Teen Titans, Season 4, Episode 7: The Prophecy
And this episode does it again. An excellent follow-up to the brilliant "Birthmark", this episode has the Titans explore the mystery behind why Slade is back. Raven knows more than she lets on, but driven by a combination of wanting to reject her own demonic nature and wanting to involve her friends as little as possible, she's not really forthcoming when Robin and the others learn about the Mark of Scath. With Slade and Trigon all dropping cryptic hints to both Raven and the audience about how she will bring the end of the world and everything is her fault. The episode is simple, with Raven doing some soul searching while the Titans do some detective work in some spooky cultist locations, all the while doing excellent action sequences with the demonfire-empowered Slade.
Raven finds her home, the magical plane Azarath and her mother Arella, reduced to nothing but rubble. We don't get explicit confirmation, but yeah, it's implied that Trigon had already laid waste to Azarath and Raven merely spoke with her mother's ghost. She eventually channels her father's demonic powers to take out Slade, telling her father to fuck off and fuck destiny, before revealing to her friends that, well, the gem that will be the portal of Trigon's arrival is... Raven herself. Even with Raven's open defiance she's still clueless at how to stop Trigon from coming, and the episode ends on that somber note, which is pretty nice and mature for Teen Titans.
Oh, and Slade is working for something that Trigon can give back, which kind of explains why our previous Big Bad is working for someone else. What it is, now, hmm...
Perhaps the episode's greatest weakness is the very, very slow buildup. We spend nearly ten or fifteen minutes just waffling around the same topics that has been covered so well in 'Birthmark', but the payoff of Raven finally being defiant against her evil demon daddy, and the excellent fight scene between her and Slade at the end, is absolutely excellent. The weird cultist ghost things could've really been cut out and more time devoted to actually building up the atrocities that Trigon has done, or a mini-flashback to Raven's time in Azarath, perhaps? It's a great episode nonetheless, though, so I really can't complain that much.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Scath is one of Trigon's many aliases in the comics.
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