Titans (DC Direct, Seasons 1 and 2)
Mar. 4th, 2020 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDick Grayson has had a falling out with Batman; Kory Anders doesn’t know anything about herself; Rachel Roth is facing evil supernatural phenomena. Love! Drama! Superheroes!
This opens with the same dark and gritty tone as Doom Patrol; lots of blood and gore in a “realistic” way that reminded me a bit of the Watchmen movie. The thing is, it doesn’t work the way Doom Patrol did. This style works for Vertigo-style stories, and the Titans, even at their darkest, were never that. Honestly, the first season feels like a test-run of the format (which, in a way, it kinda was) where they threw in a lot of stuff to see what worked and what they could get away with. Including lots of f-bombs and lots of beefcake. (And a random topless woman in a throwaway scene in S2. And Hank’s drug addiction that they can’t seem to figure out what they’re doing with.)
Most of the changes from the comics I was generally fine with: They changed around a bunch of the ages, they made Hawk and Dove non-powered heroes, they told the Robin story they wanted to tell. I appreciated that after an episode of the characters getting tortured by evil cultists, they all have lingering psychological trauma from it. I also appreciated Trigon being presented as “a dude” rather than them trying to make a CGI nightmare beast that would never have worked with the mood of the show. But I’m also pissed they did the cliffhanger rather that just doing one more damn episode in season 1. (Doubly so when I watched the beginning of Season 2 and it was literally one more episode to resolve everything from S1 and do a proper lead-in. Were the network and the showrunners screwing with each other?)
Clearly for the second season, they had a bigger CGI budget and a willingness to use natural light. Everything is still “dark”, but at least it better acknowledges that it’s a superhero show and not supernatural horror.
I had a lot of random thoughts about season 2: I spent the first half of the episode where Eve Watson appears hoping she’d be Caitlyn Fairchild; then was glad she wasn’t because that would add another layer of absurd complicated mess. The fact that Slade straight-out kills Dr. Light says something about this creative team’s opinion of Dr. Light. I liked the string of “Jason is in mortal peril, now let’s ignore it for a whole episode flashback” hooks. They didn’t have much for Jason to do in the back half, which was a shame, because a third one would have been fun.
I really enjoyed Ser Jorah as Bruce Wayne. Who was also, at some points, clearly something supernatural that looks like him. The idea that it’s Raven’s powers is floated, but I don’t buy it—there’s too much intelligence behind the manipulation for it not to be a separate entity. (Though it’s probably the same entity that controlled the gargoyle and killed the man Rachel roughed up.)
I spent the entire Jericho flashback saying, “Where’s 12-year-old Rose in all of this?” (Which gets explained later that they’re half-siblings and didn’t know about each other.) I figured out that Jericho was hiding in Slade three episodes before Dick did. I had a sneaking suspicion that Rose was Slade’s mole (given that this was clearly an adaptation of “The Judas Contract”, somebody needed to be playing Terra’s role).
The way they condense and rearrange time is more irritating than most shows, possibly because they insist on giving dates. The three-month time skip between seasons is barely enough for the progress everyone seems to have made. After the team splits, Hank and Dawn have a new house in Wyoming and are making repairs in two days; Dick is in a federal penitentiary in less time than it takes ink to dry; and Kory bounces around the country impressively fast given that her spaceship never moves and this incarnation can’t fly.
Donna’s death in the final episode pissed me off, mostly because of how stupid it was: She gets electrocuted by a piece of falling carnival equipment after she’s seen being tough enough to trade blows with a Kryptonian...while said Kryptonian and also a telekinetic stand by doing nothing. Like the prison sequence, this fell under “the writers wanted to do the scenes following this, so it had to happen no matter how dumb it was.” I suspect that Raven’s ability to bring Donna back to life will be heavily dependent on negotiations with the actress.
Honestly, they crammed too many characters and too many plotlines into this season. The Superboy/Cadmus plot wasn’t necessary to fuse into the Slade plot, especially given that they were based on comics stories written decades apart about completely different teams of characters. The time-jumps and characters acting stupidly became a necessary consequence of trying to cram in too much stuff. The Titans are all clearly deeply broken people, but they sometimes act like stupid assholes not because it makes sense for their characters, but because that’s the only thing that gets the chess pieces moved around in the tiny slice of time the have allocated to do so.
We go into next season with Blackfire on Earth, Kory’s powers gone, Donna dead but Rachel trying to revive her, Jericho in Rose’s head, and the mysterious ghost-Bruce still unexplained. Will they manage a payoff to any of it? We’ll find out!
Overall: Regardless of the R-rated content, it’s about on par with the CW DC shows in terms of mixed-quality writing and boneheaded characters. If they feel the need to cram in another half-dozen main characters in season 3, may I suggest Bumblebee or Duela Dent?
This opens with the same dark and gritty tone as Doom Patrol; lots of blood and gore in a “realistic” way that reminded me a bit of the Watchmen movie. The thing is, it doesn’t work the way Doom Patrol did. This style works for Vertigo-style stories, and the Titans, even at their darkest, were never that. Honestly, the first season feels like a test-run of the format (which, in a way, it kinda was) where they threw in a lot of stuff to see what worked and what they could get away with. Including lots of f-bombs and lots of beefcake. (And a random topless woman in a throwaway scene in S2. And Hank’s drug addiction that they can’t seem to figure out what they’re doing with.)
Most of the changes from the comics I was generally fine with: They changed around a bunch of the ages, they made Hawk and Dove non-powered heroes, they told the Robin story they wanted to tell. I appreciated that after an episode of the characters getting tortured by evil cultists, they all have lingering psychological trauma from it. I also appreciated Trigon being presented as “a dude” rather than them trying to make a CGI nightmare beast that would never have worked with the mood of the show. But I’m also pissed they did the cliffhanger rather that just doing one more damn episode in season 1. (Doubly so when I watched the beginning of Season 2 and it was literally one more episode to resolve everything from S1 and do a proper lead-in. Were the network and the showrunners screwing with each other?)
Clearly for the second season, they had a bigger CGI budget and a willingness to use natural light. Everything is still “dark”, but at least it better acknowledges that it’s a superhero show and not supernatural horror.
I had a lot of random thoughts about season 2: I spent the first half of the episode where Eve Watson appears hoping she’d be Caitlyn Fairchild; then was glad she wasn’t because that would add another layer of absurd complicated mess. The fact that Slade straight-out kills Dr. Light says something about this creative team’s opinion of Dr. Light. I liked the string of “Jason is in mortal peril, now let’s ignore it for a whole episode flashback” hooks. They didn’t have much for Jason to do in the back half, which was a shame, because a third one would have been fun.
I really enjoyed Ser Jorah as Bruce Wayne. Who was also, at some points, clearly something supernatural that looks like him. The idea that it’s Raven’s powers is floated, but I don’t buy it—there’s too much intelligence behind the manipulation for it not to be a separate entity. (Though it’s probably the same entity that controlled the gargoyle and killed the man Rachel roughed up.)
I spent the entire Jericho flashback saying, “Where’s 12-year-old Rose in all of this?” (Which gets explained later that they’re half-siblings and didn’t know about each other.) I figured out that Jericho was hiding in Slade three episodes before Dick did. I had a sneaking suspicion that Rose was Slade’s mole (given that this was clearly an adaptation of “The Judas Contract”, somebody needed to be playing Terra’s role).
The way they condense and rearrange time is more irritating than most shows, possibly because they insist on giving dates. The three-month time skip between seasons is barely enough for the progress everyone seems to have made. After the team splits, Hank and Dawn have a new house in Wyoming and are making repairs in two days; Dick is in a federal penitentiary in less time than it takes ink to dry; and Kory bounces around the country impressively fast given that her spaceship never moves and this incarnation can’t fly.
Donna’s death in the final episode pissed me off, mostly because of how stupid it was: She gets electrocuted by a piece of falling carnival equipment after she’s seen being tough enough to trade blows with a Kryptonian...while said Kryptonian and also a telekinetic stand by doing nothing. Like the prison sequence, this fell under “the writers wanted to do the scenes following this, so it had to happen no matter how dumb it was.” I suspect that Raven’s ability to bring Donna back to life will be heavily dependent on negotiations with the actress.
Honestly, they crammed too many characters and too many plotlines into this season. The Superboy/Cadmus plot wasn’t necessary to fuse into the Slade plot, especially given that they were based on comics stories written decades apart about completely different teams of characters. The time-jumps and characters acting stupidly became a necessary consequence of trying to cram in too much stuff. The Titans are all clearly deeply broken people, but they sometimes act like stupid assholes not because it makes sense for their characters, but because that’s the only thing that gets the chess pieces moved around in the tiny slice of time the have allocated to do so.
We go into next season with Blackfire on Earth, Kory’s powers gone, Donna dead but Rachel trying to revive her, Jericho in Rose’s head, and the mysterious ghost-Bruce still unexplained. Will they manage a payoff to any of it? We’ll find out!
Overall: Regardless of the R-rated content, it’s about on par with the CW DC shows in terms of mixed-quality writing and boneheaded characters. If they feel the need to cram in another half-dozen main characters in season 3, may I suggest Bumblebee or Duela Dent?
