Titans S01E10 Review: Horror Houses and Alien Ships

Titans, Season 1, Episode 10: Koriand'r

After the detour in the previous episode, episode 10 picks up where episode 8 left off, with Kory strangling the shit out of poor Rachel. We get the tie-in with the Hawk/Dove episode where, while being strangled, Rachel finds herself walking around in the two's shared dream and calls out for them.

And then Dick and Donna arrive and subdue Kory -- and Donna Troy uses her goddamned golden lasso, and I have to admit that despite my hang-ups with this show, this is just such a badass moment that I geeked out a fair bit. Kory reverts back from her assassin mode and buggers off, apologizing to everyone and... and honestly, it's at this point where I realize that 'confused alien assassin' is all we're going to get out of Kory Anders in this season, and it's honestly a huge shame. It's a pretty far cry from what the character is supposed to be, and acting confused and unsure is such a huge waste of Anna Diop's acting skills.

Anyway, while we do get a whole lot of fun snarky dialogue from the always-excellent Donna Troy ("You're not the only one with gadgets." "You're sleeping with her, aren't you?" "Except for Dawn. You fucked that up.") as they track down Kory while she follows her fractured and slowly-returning memory to the invisible Tamaranean ship stashed in some warehouse. Dick, Kory and Donna enter and basically get this huge introdump about how Kory was sent from Tamaran because of a prophecy that this extra-dimensional god-like being (they avoid saying 'demon' for some reason), Trigon, will enter the world through his child, Raven. It's something that you can already sort of parse even without prior knowledge of Raven's backstory from the comics, but it's nice to have it all spelled out. Oh, and we get confirmation that Angela's actually in cahoots with Trigon... because of some image from the mysterious book, which I felt was weirdly done. A line about how "Trigon's most devoted follower will be the mother of his child" would probably work better than the bizarre way that they look at the picture and go "gee, there's a third person there".

The whole conflict of being friends with a confused, innocent girl who's going to be the herald of a demonic Armageddon has always been interesting, and while the stakes are pretty high here, I genuinely wished that we didn't have to characterize Starfire as an amnesiac assassin to make this work.

Meanwhile, as the three older members of the group run around trying to figure things out, we get something out of a horror movie as Rachel, Gar and Angela spend the episode in this fucking creepy house with a lot of focus on mirrors and reflections, and the horror angle is played up pretty well for the episode. Reflections that bleed, the inability to use cell phones... Throughout the episode, Rachel is a fritz about how everyone she touches gets hurt, and Angela acts as a nurturing mother, giving Rachel a 'good people, good powers' speech and basically acting supporting.

And then, just as the other plotline in the episode reveals that Angela's literally in bed with Trigon, she knocks out Gar and sends him into convulsions, murders the helpful but doomed local sheriff Tommy (who's just there to provide an extra victim) and basically emotionally manipulates a terrified Rachel to tap into her powers, because she's the only one who can save Gar. It adds a whole new dimension to how Angela had been noting about how Gar is someone Rachel cares for a lot, and turns this all into a way to get Rachel to summon Trigon willingly from the mirror.

And... Trigon is a dude in a suit, and is a very affable man who initially acts as a supportive, if clearly Faustian, character. He restores Garfield back to full health (with a fun little 'boy or beast?' question), before Rachel realizes that she fucked up and that Angela was in cahoots with Trigon all along. Human-mode Trigon's cool, even if one of the lines that the pair has to say is "is it time to eat the world?"

And as all this crisis is going on, Dick, Donna and Kory arrive... but some mystical barrier prevents the girls from going through while Dick charges straight into the haunted house. This all leads to the finale, and it's... it's actually a pretty great episode from the Rachel standpoint. We get a pretty decent twist of Angela being evil all along, which is kinda neat. We get the long-awaited introdump of the true nature that Trigon is a demonic being and not just an ambiguous evil mafia dad like the series really likes to hint at earlier in the season. It's just such a shame that I genuinely feel that the season utterly drops the ball on handling Starfire. And considering the pretty great work it's done with a lot of its characters, it's kind of a shame that one of the main character gets so mis-handled.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Trigon is finally name-dropped! Characterized here as an extra-dimensional being of power, in the comics, Trigon is Raven's demonic father, and the whole Rachel plotline in this series is basically an adaptation of Trigon's attempts to enter the mortal realm using his daughter, Raven, as both a conduit and a herald. 
• Donna Troy's original superhero name, "Wonder Girl", is name-dropped a couple of times in this episode. She also gets to use her god-damned lasso of persuasion, which is badass. 
• Kory mentions that she hails from the planet Tamaran (the same as it was in the comics), and the password for her ship is X'Hal, the goddess-queen of her planet.