SPOILER ALERT: The following interview contains spoilers for Harley Quinn’s recent episode, “Bottle My Heart.”

Harley Quinn has never played by the rules, and season five is no exception. The Lady of Lunacy has taken her act to Metropolis, bringing chaos to everything from the Superman Museum to the offices of the Daily Planet. Harley has also learned more about babysitting sharks than any human being should know, and she has the cleaning bill to prove it.

However, it hasn’t all been fun and games. Brainiac has set his sights on Metropolis, and this alien collector isn’t playing around. In fact, episode six of the current season, “Bottle My Heart,” ends with the shocking death of Frank the Plant, an original member of Harley’s crew that has been around since the pilot.

We knew the death of Poison Ivy’s treasured companion will be felt on the series for some time to come, so we sat down with showrunner Dean Lorey to find out what the fallout may be. Over the course of our chat, Lorey also shares some unused episode ideas, reveals the fate of the Gotham City Sirens and explains why it was time for poor Frank to go.

How has the Harley Quinn mission statement changed since the first season? I remember initially it was The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but more homicidal. How would you describe it now?

That was part of the original pitch. There are still elements of that, but what the show has become, at least in my mind, is a more character driven show that embraces really raunchy humor and extreme violence, but at the same time we take the characters very seriously, and we take the drama very seriously. I think it's a show that sort of has grown to embrace different kinds of relationships and grief, and the transitions that we go through in life. I don't want to try to make it seem more than it is, but we take all that very seriously as we work on it.

Why take the gang to Metropolis this season? Was that synergy for the upcoming Superman movie or a coincidence?

No, it was a coincidence. I don't think we even knew about that movie when we were first trying to figure out what the season was going to be. I hadn't worked on the show since season two, so I was coming back to work on it and I wanted to do a soft reset, to kind of get back to a lot of the original characters that we had focused on. I think we all wanted to bring a fresh sensibility to the season, and we decided that a change of location would probably do that. And that sort of opened the door to exploring what it's like for Harley and Ivy to find themselves in a rut, like pretty much anybody does in any relationship at some point if you're together long enough. It seemed like that would really jazz things up and give us a lot to play with.

Was it always the plan to move away from the Gotham City Sirens?

When I came back, it had already been determined that we were going to move the show to Metropolis. That already made it difficult to accommodate the Gotham City Sirens, for obvious reasons. But we did want to explain what had happened there, because we know that season four had wrapped with that as the setup. In my mind, and this is not me trying to hide a secret or anything, we did a time jump over that period of time which would allow us to, if we wanted to, do a season or maybe a special where we could jump back and track what happened during that period of time. We weren't trying to not do it, but we wanted to do Metropolis.

I loved the way you dealt with it in the premiere. That's something that a show like Harley Quinn can do really well.

Thanks. We talked a lot about how we were going to explain it away, and finally we thought, let's just do it in the cold open. Let's just say, yeah, that sucked. It all went to shit, and we've got to move on from it. And then there's a certain amount of fun putting yourself in a position to have to live up to something difficult that you've made in service for the moment. In this one, it was the complete disintegration of the Gotham City Sirens, and maybe someone in the future will have to tackle that, or maybe I will.

Was episode five this season inspired by the Knives Out movies? I got a big Knives Out vibe from it.

It was a little bit, but I will say that episode went through a ton of changes. Originally it was going to focus on the Teen Titans prom, and we were going to cover some of the same ground in that episode, but we finally decided that it had become too much about characters that were sort of incidental to our show. But we liked the idea of dealing with some of the Titans, so we reset it in Bruce Wayne's apartment, and then decided to do like a murder mystery dinner that would allow us to hit the plot beats that we liked from the Teen Titans prom episode, but with our characters.

Just to quiet some of the voices online, shouldn't the Joker still know Batman's identity? Or did he lose that memory when he went through his transformation at the end of season one?

I would say whatever you think answers the question best. I don't think he does know, but that's my answer. He's gone through a lot of trauma during the course of these five seasons, so god only knows what the guy thinks by this point.

At what point did you realize that you were going to kill Frank? Was it a hard decision to kill a character that's been around since the pilot?

It was a hard decision, but we wouldn't have done it if we didn't feel that it would allow us to really focus on Frank this season. I think we focused on him far more than we have in any other season. He was a core part of Ivy's origin story, which I've wanted to do since episode one. It really allowed us to build up Ivy and Frank's relationship this season in a more sort of meaningful way, so that his death would have more gravity. We wanted to do it for that reason.

We also wanted to introduce the character of Frankette, to sort of see what Frank would have been like when he was a sprout. We sort of hedged our bets a little bit, because even after his death, we see Frank in the Green. He still exists there. I would say that we haven't said goodbye to him completely as a character. We have that option open to us.

It's Harley Quinn. It's the DC Universe. Anything can happen.

We killed Ivy! I mean, we killed her in season one and she came back within one episode, so it's possible.

I love Brainiac as the big bad of the season, and one thing that's interesting thematically is that Harley very much is an agent of chaos, whereas Brainiac is very orderly. This is a contrast that we've not really seen with Harley's other adversaries in the series. Talk about playing with that dynamic.

That was a big part of the reason to pick Brainiac to begin with. He's an agent of order, and Harley is an agent of chaos. We thought that would form a really good dynamic. The role of Brainiac sort of developed over the course of the season while we were writing, before we started actual production, because we were kind of falling in love with the character. We decided to treat him the way that we treated Freeze in an earlier season, so that even though he's the big bad, it was more of a tragedy than just a villain. We wanted to explore that.

Katie Rich did a great job writing the Brainiac centric episode and Stephen Fry was amazing. It took a while to kind of come up with Stephen Fry. I don't even know where that came from, but once we had him, and I saw what he was doing with it, things were amazing.

Without giving too much away, what can fans look forward to for the rest of the season?

I think they can look forward to the unexpected. Probably the most heart that we have seen yet in a Harley season. Where we ultimately get to, I find really touching and hopefully unexpected.

Harley Quinn’s fifth season is now streaming on Max. Look for new episodes every Thursday.