The first season of Titans had eleven episodes. Of those, I at least liked ten, and loved maybe eight. Despite that, the entire thing left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed. That being said, I disagree with quite a few of the reasons I’ve seen other people give as to why they didn’t like the finale.

Nightwing

From what I’ve gathered, there is a lot of conflicting opinions about Dick this season. A lot of people are upset that he’s been getting so much screen time compared to the others – my response to that is, he is easily the most popular character in the main cast, he’s my favourite comic character of all time, and he’s getting a beautifully nuanced live action take for the first time, so don’t you dare try to ruin it for me. Another large contingent has been complaining that we didn’t get to see him become Nightwing in the finale. Now that I’m going to talk about in detail.

I’m okay that we didn’t get Nightwing yet! I really am. I love Dick Grayson with all my heart. I love his journey into becoming Nightwing, I love him taking on the mantle of Batman, I love his relationships with his family and friends and the lasting impact he’s had on comics as a whole. And because of that, I want it to continue to be a slow build. I want it to be earned, not rushed. Because the costume change is just that – a costume change. Him becoming Nightwing is far more than that. It’s about him choosing his path, about moving on and growing up.

So, no. I’m not disappointed that we didn’t get a Nightwing suit in this episode. Or, well…maybe a little. The show really felt like it was building to that with the first eight episodes. But given the context of the finale and the previous episode – Dick running into the house after Rachel – it wouldn’t have made sense. When would he have had time to make a new suit? Why the hell would that be his priority? The reveal wouldn’t have had time to breathe properly, so I’m glad that’s going to happen later, when it can have the dramatic weight it deserves. What I am disappointed about? That the episode just ended with Trigon corrupting Dick.

The entire season focused on Dick overcoming his darkness. On Dick moving past Robin; coming to terms with his past; realizing that while Bruce wasn’t a perfect parent, he still tried really damn hard. Dick was the central character. He was the heart of the show. And to end the season without that arc resolved, without him deciding, no, I’m not giving into that darkness, is just a really dumb cop out. It’s lazy writing that cheapens his beautiful development. It would have been one thing had this been the penultimate episode, rather than the finale – a setback before he pushes his way through the illusion for Rachel – but it wasn’t. And I know, a lot of that’s probably due to Trigon’s manipulation, but the problem with that is…I don’t think that matters. Not when it comes to a season finale. It doesn’t matter why, it just matters that this character arc – the only real character arc in the show – didn’t get a proper resolution, rendering all of Dick’s character development not quite meaning-less, but certainly not meaning-ful. The suit is just a suit. But the season should have ended with Dick at a point where he’s ready to be the hero that wears it.

And even setting aside the thematic issues, if Dick killing Bruce is due to Trigon’s influence, it wasn’t done in what I consider a compelling way. Yes, it was cool to see how he bent reality every time Dick was ready to walk away to push him into confronting Bruce. But even so, the moment when Dick killed Bruce fell flat. It didn’t feel like much of anything, least of all the climax of anything. It was just a letdown.

Guest Star Spotlight Episodes

There have been five episodes out of the eleven that were named for/centred around/introduced guest characters: “Hawk and Dove”, “Doom Patrol”, “Jason Todd”, “Donna Troy”, and “Hank and Dawn”. And when you look at it just from a numbers perspective, then, yeah, it does seem like an inordinate amount of time focusing on characters that aren’t in the main cast. But I really don’t see it that way.

For a start, not one of these episodes is included in my personal list of “episodes I didn’t love”. I thought every one of them was excellent. “Hank and Dawn” deserves special mention in that category as well, because I was hugely skeptical going in – it was placed right after a cliffhanger, it was the second guest episode in a row, it was a flashback episode without the main cast, it was the antepenultimate episode – but when I watched it? I loved it. It kept my attention the entire way through, and I didn’t miss the main cast at all.

In addition to this, just about all the guest episodes aside from “Hank and Dawn” weren’t really about the guest. “Hawk and Dove” introduced Hank and Dawn, but focused more on Dick and Rachel’s relationship and Dick’s issues with family. “Doom Patrol” was more about introducing Gar and having him join the team. “Jason Todd” and “Donna Troy” were both about Dick’s relationship with his past and the Robin identity and the struggle he has to reconcile his love for Bruce with his anger towards him. Titans has mostly been a character focused show, and all these guest episodes served as a way of exploring the lead character.

In what might be a controversial opinion, I also think that two of the guest episodes – “Doom Patrol” and “Donna Troy” – were some of the most cohesive episodes in terms of developing the entire main cast and balancing plot with character development. In the former, we had Rachel bonding with Gar and Dick clashing with Kory, as well as Gar joining the other three. In the latter, we had more character development. We got to explore more of Dick’s past and his lighter side, through his relationship with his best friend. We also had scenes of Kory, Rachel, and Gar on the train, with Kory and Gar – who’d had very little interaction until this point – talking and bonding. We found out what Kory’s mission was. It was a very, very well constructed episode. I don’t think there’s a single episode without the guest stars – except maybe, maybe “Asylum” – that managed that level of cohesiveness.

So my issue with the guest star episodes isn’t at all that they existed. It’s not that guest stars were spotlighted more than the team as a whole. It’s not that they took up too much time in the season. It’s that they didn’t really go anywhere. When it comes to comic book media, I love a meandering, character driven story, because that’s a lot of what the heart of comics are. But that doesn’t mean the plot can be entirely abandoned or that character arcs can be nonsensical. If you’re going to having a running plot instead of actually leaning into the idea of “miscellaneous stories in the same world”, there still has to be thematic coherence and some amount of resolution. And with the finale, we didn’t get that. It felt like stopping at an absolutely inexplicable time.

What I thought was going to happen after seeing both “Hank and Dawn” and the preview for “Dick Grayson” was that Rachel was going to call Hank and Dawn, tell them to find Jason, all of that because she was trying to save Dick and snap him out of his Trigon hallucination. I figured the episode was going to be split between Dick in the illusion and Rachel outside of it, connecting the episode plot to the overall season plot, to the overall importance of Dick and Rachel’s relationship. But none of that happened. We only saw Rachel at the very end. Gar was nowhere to be seen, Kory and Donna were both stuck outside, Hank and Dawn were presumably still at the hospital, and Jason was probably in Gotham. It was messy, with too many dangling threads.

If, as I’ve heard, Hank, Dawn, Donna, and Jason are all going to be recurring characters in season three, then there is too much going on. Especially with the stinger featuring Conner escaping Cadmus. They keep introducing new characters and plot threads, but don’t seem to care enough to wrap them up, or even bring them all together so that they can eventually wrapped up. They’re juggling a lot and dropping the balls.

Kory and Gar

Look, everyone reading this probably already knows I’m biased. As I’ve said in just about every post I’ve made about comics and related media, including this one, Dick is my favourite character. And I’ve never really been a fan of either Starfire or Beast Boy. So I’m never going to complain about the show or season focusing primarily on Dick and his growth into the best version of himself. And while I wouldn’t object to Kory, Gar, and the team as a whole getting more focus, I totally disagree with the claim that centring the story on Dick is the problem, or even one of them.

I like this interpretation of Kory just fine – hot blooded, the first one to resort to violence to solve a problem, cocky, a kind of weird sense of justice…but frankly, there’s not enough there for me to love her. She’s a pretty shallow character so far. There are traits that can be interpreted from her actions, but she hasn’t had a real arc, hasn’t had those traits clearly defined and reiterated. I don’t mind watching her, but I also don’t really care either way. I’ve rewatched the pilot a couple times, and I’ve skipped through her scenes. While Anna Diop was engaging enough to keep me from getting bored the first time I saw it, I didn’t care enough to watch those scenes again, and skipped through them to get to what I really wanted to see. If season two focuses more on her, I’m going to need it to be with a much more compelling plot than she has amnesia and wants to figure out who she is. Gar has had even less screentime than Kory so far. And to me, that’s weirder than how little Kory we’ve gotten, because there’s, like…no actual reason for him to be around, either in terms of plot or in terms of the writers having something they want to do with him. He’s just here to be here. It feels kind of like how it always felt to see Storm in the X-Men movies. She was there…but not actually to do anything. Just because the writers thought, oh, X-Men, we need Storm, right? He’s going to need a lot more fleshing out in the future…but the lack of fleshing out so far isn’t why the story fell flat.

I liked episodes 1, 3, and 10. I loved 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. And with 11, I enjoyed several different aspects of it. But overall, it didn’t make much sense. It neither advanced the plot nor advanced the characters, and in some ways, reversed the character development that had already happened for the sake of getting them to a certain point. And that made the meandering plot and the slow focus on character growth far less appealing because of how jarring the finale was.

I’ve heard several rumours about the season and how it was supposed to go – that they cut an episode and merged parts of it with other episodes, that they cut large chunks out of the finale, that they even split it in two to make the second half the premier of the second season. I don’t know if there’s any truth to any of those rumours. But if the last one is true…that would make way more sense than what we got. It’d be frustrating, sure – but at least then, I’d know that it was just a bad idea, rather than writers setting something up perfectly, then screwing it all up.

I still enjoyed each individual episode enough to want to watch season two. I’m reasonably confident I’ll be at least entertained. But I’m really hoping that season two will be more coherent.