"Titans" – Titans S01E01 Review

Well, "Titans" was dark. And not just the cinematography but the emotional turmoil, the characters, and the violence. The new DC Channel, with its first new show Titans, appears to be trying to out-Netflix/Marvel Netflix's Marvel stuff. Kingpin slams a guy's head in with a car door? Hey, Titans will show Robin dragging a guy's face across a car window's worth of broken glass. Matt Murdock sees his father get killed. Dick Grayson watches his parents fall to their death while Rachel gets to watch her mother's head get blown open by a pistol shot. Punisher beats criminals to a pulp? Kory Anders incinerates them into ash statues and laughs.

Nummy.

What's the context for all of this? Let's see. We start with a dream sequence/vision of a young Dick watching his parents fall after their trapeze line breaks. It turns out this is actually Rachel Roth's (Teagan Croft) vision of Dick's (Brenton Thwaites) nightmare. Rachel has an obsessively devoted and Christian mother, Melissa (Sherilyn Fenn, who is almost unrecognizable from her Audrey/Twin Peaks days). Rachel is your typical TV high school Goth girl: picked on by bullies, ignored by the handsome jock. The girl comes home from school and a big bald guy (Jarreth Merz) says Melissa isn't Rachel's mother and forces Melissa to say so as well. Once she does, he shoots Melissa in the head and Rachel unleashes her demonic self. That lets her escape and she takes a bus to Detroit.

In Detroit, police detective Dick Grayson has transferred from Gotham and is pretty standoffish. If you're not familiar with Dick's name from the comics, TV shows, and movies, we're soon introduced to his alter-ego Robin. Dick is tracking down a freed child molester who also happens to be a drug dealer. When the guy sells some drugs to a gang, Dick changes into Robin and beats the living hell out of them with shuriken, his expandable staff, and the aforementioned car windows. Good times.

Rachel ends up in a rescue mission and an overly sympathetic volunteer tries to lead her to her car. The demon Rachel shows up in reflections from time to time and tells Rachel to run. The reflection doesn't yell "Bad touch!", which is what the volunteer comes across as. Rachel eventually runs, throws a brick at a police car, and is taken to the station where Dick works. They end up together and Rachel realizes Dick is the boy in her visions.

Just as we're getting used to this, the episode goes to Vienna, Austria. Kory Anders (Anna Diop) wakes up in a crashed bullet-riddled car next to a dead man at the wheel. Three guys drive up and shoot at her, and Kory goes to the hotel when she finds a room key in her purse. Kory has the penthouse hotel room and the concierge knows her. She goes up and finds a man in her closet and a phone with another guy's picture on it. Kory frees the closet guy, who says Kory was obsessed with some girl. He tries to kill her, she instinctively punches him across the room, gets phone guy's address, and then breaks closet guy's neck. Even better times.

The phone guy is Konstantin Kovar (Mark Anthony Krupa). Kory goes to his club and confronts him. he talks about how she was obsessed with some girl, Kory betrayed him, and that he loved her. Maybe they loved breaking people's necks together on dates? Kovar shoots Kory, who spontaneously bursts into flame, incinerates the bullet before it can hit her, and turns Kovar and his two thugs into ash statues. She laughs, confirms from a photo that "the girl" is Rachel, and walks off. Best times.

Back in Detroit, a fake cop abducts Rachel, drugs her, and hands her over to the bald guy. Dick sees them and follows, while when Rachel wakes up tells her that she's a doorway for "Him", and he's going to kill to save the world by preventing "Him" from coming to Earth and destroying the sun. Rachel isn't on-board with this plan, releases her demon self, and the demon self leaps into bald guy and ejects his internal organs from the inside. Double nummy. Dick doesn't see any of this, and despite being the student of the world's greatest detective, doesn't seem at all curious why a killer's internal organs jumped out of his own body. When Dick arrives, Rachel asks him for help and Dick drives her off in an expensive car.

In the final sequence, a security guard who plays video games when the store closes and runs dozens of TVs (Holy Electric Bill, Batman!) hears something. He investigates and finds a green tiger stealing a video game. The guard shoots and misses, the tiger runs outside, and turns into a teenage boy (Ryan Potter).

This is all very interesting. And certainly not your parents' Challenge of the Super Friends. Not even your older brother's Teen Titans Go! For starters, it's not presented with any context other than few references to Batman and his Rogues' Gallery. Dick tells his new partner Amy (Lindsey Gort) he left his partner because the guy was ultra-violent and Dick left before he became too much like him. Word to the wise: it didn't work.

So apparently the guard isn't used to seeing mutant shapeshifters. Or maybe they just don’t hang out in Covington, Ohio, where the store is located. There are apparently other superhumans around, since Hawk and Dove show up in next week's episode. No spoilers: it's in the title.

So is this the same world where the DC movies take place? If so, the whole idea of (para)demons and superhuman types shouldn't be as surprising as it apparently is. Maybe this will get explained, and there's a certain amount of "Why is this stuff happening in small burgs and foreign cities, rather than Metropolis and Gotham?", that might hand-wave it away. But it's still kind of weird. For instance, there isn't a Robin in the movies (yet). But here Robin is Batman's long-time partner and the Detroit police and mayor recognize him.

But let's set aside the continuity issues. One character is tortured by her overly-religious parent, who is then shot in front of her, and later sends a guy's organs flying out of his body. One character is trying to deal with his addictive behavior (and not doing too well). One character is a laughing homicidal maniac with amnesia issues. And the last character is apparently a happy-go-lucky teen who breaks into electric stores to steal video games. At least three of them are bound together somehow. And there's the threat of an as-yet unseen Big Bad. Trigon, judging from the bald guy's description. But that's just speculation, not a spoiler.

And none of this makes the characters particularly sympathetic. Sheesh, Gar is the only one who doesn't maim/kill a guy. He just does some after-hours breaking-and-entering.

I don't expect Titans to be as loony as Teen Titans Go! But here it looks like the creative team (made up primarily of people from the CW DC shows) saw season 1 of Daredevil and bits and pieces of the other Marvel Netflix shows, and decided to slap it on the DC universe. DC Channel wanted dark and gritty, so they went dark and gritty.

There's also the age difference. In the comics, the Titans are roughly the same age except for Beast Boy. Here, Dick has been around long enough to graduate from the police academy and becomes a relatively high-ranking police detective. Rachel is a high school girl. Kory comes across more as Robin's age, and presumably Gar is Rachel's age. It's an odd dynamic to have Dick be the father figure to Rachel. I suppose that's why they took "Teen" out of the title. Although that raises the question of why the episode, and the show, are titled "Titans". It's not answered in the show itself, which brings us to another of those standard superhero TV beats featuring supergroups: they come slowly together over the course of a season, and the season ends with them becoming superheroes and/or a team.

All of that like-wise depends on how fixated you are on the comics. The creative team certainly is: we have detectives named Wolf and Perez (Marv Wolfman and George Perez created the modern-day Teen Titans), the tie-in with Trigon, and name-dropping of comic book characters like Konstantin Kovar. Who in the comics is the father of Leonard Kovar, a Russian teenage superhero who teams up occasionally with the Teen Titans.

I'm not a big fan of the various Titans comics. But it's hard to tell who the show is aimed at. Comic book fans? The in-jokes and references seem aimed at them, but then why not go for a straighter adaptation? The Marvel/Netflix viewers? They’re already getting violence, sex, and dark cinematography on their shows: why will they want to get it on DC Channel as well?

The main actors are suitably talented. Teagan Croft acts her heart out, and Brenton Thwaites is good in a little overaged in the part. At least based on the comic book character. In Titans so far he comes across more as a father figure/mentor, at least to Rachel. That's how the character is written for the show.

Anna Diop has a lot of quirky mannerisms. It's not clear how if she's the alien that she is in the comic books. The actress sprinkles her performances with little bits of business and maybe the laughter is meant to convey the "alien with aliens values" thing. Other than the fact Gar is a "lighter" character, we don't find out anything about him so it's hard to judge Ryan Potter's acting chops.

Overall, Titans is an okay superhero show. It's hard to tell after just one episode. The premiere hits all the right beats, but it somehow comes across as more like Powers or Runaways than the Marvel/Netflix stuff. It just seems to be emulating existing shows without either bringing anything new to the table (Legion), going the comedy route (DC's Legends of Tomorrow, The Tick) or going more retro with modern sensibilities (The Flash, Supergirl). It sticks with the tried-and-trued Marvel/Netflix "Hey, look, we're on a subscriber channel where we can do darker stuff!" formula. Which is kinda sad, given that the first Marvel/Netflix show only premiered three years ago. But after ten "seasons" of six different shows, it's now kinda of tried-and-trued. Time marches on.

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