Titans, Season 1, Episode 7: Asylum
Yeah, I knew there was a reason I sort of stopped watching Titans for a while, despite it not going into a long hiatus like the other CW shows. I think I got halfway through this episode, turned it off, and sort of never really got the desire to finish watching it. The fact that Titans' first season is over and I really do want to know how an adaptation of one of my favourite superhero IP's is handled ended up with me ripping off the band-aid on this one and finally watching this episode.
And it's... it's not a fun episode to watch. I'm not generally a queasy person that gets squeamish with torture, and that's not the actual problem that I have with this episode. A good majority of the torture scenes are off-screen or mental. It's the fact that... why the fuck did we need this episode? I get that it finally course-aligns the main plot of the story with that of the Raven Cult after a couple of episodes that focuses on guest stars like Jason Todd and the Doom Patrol, but in a way that genuinely feels clunky and shoehorned in. Rachel gets to talk with the captured Adamson, and we get a pretty well-executed horrifying scene where Adamson slits his own throat to basically get Rachel to 'embrace' her destiny and heal him.
And then, in a story arc that coincidentally parallels the Young Justice: Outsiders episodes I'm reviewing concurrently, Rachel finds out that the Cult has her birth mother Angela as a prisoner, and demands that the Team go and rescue him right now. There's a combination of Dick just being a stern leader and Rachel and Garfield being rebellious teenagers, but the two younger members get instantly tasered and held captive, and both Dick and Kory end up being forced to surrender thanks to the hostage situation.
And it's... it just feels so much like contrived coincidence, y'know? And I get that it led to character moments for... for three of our four main cast members (poor Kory, once more, gets the short stick), but the way this is executed is genuinely clunky, and the tone of the episode is so dry and bland and just revolves around torture torture torture that it gets utterly boring and a slog to watch.
Anyway, when Dr. Adamson thinks it's a good idea to both deify Rachel and also threaten to kill her mother even though she's demonstrated the desire to move heaven and earth to get to her, Rachel allows her darker persona to assume control, and, in an actually pretty cool scene, go "I TAKE IT BACK!" and reverses the healing on Adamson's neck, causing him to bleed to death. That's neat. In the midst of Dick being tortured with random serum injections, he gets... some bizarre hallucination while he's escaping where he gets punched in the gut by what I assumed is his younger self? It is a neat little mental trip where Dick realizes that he can't keep blaming Batman for decisions he makes, working on the whole 'Robin needs to get out of Batman's shadow' storyline, only we already had this explored in a better way during the Jason Todd episode.
Meanwhile, Rachel frees Angela, and when she frees Beast Boy, he ends up going a bit nuclear, turns into his tiger form and mauls the torture-scientist (presumably to death?) I don't think Gar really eats the evil torturer per se, but he's just in shock after basically biting a human being to death. It's... it's interesting, but also sort of just... happens.
Kory, on the other hand, still unfortunately feels like the weakest part of the show. She's the only character that doesn't get some sort of big event happen to her in the episode, and basically ends up being subjected to an honestly bizarrely cartoonish 'let's cut off fingers to see if she can regrow them!' set of mad scientists. While the amnesia angle is something that I disliked but was willing to give a chance, we're more than halfway done with the series and I genuinely feel that they're utterly wasting both the character and the actress.
The episode ends with Dick and Kory basically blowing up the entire facility and definitely killing at least all the guards that Dick brutally beat down in that corridor. Along with it, Dick basically allows the Robin armour to burn. It's... it's a genuinely bizarre episode that, while I don't think is straight-up bad, feels such a slog and such an unejoyable experience to get through. I realize that being unejoyable is sort of the desired reaction from, y'know, torture, but the way this episode is executed and how utterly bland and contrived everything is feels like this episode could've been scrapped, and the character developments that came from this could've been shuffled into other more interesting episodes. Anyway... I'm pretty sure it's my least favourite episode of Titans, what with it making me stop watching the show for a little over two months.
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