Teen Titans S03E02 Review: Red Hood

Teen Titans, Season 3, Episode 2: X

On the surface, this seems like just a cool episode with a cool guest star villain. Some random dude has stolen Robin's Red X costume and is going around using it to commit crimes. It's honestly highly confusing why Robin has the Red X suit powered with such a powerful power source (Xenothium?) that the Titans had to go on full alert to stop the new Red X from breaking into highly classified locations to steal the Xenothium. But while I used to find this episode just... a filler episode back in the day, I thought this was actually a pretty good episode.

See, back then I was obsessed with looking for clues as to who Red X is, and we never get an answer to that -- Red X is mysterious, a Magneto or Catwoman-style anti-villain who isn't entirely evil, but definitely not on the side of the angels. He's a career thief and has no qualms at beating the Titans up, but at the same time he has enough of a code of honour to help Robin, even if it's to pay his debt, and ends up calling it a fair game when Robin gets the drop on him at the end of the episode. 

But Red X, and even the episode's real villain, Professor Chang the geriatric wrinkly obviously-evil mad scientist, is ultimately a tool for Robin's character progression. Robin has to confront the mistakes of his past -- and while I could argue that said mistake is not destroying the highly dangerous Red X suit, or better yet incorporate it into his current suit -- and confronting that, yeah, the world isn't entirely black and white.

In these later seasons Robin doesn't get a lot of screentime to really shine as he did in season one, because I can only think of one other episode that truly spotlighted on Robin's character, while elsewhere he takes on the reasonable team leader role to bounce other characters off of, or to act as a ship-mate for Starfire. And I absolutely appreciated this episode. Robin's self-blaming and his guilt, well-deserved or not, is evident throughout all of this. 

And besides, Red X is absolutely cool, and the animation in this episode certainly gave both Robin and Red X a lot of fantastic action scenes. Is it just me, or was Robin, in his guilt and angsting, is shown in a more Batman-y way, with more draping-cape shots?

Overall it's a pretty decent episode, giving Robin a surprisingly great character arc over the episode, introducing the cool and mysterious Red X to save for later episodes... and, um... Professor Chang's just a bad villain, isn't he. I guess they're going for a parody of the ever-so-classic 'evil scientist building a giant cannon' of the oldest superhero comics and cartoons? Chang's just bad. I don't know. He annoys me.

Also they actually snuck in a rectal probing joke in a kid's show with Cyborg putting on a latex glove when Beast Boy suggest checking if Robin's a robot. These kind of jokes utterly amuse me because I have the maturity of a five-year old.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Oh boy, Beast Boy's insane theorycrafting is just filled with DC Easter Eggs. In addition to Larry (who appeared in season 2) and a time-travelling Nightwing (Robin's future identity), Beat Boy suggests Jason Todd, who is Dick Grayson's (the Robin in this show) successor as Robin when he joined the Teen Titans and adopted the identity Nightwing. Jason Todd did 'steal' someone's old identity and become an anti-hero in the comics as the Red Hood, but despite the name resemblance Red Hod wasn't introduced in the comics until long after Teen Titans ended. Beast Boy also makes a 'part of a Clone Army' which is a reference to Star Wars, and a long lost brother -- in the movie Batman Forever, Dick has a brother who is absent in all other depictions of the character. No idea what 'bionic monkey' and 'evil twin' are supposed to be Easter Eggs to, but they're likely to be random theorycrafting things thrown in.