Titans S02E12 Review: Weaponized Children

Titans, Season 2, Episode 12: Faux-Hawk

As the penultimate episode of this season, this brings me into getting similar vibes to the same problems that another recent superhero season I reviewed, The Punisher's second season, into mind. They had too many storylines going on, multiple major antagonists running around, and everyone is jockeying for screentime and nothing is resolved until the last episode. The difference is that the Punisher's cast was a lot smaller; and there were a lot less flashbacks in the past that needed to be explored. Not so for Titans's second season, which, while offering enjoyable fight scenes and individual episodes, really ended up feeling very wobbly as a whole. Like, okay, the flashback episodes were really solid. The two Titans 1.0. flashbacks, the Conner-centric origin story, and this time around, the Rose Wilson one. The individual acting scenes for most of the cast is great. But all of the meat in-between the fancy gimmicky episodes... don't really hold together all that well, particularly in this second half of the season.

And it's kind of a shame to really be so down, because the individual episodes are still very entertaining. It's just that, again, the cast is so cluttered that it's hard to really get a grasp of half of the cast since so many of them end up becoming second-stringers.

This episode basically deals with the fallout of the previous episode's revelations, while also exploring Rose's backstory. Dick goes off to meet Adeleine, who tells him that she also only figured out Jericho being alive and trapped inside Slade's weird monochrome mind recently. And after getting Adeleine's approval, Dick goes off to meet a very irate fruitcake-maker Stu (how dare you burn his expensive suit) who apparently has had the Nightwing suit prepared under Bruce's orders. That was a fun scene.

Rose, meanwhile, tells all about her backstory to Jason, because Jason Todd's whole role is to be an asshole, bounce back and try to be nice, and then get a tragic, traumatic backstory from people close to him dumped on him. The backstory is honestly feels very exposition heavy. Young Rose figures out that she can't die because of the healing factor inherited from Deathstroke, presses her mom for answers, and eventually tracks down Deathstroke on her own. Slade proceeds to basically be dad of the year and gaslight Rose a whole bunch, being initially a dick to her before faux-apologizing and giving her the illusion of choice. Some very neat showcases of emotional manipulation here, and one that isn't really explicitly pointed out... which I do appreciate. We also get to see Rose in her full Ravager outfit fighting with Slade, which was a cool fight even if I laughed a lot when Slade shows off his goofy handgun-with-a-hidden-dagger. I'm not sure if the backstory actually works, because Rose herself has been so stoic and static throughout the season, but I guess it's meant to be that Jason wins her over to the side of the angels? Or something? It doesn't work that well, I feel, mostly because in order to preserve the twist that Rose was a mole, Rose herself didn't get too much action scenes. Shame.

Then we get the events of the first half of the season put in perspective, where Rose helped Slade break Dr. Light out, before setting up the whole fight to get Rose in with the Titans... and also Slade's such a dick he tells Rose that cutting out her eye is totally necessary. And as for the present day... well, Jason gets absolutely angry, and ends up leaving... and after all the poor brat has suffered through the season, getting betrayed and information hidden from him by everyone, could you blame him? And as Jason pointed out, as cheesy as the previous episode was, he did open up a lot to Rose. As much as I do feel somewhat disappointed by how little superheroing the Titans actually did, I actually buy into the writing for Jason in this season, and this is an interesting way to get him into being an anti-hero like Red Hood if we're going in that direction.

As the title might imply, Hawk (remember him? He hasn't been around for two or three episodes now) gets some focus here, but it basically amounts to him being self-destructive, fighting with his superhero suit in a fight pit, fucking some lady and falling asleep during the sex because of the pain, and then tracking down some teenage impostor that Hank sold the suit to... it's weird, bizarre, and... we get it, Hank's a destructive addict. But I really can't find myself caring for this storyline, particularly when the episode gives us a far more interesting alternative -- Dawn showing up to beat Hank out of his self-flagellation... but of course, despite shooting a whole action scene, it's all just a dream. Stop with these interesting-but-not-real dream sequences, Titans.

The Titans' lady quartet are sort of just... regrouping? We get an actually very great and emotional argument between Rachel and Kory in the car. That was actually a short but very, very well-done scene, and it's just such a shame that these two characters were otherwise kind of wasted throughout the season. Kory's also losing control of her powers, unable to summon it at times, but is hiding it from Rachel. It's really kind of a shame, the writing for Kory is a lot better in this season, but being kept away from the rest of the cast in its first half and having her Blackfire storyline clearly just seeded for season three doesn't give her a whole lot of exciting scenes.

Donna and Dawn, meanwhile, go off on a buddy cop adventure, flirt with random Cadmus guy Walter while pretending to be sushi delivery girls, before using Donna's lasso of truth to figure out what's going on with Cadmus, who is basically turning Beast Boy and Superboy into mind-controlled super-soldiers. We also get to see a bit more Beast Boy, and it's a shame that one of the longer and better-acted scenes for Beast Boy involves him being mind-controlled.  I'm not sure if this is going to be part of our finale and we're going to be jockeying for time between the Deathstroke plot and the Cadmus plot, or if we're going to repeat season one, take out one of the antagonists (Deathstroke, probably) and have Cadmus be the cliffhanger for season two.

Overall, a lot of it is set-up and last-minute exposition. Again, it's not an un-entertaining episode, but taking it as a whole and considering the fact that this is a penultimate episode in a season... yeah, probably not the thing we've seen.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• She doesn't get called that, but Rose dons her Ravager outfit in this episode. The Ravager was an identity first assumed by Deathstroke's short-lived son Grant Wilson, and various other people related to Slade have donned the identity until Rose became the character most well-known for it.
• In the comics, Slade had tried (to various degrees of success) to try and turn Rose into being his apprentice and successor.