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Five Thoughts on Titans‘ “Bruce Wayne”

By | October 21st, 2019
Posted in Television | % Comments

Hello and welcome back to Titans‘ coverage with a trippy entry with “Bruce Wayne.” Following the Titans rocky encounter with Deathstroke and Conner’s introduction and near murder, tensions are getting high in the Titans’ Tower and especially for the defacto leader Dick Grayson as he hallucinates his mentor, Bruce Wayne. This is a wacky one so let’s get into it and beware spoilers ahead!

1. I’m “Falling” for you…

So you fall off of a roof to your death and are saved by a clone boy who gets shot immediately afterward. What do you do?

If you are Jason Todd and in this situation, you replay the situation on repeat by watching out of your window. The episode starts off with Jason falling down a surreal cityscape without end. Jason is going through it after his near-death experience and desperately needs some help. Dick truly fails at trying to break through to him early in the episode, stumbling to try to tell him it’s not his fault. Jason is utterly alone until visited by Rose who connects with him about how mutually edgy they are. They talk about how the tower is a place where everyone objectively needs therapy. Jason seems to be genuinely connecting and things get romantic as Rose changes the music from metal to some smooth listening. They kiss and Rose hints at a more until she finds a record belonging to her dead brother in Jason’s record collection that he got secondhand from Dick which sets her off. She storms off leaving Jason truly alone and isolated when Rachel comes to confront him which I’ll look at later.

This episode really emphasizes and exacerbates Jason’s trauma and the use of effects to emphasize that feels like a great use of visual storytelling to illustrate a mental state which is reflected in Dick’s A-Plot which we’ll get into in a bit. Curran Walters really gets to flex a different side of his acting abilities with a more serious and hurt Jason. Jason has been an angry and smug kid from the start but his encounter with Deathstroke left him seriously shaken and traumatized and Walters really explores a sense of hopelessness and trauma that comes across really well. What doesn’t come across as well is Jason’s romance with Rose. There are scenes that hint at this development in earlier episodes, I felt that the chemistry between Curran Walters and Chelsea Zhang just wasn’t there. Arguably it was less than the chemistry between Joshua Orpin and Walters in the previous episode. Also, Rose’s dancing prior to the kiss just felt extremely awkward.

2. Bruce and Dick

Titans’ naming conventions are really getting a little misleading because this episode definitely was “Dick Grayson 2,” since Bruce Wayne was physically never in this episode, but Dick’s guilt fueled hallucination did steal this episode.

Guilt haunts Dick as he grapples with his reckless actions that almost got Jason killed but as Fake Bruce hints, there’s something deeper. While this is the main plot there’s not much in terms of action to action. Primarily Dick follows a series of leads to Wintergreen, Deathstroke’s middle man (who in the canon of the show very horny). Once Dick gets a little nuts on Wintergreen he is contacted by Deathstroke to meet at a church where Deathstroke has lovingly laid out a series of pictures of the Titans from within the tower implying that he’s inside with them. Which sends Dick back home because the monster was in the house all along.

As mentioned before, action-wise this plot is incredibly straightforward, but the primary focus is Dick’s descent into guilt-filled madness aided by a great version of Bruce Wayne. Bruce pokes at all of Dick’s flaws in an amazingly sarcastic tone and pulls at his strings in compelling ways. Iain Glenn as Bruce Wayne felt like such an odd choice when first announced but his performance in this episode was so off the wall that I really wanted more of this insane Bruce Wayne. Glenn’s Bruce is like a strange child of Kevin Conroy and Adam West and I never knew that’s what I wanted in a Batman more until now. Glenn’s Bruce even does the freaking BATUSI on a showgirl stage which made me audibly yelp. I can’t help but imagine Iain Glenn and Brenton Thwaites’ Batman and Robin as a hyper-violent, bizzaro version of the 1966 Batman show and I really want to look into that world. As mentioned before, Bruce being a manifestation of Dick’s guilt is a really great storytelling choice as it gives an external tool for exploring Dick’s mental state and also reflects on Dawn’s line from the “Aqualad” that set Dick down his dark path, “Be Batman.”

Continued below

3. Remember Conner?

Remember how the last episode felt like a completely different television show? Well, Conner has fully been integrated into the DC Universe Universe and is slowly dying of Kryptonite poisoning from Mercy Graves bullet. Kori is primarily keeping watch on him for a majority of the episode and discovers that he’s Kryptonian. Meanwhile, at Cadmus, Mercy fires Eve Watson after telling her Conner is going to die and they are moving onto Subject 14. Eve steals a card and breaks Krypto out and he leads her to the Titans. Eve tells Kori that he could probably only be healed by the Sun. Kori then wakes Teagan Croft from her trailer after not being in the whole episode until this point so Rachel can contain Kori’s Starfire abilities that heal Conner and his naked, naked body. Eve immediately says her advice for Conner to not save anyone was terrible advice for her to give him and that the world is a better place with him in it before she leaves.

Conner’s plot was definitely not the most focused on in this episode but it was a nice addendum to his episode last week. The most important part of this story was that it gave a nice cap to Eve and Conner’s relationship and set them in a good place. Conner even got to call her “Mom” which was incredibly sweet and heartfelt. Hopefully, this isn’t the last we see of this relationship but it would be a fine way to leave it for now. Also, Krypto is in the tower!

4. Who else is in the tower?

In the decidedly not T-shaped tower, there seems to be someone leaving little gifts. Hank comes out of the shower to find a bottle of bourbon waiting for him, Donna finds the soda that Garth got for her, Dawn finds a picture of the kid Dr. Light killed, and Rachel finds crosses painted all over her room which leads her to Jason.

She confronts Jason with almost full demon mode assuming that the crosses were him. She is quite mean to him as he is reliving his trauma over and over again after Rose storms off. He doesn’t know anything about it but the argument follows him into the main room where the other Titans assume Jason was the one leaving them “gifts” and they gang up on Jason which makes him feel terrible (obviously).

This storyline is interesting but becomes frustrating when all of the Titans assume Jason was the one messing with them. It feels ridiculous that the older Titans would gang up on Jason who fell off a building yesterday for leaving traumatic memories that he literally has no way of knowing about. That really broke this plotline for me.

5. “Secrets, Secrets are no fun, Secrets out I Killed someone!”

Just as the tensions are high from the Titans ganging up on traumatized Jason, Dick bursts in with a gun (he had one in his story don’t worry about it) looking a little crazy and he says Deathstroke is in the tower. Before the team can really process this information, Dick realizes Jason is gone.

Jason stands at the ledge of the tower prepared to jump. Jason talks about how he’s poison and has failed everyone who has tried to help him and that all of this is his fault. Dick tells him that everything is in fact his own fault as he killed Deathstroke’s son Jericho as alluded to a bunch during this episode.

As the episode ends leading us into next week’s flashback episode “Jericho,” I find myself a little frustrated with this season’s non-linear storytelling. Dick and the Titan’s history of using Jericho to get to Deathstroke has been alluded to so much that the final reveal doesn’t really shock as much as it serves as an off-ramp to the flashback episode, which is only marginally better than having a flashback episode right after a cliffhanger which Titans‘ has done twice this season. “Bruce Wayne” was a really great episode that built to this transition but its just a little frustrating with the overall structure. I think it’s an interesting experiment in breaking the slow build villain of the week formula for most superhero tv-shows, Deathstroke is a threat that the Titans are dealing with very early on and flashbacks are helping the episode count while keeping the present-day story tight enough not to drag on. I guess we will have to wait until the end of the season to see if the experiment holds up and whether the flashbacks are worth it and I guess we will have to wait until next week to see how Dick Grayson killed Deathstroke’s son in, “Jericho”!


//TAGS | Titans

Kenneth Laster

Kenneth is a cartoonist, critic, and cryptid somewhere in the crumbling empire of the United States. Hit him up on twitter @disasterlaster to see dumb jokes and artwork.

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