Teen Titans, Season 4, Episode 4: Cyborg the Barbarian
Okay, I take back my 'there are no bad Teen Titans episodes' line from whatever review I wrote that in.
Welcome to my least favourite episode of Teen Titans. The only real good thing to come of this episode is Raven's awesome line, "Evil beware. We have waffles." This episode is absolutely dull. And while I generally like Cyborg, he is given absolutely nothing to work with here. Yeah, there's the constant problem of having his energy run out, and there's the token romance, but all of those fall flat. Basically Cyborg gets transported back into the Stone Age, where he spends the entirety of the 20 minutes hanging around with barbarians and fighting evil barbarians and aliens and witches and all that shit. And sometimes DC cartoon shows do this -- they homage a different aspect of their rich comic book history by using time travel to justify ending up at a particular setting. Sometimes, while the episodes themselves are sub-par if you don't get the references (see: Legends from Justice League, the Legion of Super-heroes one from JLU, Mogo from X-Men...) they still manage to be somewhat decent. Not so here.
The villain here isn't even threatening, just a petty barbarian man who's jealous at Cyborg. The conflict is generic, Cyborg dressing up as a barbarian just looks plain stupid. This isn't even like the zanier Control Freak or Mother Mae-Eye episodes where the animation is at least amusing and they embrace the wacky madness of everything that's going on. The way the episode is told, its tone is one of a serious Teen Titans episode... but there really isn't much to work with here. It's just dull and boring. It's just bad.
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