​ "Conner" – Titans S02E06 Review

Episode 6, Time for a Backdoor Pilot!

One of the criticisms many leveled at Season 1 was Titans ran in fits and starts because every other episode was a backdoor pilot. We had a Hawk & Dove episode, and a Doom Patrol episode, and a Jason Todd episode, and a Wonder Girl episode. And then another Hawk & Dove episode. Given there were 11 episodes in the season, 5 of them were backdoor pilots of a sort. Or at the very least, solo stories about a hero or pair of heroes who would later go on to join the Titans. The Doom Patrol was the exception, even though it was the closest to an actual backdoor pilot. But hey, it gave us the Doom Patrol, so can't complain.

Titans has resisted that trend so far in Season 2. Yes, we've had episodes focused on Rose and Aqualad, but there was plenty of other Titans mixed in, and the episodes never took place in the near-vacuum the "solo" episodes did in Season 1.

Until now. "Conner" forgets all the pesky stuff about the old Titans, and the new Titans, and Rachel's gathering darkness, and Deathstroke, and Rose, and Jericho. Instead, the episode starts with the Clone Who Will Be Conner (Joshua Orpin) getting a bit... cheeky as he walks out of a Cadmus lab in Metropolis filled with unconscious scientists and soldiers. Scientists and soldiers he rendered unconscious. Conner rescues a captive dog, discovers it has a tag naming it "Krypto", and chooses the name "Conner" for himself because it's on the name tag of a shirt he took from a guard.

The next day, Dr. Eve Watson (Genevieve Angelson) shows up at Cadmus. Through some exposition from the VP of Special Projects, Walter Hawn (Raoul Bhaneja), and security specialist, Mercy Graves (Natalie Gumede), we soon find out Lex Luthor (unseen) runs the place, and they were creating clones. Mercy has Eve go out with a team of soldiers to find Conner and bring him back. Eve would prefer alive, since Conner is a wealth of scientific data even though he has the emotional development of a two-year-old.

Conner wanders through Metropolis, smiling, basking in the sunlight, and admiring a t-shirt with Superman's S symbol on it. (Where is Superman during all of this?) He rescues a woman from a mugger, and then kinda/sorta threatens her (that's how she perceived it, at any rate) so she gives him her purse and her money. Conner goes back and buys the t-shirt, and has memory flashes of being beaten by a man (Peter MacNeill). He also has flashes of a woman calling him "Clark" in a wheat field.

Ducking the soldiers after him, Conner sees a wheat field painted on a truck, and somehow connects that to Kansas. He and Krypto take a bus there and presumably they're in Smallville. But nobody is singing for someone to save them. Conner soon finds a familiar looking house but it has "Luthor" on the mailbox. Ruh-roh! Krypto doesn't like the place, and I don't know what that means. Dogs can innately sense evil? Lex's father is innately evil? What?

The house's only resident is an old blind man who is an elderly version of the man Conner saw in his memory-flashes. They play Bride of Frankenstein as the blind man welcomes Conner into his home and talks at length about his son, Lex, while sharing some brandy. Presumably the old man is named Lionel, although as far as I can tell his name isn't mentioned. Peter MacNeill is good, although he's no John Glover.

Conner tries the brandy and doesn't like it, and then starts going off on Lionel when he remembers Lionel is the man beating him in the memory-flashes because Lionel beat Lex when Lex was a child. Before they can pursue this any further, the Cadmus soldiers break in. Conner and Krypto take them out in a nicely choreographed fight scene. Not only do we get to see a (CGI) dog with Kryptonian superpowers, but Conner does some Superman-like moves. Like breathing in tear gas and blowing it out at the soldiers. And semi-flying through a wall, shoving a soldier ahead of him.

Eve is outside monitoring the whole thing, and Conner confronts her. She more or less befriends him and they drive off. Eve takes him to an abandoned Cadmus facility in San Francisco, so I guess Metropolis is in... Kansas? Which gibes with Smallville and some of the more recent comics, but not so much with the many other comics where Metropolis is on the East Coast and/or a NYC stand-in. Maybe Conner pushed Eve's SUV one heck of a distance very fast. Or he stuck his feet through the floorboards and ran, Flintstones-style.

At the Cadmus facility, Eve shows Conner the tubes filled with his predecessors: clones that only partially grew. During all of this, she also explains Conner is made up of both Superman and Lex's DNA. Lex donated his own DNA to stabilize the Kryptonian DNA so Eve could eventually make/develop Conner. Conner has Superman and Lex's memories via genetics, and Lex's scientific knowledge as well. Although since "knowledge" is just memories of retained information, I'm not sure why Eve acts like it's some big revelation.

I'm somewhat confused: is Lex a scientist as Lionel says here? Or is he a businessman like he was in the post-Crisis comics and Smallville?

Eve tells Conner to run because she's blaming herself for turning a blind eye to evil Lex and helping him with the cloning project. Mercy and her soldiers show up, and Mercy is loaded with Kryptonite bullets.

Conner and Krypto go walking the streets of San Fran, and Conner ignores one man beating another because Eve told him to keep a low profile. Advice that promptly goes out the window when Conner sees Robin (Curran Walters) falling to his death at the end of last week's cliffhanger. He saves Robin and the two of them share manly smiles. Then Mercy shoots Conner with her Kryptonite bullets and walks off with a Kryptonite-collared Krypto in tow. The end.

The episode rests on Joshua Orpin's beefy shoulders, and he does a good job with the role. He conveys Conner's childlike naivety, even if it's a bit cloying in the first few sequences as he wanders Metropolis with a goofy grin on his face. Conner sobers up a bit as he deals with Lex's memories, alcohol, killing soldiers, meeting his "mother", and seeing his "ancestors". Orpin is mostly likable throughout.

The supporting cast is good: Angelson does Eve as a guilt-ridden alcoholic scientist who it's hinted is using sex and/or barhopping to bury her guilt. Gumede is a suitably ominous presence as Mercy. MacNeill as Lionel is good, bringing a different spin to the role of Lex's father than Glover did on Smallville.

Of the Titans, Dick and Kory barely register. Walters as Robin does the most with his brief bit of screen time, actually showing some appreciation for once when Conner saves his life. Robin finally has someone on the team who isn't overbearingingly senior or a "lesser" non-hero. Granted, Conner is a newbie, but having Superman's powers make up for that: he's a damned powerful newbie. Plus you've got Junior Batman and Junior Superman, and the World's Finest have been doing pretty well for 50+ years. If we can't have Batman and Superman, Robin and Superboy make a decent substitute.

Overall, "Conner" is a decent backdoor pilot that rather awkwardly integrates Conner into the Titans. The abandoned Cadmus facility just happens to be in San Francisco, where the Titans are. Isn't that conveeennniiieeent? But as I've noted before, Titans could use a bit more in the members' strength department. We haven't seen Wonder Girl or Starfire do nearly as much in the entire series as we got with Superboy this one episode, and I'm eager to see more. It's a superhero/superpower show, not a "heroes dressed as birds" show. So give us more superpowers, already.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?