Titans “Dick & Carol & Ted & Kory”

So, this is the sort of episode that demonstrates how I find Titans to be both fun and frustrating.  This is a series that, honestly, I never felt really hit the tone it was looking for.  How seriously am I supposed to take this show?

OK, so here’s the deal:  Dick and Kory wake up in  matching pajamas in a nice house because, well, they’re in the process of being magically brainwashed into Ted and Carol.  They don’t know how they got there, but somehow they went out like a light and woke up with a radio transmitter buried into the back of their necks that plays nonstop the local radio station.

You know, I was going to make a joke for the previous episode that the pina colada song was playing when the Titans arrived in this town that it must have been hell.  Turns out I wasn’t entirely wrong.  There’s brainwashing going on in those soft rock oldies that were probably the cheapest the show could afford to get the rights to.  If Dick and Kory don’t watch it, they will eventually forget that they were ever Dick and Kory, and while Dick has a technique that Bruce taught him to stay himself, it doesn’t really work for Kory until it is dramatically convenient.

Oh, and Rachel’s saviors are still themselves because they’re both deaf and read lips.  Granted, there was a moment or two that made me wonder just how deaf they actually were, but the writers were probably making all this stuff up as the went along anyway.

Regardless, there were a few things I liked here.  Kory and Dick’s insistence that they didn’t have sex when they woke up was mildly amusing, but then one of their flashbacks where they try to remember who they are is a post-sex scene from season one, so it’s not like they haven’t had sex before.  Kory’s “Carol” personality was a bit of a hoot.  Rachel seemed to be more or less in-control of her situation, either psyching out henchmen to stay alive or showing that for every injury her creepy half-brother Brother Blood inflicts on her, an identical one appears on him.  Plus, this episode remembered Dick could fight after he got slapped around by some cops in the previous episode.  I may not always like what Titans does, but it does generally have good fight choreography.

And yes, Dick and Rachel do shut down the radio station that seemed to be running off a half-dead person.

But then there’s the stuff I didn’t like.  For starters, no matter how much Titans does these silly things, the show doesn’t quite seem to play them all that silly, or not silly enough for my tastes.  I really don’t much care about anything Tim Drake does.  I’m not even 100% sure why the Titans took him with them when they left Gotham.  It wasn’t like he was a talented orphan or something.  He’s a clumsy fanboy.  And whatever Connor is doing…well, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

And where the hell did Krypto go?  Wasn’t he in the RV?

So, basically, typical Titans episode.