In Review: Titans – Dick Grayson

Synopsis: Dick takes a dark journey back to Gotham.

Review: In a mind-bending finale we get to see a bleaker and darker version of Gotham thanks to the manipulations of Trigon, who has Dick under his control.

The Story

Picking things up from last weeks penultimate episode where we met Trigon for the first time when Raven released him to help her heal Gar. And we are thrown right into a world of Trigon’s creation as he prevents and contains Dick from saving his friends.

The whole episode is a dream of sorts, which starts off with Dick living in LA with his wife Dove and one child. Dove is expecting another baby and is trying to get Dick to pain the new babies room.  But when Dick gets a visit from Jason Todd who is now wheelchair bound thanks to injuries sustained from his work with the Batman. Dick is spurred into visiting Gotham in order to save Bruce Wayne from himself.

Jason tells Dick that Barbara Gordon has gone missing and Commissioner Gordon and Alfred have died, and these events have pushed Bruce Wayne over the edge to the point where he is completely disregarding his ethical code when dealing with criminals.

When he arrives in Gotham. Dick finds it to be a much bleaker and darker place than when he left. And winds up having to work with the authorities in order to even get a shot at saving Bruce, but ultimately given the nature of Trigon’s hold on Dick. The dream ends in a darker place than when it began and there doesn’t seem to be anything that Raven can do to help save Dick from her father.

The Acting

Brenton Thwaites is understandably the focus of this episode as he gets to peel a few more layers off of Dick Grayson’s character, which to be fair is the character that has had the most development this season and pretty much at the expense of the other characters, which am sure will get more to do in the second series.

Thwaites does great with what he is given here and the whole episode feels like a proper journey for him and even explains a little why the character started out in such a dark place when we met him in the start of the series.

Alain Moussi puts in an uncredited performance as the Batman, but has very little in the way of dialogue to deliver, but does deliver an awesome fight sequence toward the end of the episode when the Police raid the Batcave as they attempt to capture the masked vigilante.

Overall

This is a season finale that I wasn’t expecting. But knowing that we are getting a season 2 helps soften the blow of being left with such an epic cliffhanger.

Overall there was more to like that there was to dislike in this episode. The story felt very much like an Elseworlds story in which our much-loved characters are altered to portray a much different point of view. And the reveal that the whole episode was the manipulations of Trigon was pretty much obvious from the beginning, but the story was so good that you couldn’t help but be sucked in.

We even got to see a bit of the Joker in this story and there were also references to other famous villains from Batman’s rogue’s gallery.

This sets things up perfectly for season 2 in which I suspect we’ll see the Titans come together and execute a plan to take down Trigon, but given that Trigon is one of DC’s most powerful villains. I suspect it will take the titans the better part of season 2 to actually put things right. And I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.