Teen Titans S01E05 Review: Juxtaposition

Teen Titans, Season 1, Episode 5: Sum of His Parts

Here's an episode that really encapsulates the tone that Teen Titans has as a whole. We have two plots intercut together. Around a third of the episode, Cyborg ran out of battery while chasing a lunatic magician, and we then cut back and forth between the insane zaniness of the other four Titans chasing the Amazing Mumbo and his insane visual gags that felt like it came out of Looney Tunes, while Cyborg has to deal with some existential shit as he is trapped by Fixit and forced to contemplate his humanity. We jump from scenes where the hypercaffeinated Mumbo just sucks money from an ATM into his hat or pull rabbits out of his hat to scenes with Cyborg strapped to a table while Fixit tells him with the deadness of a robotic doctor that "Do not resist. It is for the best. Flesh is imperfect."

There's a great sequence at the beginning too with Cyborg having loud, boisterous fun playing football and booyah-ing, and is visibly touched when a kid with a prosthetic hand goes 'hey, you're just like me!', but when his batteries run out, he gives a firm but obviously-dejected reply that it's going to be okay, all he needs to do is head back and recharge. 

Of course, they meet the Amazing Mumbo, and we're engaged in this absolutely insane sequence with a green-skinned magician with Looney Tunes magic powers right up until Cyborg falls down a junkyard and is found by Fixit. Maybe either one of these plots wouldn't be able to fill a good episode by themselves, but conjoining them together, ensuring that the episode is neither too somber nor too jokey? Genius.

Fixit's scenes with Cyborg is definitely the meat of the episode, with Fixit never feeling like a villain. Just a misunderstood one. He definitely really comes off like wanting to help, especially initially when he is actually friendly. It's when Cyborg wants to go back before repairs are done that Fixit starts immobilizing Cyborg with his army of robots. See, for Fixit (who's a less-organic cyborg himself, with the only organic bits being his internal organs), the reason why Cyborg is broken and sick is because he hasn't became fully machine. It's a horrifying moment as we see a nightmare sequence of Cyborg losing his humanity and soul, how Cyborg just begs for Fixit to leave him be, how he wants to keep his humanity...

It's great writing and voice acting from Cyborg, showing that, yes, these wacky characters do have a serious side to them. It's an episode that actually still felt good watching and not one that makes me go 'yeah, this is awesome if I'm a kid, but just okay as an adult'. I mean, shit, it's an episode where Fixit basically wants to 'fix' Cyborg by removing his soul, basically, leaving him a full machine with nothing but his copied memories. 

All the while the episode likes to cut away to insane gag sequences with Mumbo.

It's a great episode, one that manages to be fun yet serious at the same time, and one that embodies the tone and style of storytelling that Teen Titans uses.


DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• While Fixit and Mumbo are original characters to the show, the plotline of Cyborg struggling between being a robot and being a human is actually part of his character arc in New Teen Titans, where more and more of him became replaced with machinery until he was turned into an almost-entirely-machine alien being named Cyberion that tried to assimilate all technology on Earth... though thankfully through one way or another he was restored to plain ol' Cyborg.