Deathstroke - Knights and Dragons E01 Review

CW Seed: Deathstroke: Knights and Dragons, Part 1

Well, that's... different. CW Seed announced a Deathstroke mini-series a while back and I genuinely completely forgot that it exists until part one has been out for a while. And it's a multi-part series, too, which is... interesting. Unlike the previous CW Seed projects, though, this was just an animated project that's mostly standalone, and isn't meant to tie in to the CW live-action continuity the way that Vixen and The Ray did. And unlike Constantine: City of Demons, there was no way this one could be handwaved as taking place with slightly different details in CW's backstory considering we know basically everything about the live action Deathstroke.

And... it's relatively well-animated for an animated DC project that's not one of those once-a-year movies that I really need to start getting caught up with. And for a while, I thought it was just going to be a 35-minute episode that serves as Deathstroke's origin story and basically tell about the tragedy of how he ended up causing his son Joseph to become mute. With an added bit of the titular 'knights and dragons' because Slade likes to tell his little son Joseph a storybook about knights and dragons. And a lot of the beats of the first ten or so minutes fits Deathstroke's origins in New Teen Titans, albeit, of course, minus any sort of involvement with the Titans (or Grant Wilson, fuck 'im I guess), and with a significant amount of moral backbone in this incarnation. Which I suppose the animated series kind of needs to make us really root for Deathstroke. Sure, he's a mass murderer, a mercenary and stuff, but he's got a code of honour, and he kills, like, despots and refuses to work with the bigger evil. That's certainly an injection of adaptation-based goodness, because his comic counterpart certainly didn't, and he's basically the Punisher in this one, isn't it? Just with an added amount of super-soldier serum running through his blood.

This movie is also surprisingly more violent, at least as violent as you can get with the art style. Slade goes around decapitating people and there's a scene where the first act villain, the Jackal, brutalizes and breaks Adeline's bones one by one. We go through the beats of Slade's comic-book backstory, where he became a super-soldier after volunteering in an army experiment, and lied to his wife that he's a legitimate businessman while actually going around being a mercenary... and things get caught up to him when his enemies, in this case HIVE, end up kidnapping Joseph and held him hostage. We get a fun injection of super-villain goodness with the costumed armoured supervillain Jackal serving as Slade's attempted recruiter, while longtime DC comics character Bronze Tiger ends up fighting Slade as a minion of HIVE.

Of course, as good as Deathstroke is, he wasn't fast enough to save Joseph, and ends up leaving him maimed and mute in shame... until a couple of years later when HIVE resurfaces under the leadership of the HIVE Queen, and Adeline asks Slade to bring their kid back. We get a bit of intermission with Slade fighting with a cyborg-ified Bronze Tiger in a war-torn country, with Bronze Tiger essentially portrayed as a far more mercantile and soulless version of a mercenary, fighting both sides of a civil war. After getting what he needs from Bronze Tiger, Deathstroke goes off to rescue his son from the HIVE's island lair.

And... and after immediately surrendering to Lady Shiva (who Slade respects because she's the best martial artist in the DC universe) Slade is brought before the HIVE Queen, who shows off Joseph, a.k.a. "Jericho", as this powerful mutant with vaguely-defined psychic and telekinetic powers in a cage, intending to use him as a weapon. Slade ends up rescuing Joseph and cutting his way out of the HIVE base, and I genuinely thought that this was going to be the end of the episode, with Slade and Joseph escaping home-free from the HIVE base as sort of a self-contained first chapter.

Not so, because the episode pulls the rug out from under us and ends up promising what could be a very interesting take on the Deathstroke mythos. Turns out that the HIVE Queen is Slade's bastard daughter Rose Wilson (it was kind of foreshadowed early on, but I genuinely didn't think Rose would be involved in this series, or at least not as the HIVE leader) and Rose basically talked to Joseph/Jericho about basically working together, and Jericho's pretty willing to help HIVE turn the guns on Deathstroke, who gets shot up and dropped into the ocean at the end of this episode. He's probably fine because this is 'part one' and also this version of Deathstroke's got the Wolverine-level healing factor, but it's still an interesting take. I'm not the biggest fan of diverging this wildly from the comic-book inspiration for just shock value, but this one is done relatively well. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with the addition of the code of morals to Deathstroke, though, having him actually be ruthless in everything other than family would make Joseph's turn to evil a lot more believable, I feel. It's a decent little special, and if nothing else, I am looking forward to see what comes next from this series.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The relative outline of the first part of this episode is taken from Deathstroke, Adeline and Jericho's backstory, taken from the pages of New Teen Titans, where Slade was transformed into a super-soldier from a military experiment, became a mercenary while lying to his family about settling down, and later being just a moment too late in stopping his rivals (the Jackal gang instead of a supervillain called the Jackal) from slitting his son's throat and causing him mute. The rest of the story diverges wildly from there on, though, as is the specifics of Jericho's powers. 
• In New Teen Titans, HIVE and their hexagon-based bases employed Deathstroke as their mercenary hitman multiple times, although their relationship was always business-like.
• Acting as the Alfred to Deathstroke's Batman, Billy Wintergreen's MI6 background also came from the comics. Him being black is shared with his live-action incarnation in Titans, however. 
• Rose Wilson, the bastard daughter of Deathstroke, was introduced in the pages of the 90's Deathstroke mini-series, but she tends to be associated more as part of the then-current incarnation of the Teen Titans instead of being associated with a villainous team. 
• Bronze Tiger (Ben Turner) and Lady Shiva (Sandra Wu-San) are two antagonists in DC comics that tend to be associated with various teams. Neither have been actually involved with HIVE in the comics, however, but rather with the League of Assassins. Bronze Tiger's primarily associated with Suicide Squad stories, while Lady Shiva is nominally a Batman antagonist. We've talked about all these characters multiple times on this blog before as they appeared in Arrow and Young Justice. 
• The fight between Deathstroke and Bronze Tiger takes place in the fictional war-torn nation of Kasnia, originating from the DCAU Justice League cartoon series.