And once again, we return to this. After a production delayed by COVID-19 Titans returns for its third season with a Death in the Family. Despite having an overall solid production pedigree, Titans has never really played for me as well as I’d hoped for. But now on a new streaming home, HBO Max, and with three episodes to go over in the next couple of days maybe it’ll be third times the charm for the series about teenagers and twenty-somethings finding themselves in the shadows of their abusive parents and in a world filled with the opportunity to take the easy way.
1. A Death in the Family
The promotional material promised a death in the family, the only question was when it would happen. Going in I’d expected it to be the finale to this first episode the shocking discovery that would bring the Titans too Gotham in the second episode. The writing team go a different route by showing the murder of Jason Todd in the pre title sequence. It’s an impactful way to start an episode and an event that hangs over everything going forward. With Television-Streaming now out of the new-Golden Age/Peak TV era now more than ever producers can only play on audiences’ expectations of ‘when’ something will occur not ‘if’ it will occur. Killing Jason at the top of the episode is a great play on those expectations.
2. Tonality
A consistent tone has never been this series strong suit. It is at once a deadpan serious drama that leans towards the gritty excess of the Arkhamverse by way Schumacher Batman production design and features a super powered dog. It’s telling an internal melodrama about the stresses of being a vigilante and then you have sci-fi body horror stuff with Beast Boy, Superboy, and Starfire. Or the magic of Raven. They dynamic range afforded by the cast means the storytelling possibilities are vast, but making it all fit together and more specifically transitioning from one plot thread to another jarring.
The greatest moment of yawing from one tonality to the other is the space between the pre and post title sequence. At the top of the episode, we have a death in the family as Jason is brutally murdered with a crowbar. Immediately after we are sent headlong into a Titans introductory sequence set to what sounds like a French cover of a Beach Boys song. The juxtaposing tonality is obviously the point. I just don’t think it imparts the message they think it does. The sequence is traditional team introductions, we’ve seen in from the third episode of Legends of Tomorrow to the start to Age of Ultron. The use of the song creates an ironic distance, a sign of both their collective immaturity as they play superheroes and the lack of danger. Those elements are all there, what the song highlighted for me was the brutality of the action as it oscillates from hard-nosed electric escrima sticks to the face to slapstick as Superboy sends anonymous henchmen through drywall or Krypto being the one to subdue the main villain. The musical sequence doesn’t want you to think about the choreography only the feeling of cool it creates. I wasn’t listening to the music or vibing with the cool, just noticing how destructive they all are.
The opening sequence makes sense structurally, but in practice it was an awkward second step for the episode.
3. Visions Come True
Season 1 of Titans was a mixed bag and clearly a learning experience. One of the more interesting episodes, however, was what became the season finale “Dick Grayson.” The episode was an extended riff on the animated classic “Over the Edge.” The episode was a dream episode as Dick subconsciously battled Trigon who challenges him with his worse fears come to life, that he is ultimately a murderer with only a facile difference between the villains he fights. That fear manifests itself in a vision of Batman gone mad killing from the Joker and many other members of his Rogues Gallery. Leaving him with the choice of how to stop him and Jason, ultimately killing both.
Those fears come true in “Barbara Gordon” as Bruce drops a bloody crowbar at Dick’s feet after bashing the Joker’s skull in. Unlike his vision, that appears to be the end of it with Bruce disappearing after charging Dick to be a “better” Batman. That has been the quest Dick has given himself since the start of the series, to not be the abusive, deluded, mentor-father Bruce was to him. With Bruce giving him this mission, it also makes it more concrete in ways that should be interesting to track.
Continued belowThis was an effective way to write off Ian Glenn’s Batman. In a series that has not hidden how destructive and abusive Batman is to the people around him, murdering the Joker is the perfect final act for an old broken Bat who had fully given up any deluded sense of self-righteousness.
4. Barbara Gordon-Tim Drake and the Impossibility of Symbols
Titans is a show about generational conflict and transition. How do we live up to our forebearers, the caped equivalent of the Greatest Generation? That stature and mythology is the byproduct of narrative hindsight, a means to justify and reinforce the moral-ethical clarity of their actions and what they represent. With the introduction of two new characters Barbara Gordon(Savannah Welch) and Tim Drake(Jay Lycurgo) Titans begins to explore the role ones relationship to a myth plays, in ways Dick Grayson is currently incapable of comprehending.
Tim Drake is characterized as the fanboy Robin, the one who figured out Batman’s secrets and became his sidekick. That metatextual fanboy quality is transferred to this Jay Lycurgo iteration, much to the displeasure of the cops who give him a hard time. He only has an abstract, distanced, view of both the good and what it is Batman and Robin did together. In a world as harsh as Titans it’ll be interesting to see if Lycurgo’s Drake is able to keep that naïve energy going forward.
Barbara Gordon as both the former Batgirl and current police commissioner has a much closer relationship to the myths that imbue Tim Drake with fannish glee. It is that closeness that allows her to cut through Bruce’s self-serving mythology of erasure as he writes of Jason Todd, and her Father, as casualties of war. They were individuals who understood that sacrifice would be necessary, that is a romantic view that helps to justify his vigilantism and war on crime. Barbara quickly cracks those rose-colored glasses by countering Bruce’s recollection of her Father with a rhetoric approaching realism. James Gordon didn’t die heroes death, one of clear mind and body. He died of a heart attack after being frozen in a block of ice “by a man in a fuckin refrigerator suit.”
“Mr. Freeze” Bruce interjects attempting to control the language used in discussing their shared exploits and history.
She knows who he was, what he is called. By denying Victor Freis nom de plume and focusing instead on the outcome, Barbara severs Bruce’s narrative distance and pulls him into the present. Of the people in this show thus far, she is the only one able to recognize and being to name the trauma and pain these symbols are built on. Savannah Welch embodied Barbara Gordon and the legacy of Batgirl in this sequence as the one who is able to talk back to Bruce-Batman.
Much of this show, perhaps a little too much, is built on an unseen and obliquely referenced history. Episode scribes Richard Hatem and Geoff Johns are able to use this to their advantage. To use the weight of history in the abstract and minute sense to show Barbara Gordon’s character in a matter of minutes.
As harsh as the tonal whiplash might be at times, I nevertheless appreciate the shows willingness to name certain aspects of what is experienced and live in the tense liminal space between realism and mythology. It might come off as dour or grim and gritty, but it reinforces the tenuous nature of everything.
5. Holy F@&*%, Batman
Superhero comics and their properties have something of a tenuous relationship too maturity. Maybe it isn’t the medium/genres relationship to it so much as the audience that interacts with them. Like the Titans they are perpetually asked to prove their maturity and adulthood and often the mere attempt to enter that space is treated as trespassing. See the snarky lampooning reaction to the first trailer to Titans and “Fuck Batman.” A moment that was clearly enhanced by the trailer and meant to be surprising and jarring moment. (Something that wasn’t jarring is the footage leading up that wherein Robin smashes people’s bones like it’s nothing.) And of course, the moment in the context of the episode itself worked and made sense. Or Zack Snyder casually explaining why his Justice League movie would likely receive a R rating from the MPAA. Even when those moments are effective in the context of their work, it is harped on as edgy and by extension childish. Not the perpetual PG-13 violence that is graphic but dry and brutal without breaking a bone.
Continued belowNow that Titans is on HBO Max, the writers and producers would like you to know they’re not fucking around. Previously Titans was treated at about the level of a basic cable show that really wanted to be on FX but would have to settle for TNT. Now that they’re on the streaming extension of one of the most premium brands in cable/entertainment, they can let loose and let the F bombs fly. I stopped counting after what seemed like 10 in this episode, they continued to appear in the next three episodes. Titans profanity just doesn’t have the toxic corrosive poetic quality that Al Swearengen and the cast of Deadwood or Spartacus had.
What it lacks in poetic qualities the actors make use of the phrases blunt force, with it often appearing as a breakdown in a character’s ability to express the complex emotions they are feeling. That breakdown is to the shows favor as it becomes a verbal representation of how ill equipped and trained this new generation has been by their absent Fathers.
The course language might turn off families from watching it together, but really with a show that is can be rather violent did you really want to watch this with your kids anyway?
