Teen Titans S05E07 Review: Babysitting

Teen Titans, Season 5, Episode 7: Hide and Seek

After two episodes with the 'whole team + side guest' formula, we return to a 'one Titan + guest stars' formula used in Trust. This time, it's Raven that gets the starring slot, with the other Titans apparently in a mission elsewhere and Beast Boy acting as the unhelpful mission control over Raven's T-communicator. The whole concept of the episode is a setup for zany hijinks. What happens when Raven, Little Miss Antisocial herself, is forced to babysit a bunch of four-year-old kids, having to play entertainer as well as protector when Monsieur Mallah shows up to fuck them up? 

Raven was scripted wonderfully in this episode, with her irritation at being stuck on a mission that's absolutely counter to her personality being conveyed wonderfully as her goth/emo passive-aggressiveness absolutely fails when dealing with five-year-olds fighting over a blanket or vomiting over travel-sickness. It's also hilarious to have Raven try to entertain the kids by telling stories and absolutely scaring the shit out of them and quickly concluding it with "my friends saved me and we all ate cake the end." We get some utterly awesome fighting scenes too with a couple of cool set pieces when Mallah attacks them on the cable car and later on the train. And the battle between Mallah and the imagination-created giant teddy bear is pretty fun, too.

Of course, just why they couldn't have taken the T-jet or Cyborg's T-car or even used Raven's ability to cloak people within her shadow-raven form is never explained. Yeah, Teether gets sick when you use platforms, but what about all the other ways? And why bring them to the monks, who prove to be immediately unable to protect the kids when Mallah decides to attack with a tank? 

Add that to the fact that Melvin, Timmy and Teether are actually all quite annoying little shits, too, that it's a bit hard to really care for the little brats. The constant reminders that, hey, Melvin has a imaginary friend and Timmy is a little shit that needs some proper discipline really makes it hard to care for the kids. Maybe have another Titan (Starfire feels clueless and is basically a big baby that can tick Raven off) show up to be a less-irritating character for Raven to bounce dialogue off of, and reduce the kids from three to two or one? I dunno.

Despite this the episode is still quite decent fun, with Raven managing to carry the episode mostly on her own back, so despite the strange logical holes that the episode wants us to jump through, it's still a pretty decent episode if you can get over the kids' annoyance factor. Definitely not the best episode in the fifth season, but it's one that I liked a fair bit more than I remembered it to be.