Titans “Titans Forever”

So, the title of the final episode is “Titans Forever”.  I can’t help feel like that is a lie.

OK, here’s the deal:  the Titans are all together, even if Conner is temporarily dead, all to stop Brother Blood.  Except for Krypto, and while the dog does appear in the episode, he doesn’t do anything but whimper a bit as Conner may or may not be dying.

However, this episode in many ways is perhaps very much the quintessential episode of Titans.  That means a lot of things happen, the characters are kinda bland, the fight scenes mostly work, but I keep wondering why certain things are happening.

Dick makes reservations for a nice restaurant before the Titans go off to battle Brother Blood, a battle they need to win since he’s done something to destroy Earth and Tamaran at the same time.  Did he know they were going to succeed?  Conner hadn’t even woken up yet.

Brother Blood summons Trigon, the dangerous demon thing that, in a recent animated movie, fought Darkseid to a draw for all eternity, a Darkseid who had spent the entire movie basically killing everything and everyone who got in his way, including the entire Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians of the Universe.  Naturally, Brother Blood just whacks Trigon with his staff a couple times and kills him rather easily to steal his power.  Why were they worried about Trigon if that was the case?

Brother Blood makes whole hosts of people at S.T.A.R. Labs suddenly bleed to death, and then later on, he takes control of Starfire, but Nightwing and Robin–two powerless heroes–can fight him to standstill.

Heck, he had Starfire under control, but he needed her to charge his machine, but he stopped controlling her before she did that.  Why not control her long enough to charge the machine?

Dick says he can’t beat Brother Blood, but Conner (now awake) can.  Why?  Brother Blood was the one who almost killed Conner in the first place.

Gar needs to pull some cables out to stop the machine, but rather than, say, turn into a stronger animal like a gorilla or something, he stays in human form.

And then when the team prevails and meets for dinner, they all decide to go their separate ways except for Dick and Kory because they’re in love now or something.

That’s a lot of things that don’t make sense.  But I got to see Superman’s feet, and I’ll say this for Rachel:  she looks good in white even with that obvious wig.

Look, I know why Titans did many of the things they did.  The budget was probably never particularly high.  But that doesn’t explain other things.  Like, why were supporting and guest characters always more fun than the main cast?  I think the AV Club actually wrote a retrospective that said the series was legitimately good for three episodes in a row before going back to, well, whatever this show was.  They were talking about the beginning of season three when Bruce Wayne snapped and killed the Joker after Jason Todd died, and those were a legitimately good three or so episodes.  Then, yeah, not much more of that.

Instead, I got a bland Dick Grayson always at the center.  Other Titans were good and all.  Heck, Kory was always a treat.  But there was so many moments where the show just kinda existed.  There were decent episodes here and there, but there were so many times when the show just never quite made it, made worse by inconsistent writing that never quite made me all that interested in these characters.  I never hated Titans or anything, but I also never quite loved it.  At best, I liked it.  At worst, I found it just kinda there.  It’s just this strange show that somehow kept going when the DC Universe streaming service folded into HBO Max, and Max kept it going for some reason.

Let’s say a barely passing 7 out of 10 heroes standing around in one room while other heroes do stuff in other rooms.

But hey, what’s up for next time on Mondays?  Well, The Great came back.

Now that’s a show that always entertained me.