. People talk about if I could handle a child. Every time I'm sick, someone will ask if it's morning sickness. Even if I have the flu or a rash or something. All sorts of shit like that, and it's none of their business. So I wasn't looking forward to this episode at all because I'm tired of all these expectations.

Meanwhile, back in the episode Guy has an existential crisis, Harleen hires some pen twirling assassins and scientist guy freely gives out information about the child to Barbara.
He's ageing too fast and they want to try to slow it down before he dies.

Barbara drives a Hummer. I don't want to be judgemental but I never figured her for the type!
Maybe my Australian-ness is showing. Here, Hummers are rented for special occasions like environmental disaster limos. Maybe they're more common in America as everyday vehicles. I don't know. Anyway, the kid's now ten or something and the girls figure out that he gets age/growth spurts when he naps.

Barbara has spent the last half an hour being all no, we can't take Guy to the lab without knowing more, it's an obvious trap.
Helena's been like, eh, we gotta get rid of him sometime it'll be fine plus he's like dying and shit.
There's a security guy with a gun behind Barbara but it still takes Dinah a psychic handshake to realise and yell "it's a trap!"

Luckily, Helena had the sense to wait outside with the kid for his own safety. Then she leaves him in the car by himself. Um....

That's about as funny as Dinah going cross-hair cross-eyed. 

Huntress still doesn't care about wearing a mask or nothin', Barbara pwns some guy with a stick and Dinah.. well. She just kinda stands there.

Just like the main scientist guy, only he gives himself whiplash looking back and forth between Huntress and Barbara taking out his goons instead of, I don't know, making good on his threat to kill Dinah or at least fire a warning shot?

Anyway, Guy bursts ins and karate kicks the dude into a handy electrocution box. Then we get a reaction shot from Huntress, then Barbara and Dinah, then the scene basically repeats itself with the reaction shots. Barbara subtly pawns Guy onto Huntress now he's basically a murderer.

Helena takes Guy to the park and does the 'murder bad' speech that every parent/guardian figure goes through. They let him sleep even though they know it's probably not gonna end well. 

Meanwhile Harleen and her head assassin guy find the dead scientist and Harley explains why she's keen for a short lived child - he's an assassin army prototype, and he won't get to be old enough to borrow her car. Fair enough, that's good enough motivation for me! 

Guy wakes up during the mood lighting inspired assassin chat and is pretty annoyed. I mean, the kid's been asking what he is for days now, of course he's pissed. Naturally, he has a tween drama speech and he runs away. 

Dinah finds him in like ten seconds, but apparently he was able to get into The Bronze bar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer despite looking very confused about it. 

These two bond a bit and it's kind of cute but then obvious nineties creeps appear and harass Dinah so Guy tells them to back off. They go "make us!" and.. you can probably guess how this goes. 

Off-screen, apparently because Huntress creeps up on Reese this time and he hears over the radio that some punk kid is super dangerous and starting drama, you don't want no drama - down town. 

Police and emergency services are doing a pretty poor job of keeping people away from the burning club because both Dinah and Huntress asre just walking around, right near the door where the flames are licking, and then Harleen joins in with her destruction boner. 

Yes - burn them, burn them all!!

Guy is passed out in the park after his rage bender and Huntress finds him. She's like you're okay buddy, everyone passes out at their first kegger but then gets distracted by some mutant sense tingling. She rambles about danger approaching, then Guy's like, uh, duh, it's like, me? The engineered assassin? He punches her in the face and hopefully that re-calibrates her mutant senses because they're pretty shit. 

Guy's theme song goes from B.E.P My Humps (so don't burn down my town boy, don't punch my face, boy) to Ghostbusters (killing makes me feel good) in about two seconds tops. Huntress is all like, no, why you do dis and Guy's like.. it's my programming. You knew this, man. Keep up.

She decides not to fight back and tells him that he doesn't need to listen to the programming and can just be himself. Harleen's assassins arrive... they aren't exactly stealthy or subtle. I hope she isn't paying for them. 

Afterwards, Guy morphs to middle aged and then a bit older after just a micro nap. Luckily, his clothes still fit so that's something. They finally decide to throw him the birthday party he's been hankering for all episode. They promised cake, but only gave him a solitary cupcake. He dies before he can eat it, so that sucks. 

Harleen muses about why the prototype failed to kill (Helena) the assassin guy was like "I think they're friends!" to which Harleen's like "No, that wouldn't override millions of dollars in programming. It's not My Little Pony up in here!"

Back at the park, Helena is moping when Reese appears. He's forgiven her for leaving him behind at the burning club and tries to console her despite her confusing explanation of what's happened with her 'nephew'. Failing to make a dent in the melancholy, he leaves quietly. 

On the balcony of the rooftop, Dinah questions Barbara about the whole thing. She states that Helena saw someone - a woman - at the club - but didn't see her face. They suspect this woman. considering Harleen is Helena's psychiatrist, you'd think she's recognise her anyway but they don't even say what she saw her doing. If she was just 'there', that's not good enough. There were plenty of moochers hanging around the club. Helena appears and blows out the candle on the cupcake.. which... I really hope they didn't leave lit when she went to the park. 

Wotta Comedian!

Barbara: 'Guy'. Simple, yet insightful. 

Helena: It's like holding a sack of screaming cats!

Harleen: (threatening) I paid you good money to genetically engineer this baby for me, now where is he? (upbeat) I bought a cute little onesie for 'im!

Harleen: My biological clock is ticking, Melvin.. and it's a bomb!

Oracle: There's a bio-chip in her shoulder.
Huntress: Yeah, I can feel it. 
Oracle: Cut it out. 
Huntress: .......I don't get paid enough for this. 

Harleen: He was designed to go through a life cycle in three days. The perfect child for the busy career woman!