"Asylum" Titans S01E07 Review

Another week, another Titans episode.

Don't get me wrong. "Asylum" wasn’t a bad episode. But it was another... average episode in a stream of several average episodes. The show doesn't seem to be going for the highs the comic book reached and made the New Teen Titans such a popular comic back when it first came out.

Part of it is the show continues to focus on Dick Grayson. A lot. Compare how much we know about him to how little we know about Kory or Gar. Or even Rachel. We're seven episodes in and We. Get. It. Dick lost his parents and basically tapped into a lot of unreleased rage when he became Robin. And that scared him, so he left. But the rage hasn't stopped, so Robin beats people. I don't know why the creative team has to keep telling us this.

But what is Dick so mad about? Let's find out. At the safe-house, Adamson cuts his throat with a thermometer glass. Why there's a thermometer glass in the shower/tub he's handcuffed to, I don't know. He tells Rachel she can heal him, and she does. Adamson also lets slip to Kory there's a woman, Angela Azaroth, who is Rachel's birth mother and the organization he works for is keeping her at an asylum.

Dick finds the asylum, while Rachel and Gar go off on their own to rescue Angela. They get tasered and captured. Dick and Kory arrive and are soon captured, too. Adamson somehow shows up and tries to convince Rachel to summon his father, so he can purify (i.e., wipe out the population of) Earth. Meanwhile, Dick, Kory and Gar undergo "assessment". Dick is given a hallucinogenic, Kory undergoes an alien autopsy-type examination, and the doctor torturing Gar with an electric prod demands he shape-shift and show them what he's got.

Dick hallucinates confronting his young self (Tomaso Sanelli), who blames Dick for turning his younger self into a monster and beats him with his bo staff. A lot.

Rachel goes all demon-self on Adamson, and "takes back" her earlier healing. He bleeds out from a cut throat, and Rachel first finds her mother (Rachel Nichols), and then Gar. Gar goes all tiger and rips the throat out of the doctor who tortured him. And is duly shocked that he's killed someone for the first time.

The team then finds the catatonic Dick, but Rachel reminds him he promised to never leave her again. That snaps him out of his catatonia, and they find Kory, take out her doctors, and free her. They then head out the same tunnels they came in through. Some guards show up and Dick beats them to a pulp. The group gets out and Kory ignites the gas lines, blowing the whole place up. The end.

Like I said, other than yet another exploration into Dick's fractured psyche, We don't find out anything about the rest of the team. The only major thing is Gar kills someone for the first time. Which at least promises to have some future effect, even if it's just to remove the mental block he has and let him transform into more than just a tiger.

We find out Rachel can heal people, and Kory heals fairly fast. And that's about it. We do find out a very little more about the organization. They are devoted to Rachel's father, presumably the still-unnamed Trigon. And want Rachel to summon him to Earth to "purify" it, and presumably she needs to do it voluntarily. How they created the Nuclear Family, who knows? What other resources they might have is also unclear: all we see here are a bunch of guards with electric prods and some hallucinogenic drugs.

They apparently don't know Dick is Robin. We eventually find out the scenes of Robin are Dick's hallucinations. But then there is a Robin costume he burns at the end of the episode. The organization knowing it existed would compromise his and Bruce's secret identity, so it's a good thing they don't find out. I don't know where it came from.They do know his name is Dick Grayson, but they could easily determine that from knowing he's a cop in Detroit. Why they think he's hanging out with two super-powered individuals and the daughter of their god, who knows?

Overall, "Asylum" was an okay episode. It's still kind of plodding, and writers Greg Walker and Bryan Edward Hall separate the team just as they're coming together in... umm, "Together". It just seems like the creative team could have sped things up a little by not doing the Hawk & Dove episode, and the Doom Patrol episode, and the Jason Todd episode. And possibly next week's episode featuring Donna Troy. Which I suspect will confuse the continuity of Titans vis a vis the DC Cinematic Universe even more. Is she the sister (sort of) of Wonder Woman? That will confuse things if they try to make that part of the movie Wonder Woman. Or does she have the sever-from-Wonder-Woman origin that she eventually got as Wonder Girl and then Troia? If you thought the origins so far was confusing, trying to watch the creative team disentangle that mess gives me nightmares.

Then again, they didn't bother with the origins of Hawk & Dove. But then you wonder what's the point of having Donna Troy show up if she isn't a former superhero. She could become a fifth member of the new team, I suppose, but the last thing we need is another character to hog the spotlight the four current members are getting. Her only connection to the current group is through Robin, and the official synopsis is she's his "old friend". But we already had Hawk & Dove as superheroes who shared a past with him and were "old friends". How many old friends does he have?

But I suppose we'll find out next week. I'm not sure we'll like the answers, though. Or that they'll accomplish much.

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