Teen Titans, Season 2, Episode 9: Winner Take All
It's a great episode, pitting three of our heroes against several other recurring characters and several new ones in a huge tournament staged by a weird powerful monkey-alien, the Master of Games. It's supposed to be a friendly match between the heroes to see who gets a reward, with the losers apparently 'teleported back to Earth'. Of course, the Master of Games ends up trying to suck all the losers' powers into a weird Horcrux thing to use them himself... and he can use the pendant on Cyborg after absorbing the first group of losers, so it begs the question why he doesn't use it on all the winners until Robin goaded him into battling him. Of course we get a team-up between the heroes, and they beat the Master of Games.
Just taking the boys (the ending implies the girls will go through the same thing) gives the show a pretty great excuse to relegate Terra to a non-speaking cameo, yeah?
The focus of the episode is Robin, I guess, because he eventually won the tournament, and the big point of conflict in the episode is Robin being so obsessed with winning (granted, he thought it was a friendly match) that he paid no heed to Cyborg's warnings... though the fact that Robin ended up fixing the whole thing by freeing Cyborg and Speedy and later the rest of the captured heroes is a bit of a backfire on the moral story there. Also I'm honestly unconvinced we needed those random five minutes of them playing the weird Uno/Magic hybrid card game and showing that Robin is a sore loser.
But who the hell cares about the logic leaps that this episode takes? Who cares that the Master of Games is one of the most idiotic villains for someone with his power-absorbing ability? The fight scenes in this episode has some of the absolute best in the show, with Robin versus Speedy being a great highlight, with their final fight and the effects and moves with the smoke being awesome. Robin fighting Hot Spot with all the animation with the flames, and Aqualad's water manipulation ability, are also pretty damn good stuff.
We also get the very welcome return of Aqualad and Gizmo from previous episodes. Aqualad doesn't have that much to do here, losing in the first fight, but he shows off his comic-book counterpart's ability to control water and that is awesome. Gizmo, likewise, is a bit of an oddity since everyone else are heroes and he's the sole villain (notably his HIVE buddy Mammoth isn't around) but he's good fun too, being a little prissy brat and being pissed that he didn't get a Titan Communicator.
Of the newly introduced characters, only Speedy stood out with Wildebeest being a growly beast-man and Hot Spot having like one line, and the show clearly likes pushing Speedy as a character... but even the show makers recognize how much of a Robin clone Speedy is by having them literally do the 'I see myself in a mirror' and have them geek out over arrow/birdarang/cape composition. Speedy is hypercompetent enough on his own, though, holding his own against Aqualad and Wildebeest, and managing to strike the blow onto the Master of Games' pendant that freed everyone else.
Overall, though, it's I think one of my favourite episodes in this season, though the second season does have a lot of great episodes. The whole Terra arc, Starfire and her journey to the bad future, Robin going to prom... yeah.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Speedy (Roy Harper), later known by the aliases Arsenal and Red Arrow once he passes the mantle of Speedy down to other successors, is the sidekick to Green Arrow, and one of the five founding Titans alongside Robin and Aqualad. He isn't that much of a Robin clone in the comics, though the two do have a lot of similarities, what with both being non-powered members of the team and going through a similar 'outgrow my mentor' story arcs.
- Hot Spot, otherwise known as Isaiah Crockett, is one of a group of half-human, half-H'San-Natall Teen Titans members which included other Titans including Argent, Fringe, Prism and Risk. In the comics, Hot Spot is known as Joto, the Swahilian word for 'heat', but the Teen Titans show changed Joto's name into Hot Spot during the adaptation because they learnt that the term 'Joto' apparently is a deregatory term for homosexuals in Spanish. This name-change would eventually be applied to the comics as well. In the comics, Joto/Hot Spot was only able to increase the heat of objects instead of going full Human Torch and being made up of flaming lava like he is in the cartoon, but eventually later authors wrote Joto's powers as having evolved into something similar to his cartoon incarnation.
- Wildebeest is a genetically created baby hosting a tainted soul from Azarath or something created by the *ahem* Wildebeest Society, which is probably the weirdest name you could ever give to a criminal organization. The Teen Titans took down the Society, but ended up adopting the Baby Wildebeest, who had the power to transform from a baby to a were-wildebeest monster-man.
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