DC's Titans: Season 2, Episode 1 - Review
So the episode opens moments after the events of Season 1's finale 'Dick Grayson', with Dick (Brenton Thwaites) having succumbed to his inner darkness under the influence of Trigon (Seamus Dever) to the horror of Rachel/Raven (Teagan Croft) and Gar/Beast Boy (Ryan Potter). It was a great cliffhanger ending, and the episode starts out fairly well with a possessed Dick pursuing Rachel and Gar throughout her surprisingly creepy family home. There's an awkward moment where Gar almost transforms into his beast form and then...doesn't, I assume for cost reasons, but it's mostly fine. Rachel's reaching out to Dick is a basic emotional hook, albeit one that works better when you haven't had a full-year gap between seasons (in the UK, at least) that completely loses the momentum of the over-arching story.
Anyway, Rachel telepathically reached out to Hank/Hawk (Alan Ritchson) and Dawn/Dove (Mina Kelly), who go to Wayne Manor to recruit Jason Todd/Robin (Curran Walters) at Rachel's request, before meeting with Kory/Starfire (Ana Diop) and Donna/Wonder Girl (Conor Leslie) outside the house. Brief snippets of exposition are exchanged, before the characters are let inside by Trigon and then possessed one-by-one through brief dream sequences. Oh, and by brief, I mean brief. None of these sequences have time to play out, the dialogue is cringe-worthy, and they're staged in such a haphazard way that it absolutely baffles me how many people must have said "yes, this is the standard we're looking for". Donna's backstory is hinted at for the first time with a hilarious charred corpse of her deceased father; Jason fights Dick to claim who's the better Robin before Jason just shoots Dick with the gun that killed Bruce Wayne's parents (yeah, it really is that random); Kory dreams that she murders Rachel (presumably nightmarish because Kory is succumbing to her alien orders...I guess?); and Hank and Dawn do drugs. Ooooh. So sinister. Anyway, this apparently means that Trigon controls all of them now, so they can all beat Gar senseless, despite the fact that a good few of them have super-powers - including Gar himself, who could just transform into a tiger and attack them. I assume he doesn't because he doesn't want to hurt anyone, but why doesn't Kory just blast him with her alien fire energy? Or Donna strangle him with her lasso?
Then Trigon transforms into a poorly-rendered CGI demon monster with a voice that clearly isn't Seamus Dever - I seriously wonder if he was even present for the re-shoots, or if this was all from principal photography in 2018 - after literally breaking Rachel's heart. Gar turns into a snake (only now?), and then manages to very quickly snap Rachel out of her possession with an underdeveloped romantic backstory, before Rachel does a similar thing for Dick, and then goes out to confront her father. With her magical powers fully established (I assume?), Rachel decimates Trigon and the over-arching narrative of Season 1 concludes a mere thirty-ish-minutes into a fifty-ish-minute episode.
Now, I actually really like the idea of 'Trigon' being about Rachel coming to terms with her powers and her father, and destroying him entirely by herself. It's a nice conclusion for her story, and her saving Dick near the end is a nice wrap-up for their dynamic across the first season. However, if this is the case, why does anyone else need to be there? Their dream sequences are so short that nothing really develops, they don't contribute towards Trigon's demise, and then just piss off after the conflict is over. This episode should be focused on Rachel, with Dick, Gar and Kory as the supporting Titans. Hank, Dawn, Jason and Donna aren't needed here. But the real shame is that this character-centric conclusion takes place over thirty minutes. Not one hour, not even over two whole episodes, but in thirty minutes. There is no way in hell that this was how it was planned to be all be resolved, and this absolutely reeks of the creative team just throwing their hands up in defeat and rushing the ending. I can understand needing to reshoot the Season 1 finale as part of another filming block alongside Season 2, but this needed to just play out properly over either a whole episode or two. It's so rushed, underwritten and haphazardly put-together that to call it an anti-climax feels like an understatement, especially when there are so many elements in 'Trigon' that on a surface level work quite well.
Oh, and then we get a whole fifteen-ish-minute epilogue to set-up Season 2, with the Titans going off in their different directions, with Dick taking Rachel, Gar and Jason with him. Then, we cut to Esai Morales as yet another live-action incarnation of Deathstroke (whose story on Arrow abruptly ended a couple of years ago, and whose story set-up in Justice League will presumably never be resolved), who seems pretty pissed-off about Jason Todd claiming "Titans are back, bitches" on live television. Quite why a TV News crew showed up at Rachel's house is baffling, considering no one would have called them, and quite why the Titans hadn't left by then is just strange. Anyway, this then abruptly cuts to Dick visiting Bruce Wayne (Iain Glen, struggling to do an American accent) to get some closure on his "darkness" arc. Rachel, Gar and Jason have strangely disappeared somewhere else, I guess along with Alfred, but Bruce hints that he wants Dick to look after Jason. Then that abruptly cuts to Dick and the gang turning up at a new Titans HQ, presumably gifted by Bruce, and hints at a bright future for the Titans team. There are four epilogue scenes, each abruptly cutting to the next, and none of them having any sense of cohesion. These epilogue scenes clearly needed to be here, but why not work these into a separate episode? Take the time to set these elements up, and give the actual plot of 'Trigon' more time to be fleshed out. This is just basic narrative structure, but Titans still fails at this. How?
'Trigon' isn't a horrible episode of Titans, but it's a bloody disappointing one nevertheless. Teagan Croft shows great promise as Rachel still, Ryan Potter continues to be criminally under-served as Gar, and the rest of the cast are all okay here, and it's not badly directed or anything, but the writing, pacing and overall structure are a mess, not to mention the horrifically awful CGI Trigon model. A conceptually strong episode, perhaps, but very poorly executed on a number of levels. 4/10
Titans is available to watch now on Netflix in the UK, and DC Universe in the US.
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