There’s no two ways about it. Titans season two is a gigantic mess of a TV show. It feels like someone just threw a bunch of characters and story arcs into the mix and didn’t put any effort to make the narrative greater than the sum of its parts. What makes this worse is that there are several moments of promise sprinkled throughout the show.
Titans season two premiered in a strange way: by wrapping up the cliffhanger ending of the first season in a way that was, if not compelling, at least interesting. With Trigon out of the way by the end of the episode, Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites) tries to get the band back together. However, the team soon starts to splinter, with everyone bickering over one thing or the other, even when they have to deal with the returning threat of Deathstroke (Esai Morales) and the burgeoning menace represented by Cadmus, headed by Lex Luthor’s number two, Mercy Graves (Natalie Gumede).
While there are plenty of sub plots going on, the large cast makes the narrative feel unwieldy. Dick Grayson gets a fair amount of time for character development, but others like Jason Todd get the short end of the stick. For instance, we see that Jason Todd is having flashbacks after almost falling to his death, but this thread is dropped in subsequent episodes.
In general, the expanded cast of characters means that most of them have nothing to do in several episodes.
Sure, they have something to do, but most of the time it doesn’t lead to meaningful character development. One of the plot lines involving Slade’s son, Jericho, seems to come out of left field, as there was no hint to either this or the Titans already existing in season one.
Even Dick Grayson doesn’t always fare better. At one point, he assaults cops and gets arrested because he wanted to atone for past mistakes. That seems like an unnecessary detour, if not for giving him the idea to become Nightwing.
To be fair, the sixth episode, which focuses on Superboy, is a delight, but then he is unconscious for the next two episodes and then he ends up murdering several cops. The show often takes unnecessary detours like this, and that ends up muddling the narrative flow even more.
Although the finale does bring the team back together, the tragedy at the end feels tacked on. Furthermore, Deathstroke is also beaten quite easily, and the Jericho plot thread is resolved rather unsatisfactorily.
Maybe if the situations were flipped and the Deathstroke battle was saved for last, the finale would have been a lot stronger.
Hopefully, the show can streamline its narrative for season three. It has already trimmed the cast to a more manageable number and there’s already a looming threat headed for the Titans. Titans always has had more promise than its CW counterparts, which makes its missteps feel worse by comparison. When it gets its act together, it could be one of the strongest superhero shows out there. Let’s hope that happens sooner than later.
