The Unfortunate Timing of Titans

Now that the A to Z Challenge is over, it's back to the usual Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule that despite being predictable, no one will remember anyway. 😒

Back in March I finally got around to watching Titans on HBO Max.  And I pretty much hated it.  The biggest problem for me was the show, especially in the first season, was so dark.  It was basically like Teen Titans by way of Watchmen.  And yet strangely Zack Snyder wasn't involved.

I'm not really a big reader of Teen Titans comics or the later Titans comics where Dick Grayson, Starfire, and some of the other original Teen Titans became kind of the middle children between the Justice League and Teen Titans.  Anyway, even in my limited reading, I really don't think they nailed this at all.  I especially don't think they nailed Dick Grayson's character at all.  I mean in the comics I've read, Dick isn't Bruce Wayne Jr or Batman Jr.  He's usually a lot more well-adjusted and personable than Bruce.  In the Grant Morrison era of the late 2000s/early 2010s when Dick took over as Batman for a couple of years, one of the ways that Commissioner Gordon knew Dick wasn't the same Batman is that he would actually smile and make jokes.

Sadly that isn't the Dick Grayson we get in this show.  Instead we get a Robin who's more like Rorschach, hunting down criminals and then beating them bloody, breaking bones, and in one case basically ripping a dude's dick off with a grappling hook.  He notably says, "Fuck Batman" and yet really isn't all that different from Batman, at least the Frank Miller/Batfleck kind of Batman.

I don't think they really nailed Starfire either.  Not because they cast a black woman.  It's mostly because she spends pretty much the whole first season as some kind of alien Jason Bourne in that she can't remember who or what she is but then she starts killing people by shooting fire.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that's how it worked for in the comics.  And it didn't help that pretty much that whole season she dresses like some kind of drag queen prostitute.  Ugh.

They did a better job with Raven and Gar, aka Beast Boy.  At least Raven v2.0 because the first Raven was more or less an adult and not a Goth kid like the later iterations.  Beast Boy is probably the one they got the most right, though it was lame that until the last episode of the first season he only turns into a tiger.  Even then the only other thing he does is turn into a snake.  Is the CGI morphing stuff really that expensive?

Though no one cared about my Doom Patrol blog entry (or this one either), my problem with that show was in the end most of the stuff that happens and most of the characters don't matter.  That winds up being the same problem with the first season of Titans too.  The whole thing for the season is protecting Raven from first some kind of secret organization that wants to capture and study her, if not kill her, and then later to save her from her father, the demon Trigon.  But in the end (which is really the first episode of season 2) the only one who really helps Raven is Gar.  Everyone else is corrupted by Trigon, starting with Dick in a largely pointless fake-out fantasy episode where he imagines killing Batman.  

So like with Doom Patrol we get introduced to all these characters and their problems, especially Hawk and Dove, who have a whole flashback episode to introduce their problems, and they don't really factor into the end.  They could have not been in it at all and the outcome would still be the same.  You can at least make the case that Starfire and Dick helped to get Raven and Gar to the end, though still if everyone except Raven and Gar had not been in it at all, the same result could still have happened.  That's just lousy storytelling to me.  Though the most useless character was Dick's partner on the Detroit PD.  She's introduced, she talks to him a couple of times, talks to the coroner, and then she's dead and no one, especially not Dick, seems to give a shit about it.  What was the point of her even being in the show?  Dick being a police detective was pretty unbelievable too and the only reason they did it was so he would have a reason to meet Raven, and flashing a badge opened a few doors later on.  He could have met her another way and done without the detective thing and useless partner.

The second episode of season 2 is almost like a soft reboot.  Dick moves Raven, Gar, and Jason Todd's Robin to the old Titans Tower in San Francisco, which unlike the comics and animated shows/movies is not shaped like a big T.  But wait, there was an old Titans team?  They hadn't really mentioned anything about that in the first season, just that Dick and Donna Troy (aka Wonder Girl) knew each other and Dick also knew Hawk & Dove.  Meanwhile, Starfire apparently remembers everything about her alien life now so that when some royal guardsman comes back to take her home, she even remembers sleeping with him once before.  And while in the first season we never see Batman or Bruce Wayne (maybe because they were hoping for a Ben Affleck cameo) suddenly Dick is meeting with some middle-aged balding guy who is apparently Bruce Wayne.  Um...ok then.

After Trigon is dealt with, the main bad guys in the second season are Deathstroke and Cadmus.  Deathstroke famously went against the Titans in The Judas Contract back in the early 80s comics--which was made into a 2017 animated film.  In that he used a new recruit named Terra as a mole (appropriate since she had earth moving powers) to get inside the Titans and then capture them.  In a half-assed way they sort of do something similar only instead of Terra, it's Deathstroke's daughter Rose who becomes the mole.  Dick "rescues" her and invites her to stay and she helps stoke the flames of division in the group.

Just seeing Deathstroke has the rest of the old Titans (Hawk, Dove, and Donna Troy) shitting their pants.  In flashbacks over a few episodes we find out that Deathstroke killed Aqualad, the sidekick of Aquaman.  To try to flush Deathstroke out, Dick and company find Deathstroke's son Jericho, who is mute after some bad guys cut his throat, but has the power where he can jump into anyone he makes eye contact with.  Anyway, the half-assed plan to use Jericho to find Deathstroke leads to Donna getting her ass kicked, then Dick getting his ass kicked, and Jericho seemingly killed by Deathstroke.  After that the original Titans broke up.  And after Dick tells that story to the new Titans, they break up too because he didn't tell them the truth.

Meanwhile, at the end of season 1 there was a cookie scene showing Conner Kent escaping Cadmus Laboratories with Krypto, who was Superman's dog in one of those goofy old stories.  It's not until midway of season 2 when they get back to this and show Conner escaping and taking Krypto with him.  Conner makes his way to Kansas and the home of Lex Luthor's father, who I guess in this universe was a farmer who lived down the road from the Kents.  Conner has memories of both Lex and Clark Kent (aka Superman) because he was cloned with DNA of both of them.  With the help of the scientist who made him, Conner ends up in San Francisco in time to save a falling Jason Todd.  But then Conner is shot with a Kryptonite bullet and is saved by Starfire giving him a burst of solar radiation, but he's still in a coma.

With everyone else going their separate ways, Gar stays to watch Conner.  When Conner wakes up, Gar starts teaching him about the world, but when Conner inadvertently beats up some cops he thinks are hurting someone, he goes on the run until he and Gar are captured and brainwashed by Cadmus.

Meanwhile Dick decides to do penance by beating up a couple of TSA people in an airport and going to prison.  Despite that to prosecute someone and send him to jail would take weeks if not months, it seems like overnight that he's sent to a Nevada prison.  Meanwhile Donna keeps trying to call him on his cell phone, because I guess his story didn't make the news and she never bothered to Google him or anything.  And she didn't bother asking Wonder Woman or Batman or anyone in the Justice League to help find him.

And there's some whole dumb subplot about Starfire's sister going all Cersei on Game of Thrones and killing everyone on their home planet to take over as undisputed ruler.  And while Starfire wanted to stay on Earth when her bodyguard tracked her down, all the sudden she doesn't want to stay on Earth anymore.  And Raven is struggling to control her powers.  And Hawk and Dove break up and he starts doing cage fights sort of like Wolverine in the start of X-Men back in 2000 to get money for blow.  And Jason Todd and Rose go back to Gotham to fight crime and then play house in some busted drug dealer's mansion.  Blah, blah, blah who gives a shit?

The last episode does slightly better at getting more people involved.  Cadmus unleashes Gar on a carnival in San Francisco and then sends Conner to fight him to demonstrate his capabilities.  Starfire, Raven, Donna, and Dove decide to go stop the fight but Deathstroke stops him.  Then Dick shows up to fight him and Rose shows up to help--while the others just sit in the car.  It's kind of creepy that Jericho, whose spirit had been living in his dad when he died, jumps into the body of his half-sister.  And then supposedly Deathstroke is dead.

Then they go to the carnival and Raven brings Gar back and then she, Dick, and Donna manage to un-brainwash Conner.  He beats the shit out of the Cadmus goons in the area--who apparently don't have Kryptonite bullets handy--and everything seems fine now.  But this fucking show is so pathological about avoiding anything that might be construed as fun or positive that they have to engineer Donna's death in a really fucking stupid way.  Dove's big contribution is to grab a kid's doll and while she's giving it to the kid, a big metal tower that was part of a ride or something is going to fall on her.  Even though there is literally a clone of Superman with super-speed and super-strength right there, Donna grabs the tower thing and gets fried.  Like Iron Man and Captain America in Endgame I wonder if this was more about the actress wanting out than any real reason because it was so unnecessary and dumb.

Donna's strength--or lack thereof--doesn't really make much sense to me.  In a flashback Deathstroke beats the hell out of her and breaks some of her bones.  But then at the carnival she takes a punch from Conner with little damage.  But then she gets electrocuted to death?  She can take a punch from a Kryptonian clone but Deathstroke breaks her arm and electricity kills her?  It's not really consistent.

And still while they did a little better to involve more of the characters, in the end Hawk and Starfire were useless, Dove was worse than useless, and Jason Todd was absent.  I don't know why for this and Doom Patrol they suck so much at getting characters involved.  In the end there's so much stuff that winds up wasted.  I think they do a better job on the ones that end up on the CW.  And the animated ones.

The only cookie scene at the end teases that Starfire's sister is back on Earth.  Big whoop.  Are we supposed to believe Deathstroke is really dead?  And what about Dick Grayson?  He broke out of prison, so isn't he a fugitive from justice?  Or is Bruce Wayne going to make those charges go away?  Next season I guess they're supposed to have Tim Drake as a third Robin and Barbara Gordon as Oracle/Batgirl, but I'm sure they'll fuck those characters up too.

The biggest problem for this show is that it was still a product of the Snyder era.  Though Zack Snyder wasn't involved, it was made like Watchmen or BvS, the kind of grim and gritty "superhero" universe where the heroes are really not much better than the villains.  The first season aired in 2018 but it was made in 2017, before the failure of Justice League really put the kibosh on the whole "Snyderverse" thing.  If they had started production after that, they might have decided on a lighter tone, which really would have made the show more enjoyable.  It's not like I wanted something as goofy as Teen Titans Go, but more like the animated movies or the animated Young Justice series, which like with most DC properties do a lot better job with the material than the live action versions.

I suppose the thinking with some of the characters was sort of like with the Henry Cavill Superman where they were trying to have the characters start out gloomy and pissed off and then work towards making them more fun as they worked through their issues.  Especially with Dick Grayson that's what they seemed to be trying to do, but it seems kind of ass-backwards to me; you're really hoping that the audience is going to stick around through that whole change and I'm not sure you can really count on that, especially when you start so dark.  Character development is nice, but they didn't need to make most of them so fucked up.

Fun Fact:  The first two episodes were directed by Brad Anderson, who is one of my favorite underrated directors of movies like The Machinist (with former Batman Christian Bale), Transsiberian, and Session 9.  It was nice to see him getting some work even if I didn't really like the show.