Teen Titans, Season 3, Episode 1: Deception
Season three of Teen Titans moved the focus away to Cyborg, which is a great move -- out of the three Titans who haven't starred in their season (Raven, Starfire, Cyborg), Cyborg is actually the least interesting. He's loud, sporty, and the 'masculine man' to contrast with Robin's 'smart dude' and Beast Boy's 'funny dude'. We get an episode all to Cyborg, and he infiltrates HIVE Academy, an organization set up all the way back from episode one of season one... and we get to meet the big boss, Brother Blood. Or, well, Headmaster Blood.
Blood here is reimagined as a headmaster of supervillain Hogwarts, instead of, well, the blood-ritual father-killing Satan-worshipping cult leader. For obvious reasons, because this is a freaking kid's show. And, yeah, the infiltration ends up having Cyborg, under the guise of 'Stone', hanging out with the HIVE trio Gizmo, Jinx and Mammoth, and both showing up the villains in their own game before kind of being sucked into the whole school thing and kind of forgetting his mission. It's a kind of immersion that became a point of conflict between Cyborg and team leader Robin. And while there's really no doubt that Cyborg isn't going to turn evil at all, it's a nice little fight scene that we got in the end with 'Stone' fighting the other Teen Titans.
It's serious, with some really melancholic moments between Cyborg and 'little miss innocently insensitive' Starfire with them talking about Cyborg's 'Stone' persona and him being seemingly entirely human. Becoming normal, becoming just a kid in school -- a supervillain school it may be -- is something that was robbed away from Cyborg, and while the show doesn't actually point this out to our faces, the subtleties that it's a life that Cyborg misses and yearns to... and ultimately forsakes because he's a Titan, is well done.
Plus we get to see Beast Boy dicking around with a knockoff Cyborg fascimile, plus the constant schooltime jokes are honestly quite surreal. It's not quite the best episode out there, but it's Teen Titans's first attempt to integrate a more serious plot as a seasonal arc as opposed to have three or four episodes starring Terra and Slade. Opinions vary on which attempt is better, but I honestly like both.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Cyborg's alias of 'Stone' as being his alter ego's last name. While in the show it has the dual function of showing Cyborg's disguised power -- transforming into stone, this gives the final scene of the episode, with Cyborg putting the hologram ring away and saying 'goodbye, Stone' and embraces his full cyborg-y self, a hell lot more poignant.
- Brother Blood (Sebastian Blood XI) is a classic Teen Titan arc villain, and is also associated with HIVE. Instead of being a headmaster, though, the comics version of Brother Blood comes from a line of cult leaders with magical powers derived by blood rituals and killing their own fathers.
- While Jinx, Mammoth and Gizmo have had multiple appearances in previous episodes, the scenes in HIVE academy introduces a smattering of new show-original characters, some of which will graduate (hee hee) into being actual villains and sidekicks to the original HIVE trio. Among the HIVE students, we see Bumblebee, Billy Numerous, See-More, Private Hive and Kyd Wykkyd, who would show up as more important villains down the line plus Angel, INSTIGATOR, XL-Terrestrial and Wrestling Star... who will only have very minor roles.
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