Harley's plan to kill Mr. Freeze hits a snag when she needs to cure his wife first.
Tropes:
- Acquainted in Real Life: Parodied. Victor and Nora's love story is a straight riff on You've Got Mail (he was trying to kill her company in real life but fell for her online), except replace "bookstore" with "cryogenics lab". He's telling this story while she's frozen solid to a table of prisoners. Lampshaded when Clayface namedrops Meg Ryan.
- Anti-Villain: Mr. Freeze isn't evil, he just commits crime to find a cure for Nora's disease. He's otherwise a decent, loving, and often outright heroic person.
- Blatant Lies: Kite-Man insists he didn't touch the paralytic flowers he just touched when Ivy mentions that he's grabbed the wrong ones. They kick in just as he arrives at Freeze's lair, causing him to crash land through the window.
- Casual Danger Dialogue: Harley's crew chats about Ivy's wedding while skating around the courtyard of Freeze's lair beating up his mooks.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Harley's crew demolishes Mr. Freeze's henchmen while having some Casual Danger Dialogue. In return, Freeze effortlessly defeats Harley's crew with his freeze ray.
- Didn't Think This Through: Freeze incapacitates Clayface in ice, which doesn't hold him as he has an amorphous body. On the other hand, Clayface didn't even grasp that he could easily escape, to the other's fury.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Harley, having suffered years of Domestic Abuse at the hands of the Joker, struggles with the concept that Mr. Freeze genuinely loves his wife, instead believing that Nora was imprisoned against her will like Harley was with Joker. It's only when Mr. Freeze sacrificed his life to save Nora in an Act of True Love that Harley undergoes a Heel Realization.
- Dr. Psycho also initially assumes that Mr. Freeze might sacrifice one of them instead, before Freeze explains why he would use himself anyway.
- Evil Is Petty: Condiment King shoots some mustard on Kite-Man's tux just to make him look bad in front of the corn factory's owner.
- Friend-or-Idol Decision: Kite Man is forced to choose between leaving in the middle of touring a venue at an old corn factory that he really wants to book a wedding at (Idol), or helping Poison Ivy get a flower from her apartment to help Nora Freeze (Friend), and he chooses the latter. He winds up losing the venue.
- Get Out!: Nora screams this at Harley's crew when they awkwardly hang around after Freeze's death.
- Gilligan Cut: Harley makes a plan that she and the crew ambush Freeze, take his gun, and freeze him to a chair. The next cut has Harley and the crew all frozen to chairs.
- Heel Realization: Seeing Mr. Freeze's willingness to give his own life for Nora shows Harley that she was projecting her own toxic relationship with Joker onto others.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Mr. Freeze willingly takes Ivy's serum so his blood can cure his wife, even though doing so will kill him.
- Heroic Suicide: Mr. Freeze dying for his wife has shades of this. He admits right before injecting himself that he finds living in his suit hellish and that he only tolerates it so he can live long enough to cure his wife. He may find the fact the cure will kill him as a positive.
- Hurricane of Puns: Condiment King delivers a series of lame condiment puns to Kite-Man after booking the Old Gotham Corn Factory ahead of him.Ivy: I think he's my nemesis now, too.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Mr. Freeze cures Nora of her terminal disease, even if it means he has to die.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: Nora is not dead, merely a Human Popsicle, but the way Freeze props her body up at the table, spoon-feeds her through a hole in the ice, and pretends she's conscious makes it hardly any different. Combined with the horrified expression Nora is frozen in, it's all played for Black Comedy.
- Mythology Gag:
- Several to (the generally despised) Batman & Robin:
- All of Freeze's mooks are on ice skates and armed with hockey sticks.
- Mr. Freeze's synth-heavy leitmotif in this episode is
very reminiscent of Freeze's theme in that film. - Freeze and Ivy had allied in the film, but not in a good way, and nearly fatal for Nora.
- The dining table scene recalls a Mr. Freeze episode from the 1966 series.
- Several to (the generally despised) Batman & Robin:
- Nervous Wreck: Kite-Man is a mess in anticipation of booking the Old Gotham Corn Factory for his wedding to Ivy because he always imagined having his wedding there and knows the owner to be picky about who is allowed to use it.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Harley believes Nora is not actually sick, and Freeze is keeping her frozen against her will. She attempts to "free" Nora, which sentences her to death.
- Noodle Incident: King Shark mentions being in a relationship with a woman named Leslie.
- Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: As Mr. Freeze points out throughout the series, he's not really a supervillain since he's not interested in harming Gotham, but just desperate to find a cure for his terminally ill wife. Nevertheless, Harley believes he's a creepy, controlling misogynist who "gets his jollies off freezing women" due to Nora being frozen with a seemingly horrified look on her face, and Mr. Freeze himself having already frozen Harley in a block of ice for months. It's only after Nora is unfrozen and reveals that Mr. Freeze was telling the truth about them being in love but her dying of a rare blood condition, and him having only frozen Harley to keep the Injustice League from killing her (by playing their misogyny against them) that his name is cleared for Harley.
- Not Helping Your Case: Harley seeing Nora's cryogenically frozen body only reinforced her belief that Freeze was trying to have his way with her. Her face was literally frozen in horror which gave the impression that she was frozen against her will, not to mention the hole that was meant for food to enter her mouth could be interpreted as... for something else.
- Offhand Backhand: Clayface punches out a mook without turning his head or even interrupting his train of thought.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- Harley wholeheartedly believes that Mr. Freeze is a psychopathic abuser similar to the Joker, a delusion not helped by Freeze clearly being loose a few screws and Nora's unique situation, and she ignores all evidence to the contrary. It's only after she breaks Nora out of the ice that she learns that Nora's freezing was keeping a terminal illness at bay and that Harley's own freezing was to protect her from the rest of the Injustice League. While Nora's life does get saved, it comes at the cost of Mr. Freeze's own, a tragedy that leaves everyone devastated and Harley heavily reconsidering what love really is.
- Shaped Like Itself: Dr. Psycho describes his sadness at Mr. Freeze's death as the following:Dr. Psycho: I'm feeling feelings!
- Shout-Out:
- Mr. Freeze refers to Harley's crew as her "Insane Clown... Group"
- Mr. Freeze and Nora's love story is a riff on You've Got Mail.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Condiment King to Kite-Man. Their nemesis relationship is more petty pranks than attempted murder.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- After Mr. Freeze sacrifices himself to give Nora the cure to her blood disease, she is devastated and sobs over his corpse. Harley and crew half-heartedly try to cheer her up and make small talk, but Nora is understandably not in a good place to hear their peppy small talk, and eventually screams at them to get out.
- Kite Man is half-hopeful that his choice to leave the tour of the Old Gotham Corn Factory to help his fiance would have impressed the proprietor with his Act of True Love enough to choose him and Poison Ivy over Condiment Man and his fiance. As it turns out, it wasn't. Condiment Man was already impressing the proprietor more than them before they left, and leaving in the middle of the tour just sealed the deal.
- Sweet and Sour Grapes: Subverted. Kite Man really wants to book a venue at the Old Gotham Corn Factory because it's where all the classy celebrity couples get married, but his Sitcom Arch-Nemesis, Condiment Man, keeps showing him up. After Poison Ivy has to leave to help Harley, she texts Kite Man asking him to pick up a flower at her apartment to help Nora Freeze. Kite Man is then forced to choose between helping his fiance and impressing the proprietor but chooses the latter, and seemingly impresses the proprietor with his Act of True Love. When he gets a call from said proprietor at the end of the episode, it seems he got the venue after all... only for it to turn out to be Condiment Man to rub it in that he got the venue instead.
- Take That!: Harley's mistaken assumption of Mr. Freeze being a clingy psycho who froze Nora against her will could be seen as a jab at the New 52's unpopular retcon of Mr. Freeze's modern backstory, in which Nora was actually frozen decades before Freeze was born and the latter is just a random scientist who became obsessed with Nora and deluded himself into believing she was his wife.
- Taking You with Me: Mr. Freeze threatens to blow up his lair and Harley's crew with it when they unfreeze Nora and break his freeze ray unless they can get Ivy to find a cure.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: This is one of, if not the only time that Mr. Freeze's wife is completely cured since Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero. Not "a cure is being worked on", but completely cured.
- What's more, Freeze dying just after curing Nora and both of them reaffirming their love becomes his happy ending instead of subjecting him to suffering terrible losses after Nora is restored and eventually a grim distant future, or Nora even turning against him like in the comics twice.
- After Harley realizes how skewed her views on love are when Freeze sacrifices himself to cure Nora. King Shark comforts her by saying how they all had toxic relationships corrupt their perspective of love while also reminiscing on his past lover named Leslie.
- What the Hell, Hero?: King Shark calls out Harley for falsely accusing "the most woke ice-themed villain in New New Gotham" when Freeze reveals that he froze her to keep the Injustice League from killing her.
