it means everything yuri edition

titans 2.01

so i just finished watching the episode in its entirety, and i have this to say right off the bat: our cheesy, scrappy, comic-booky, melodramatic-yet-weirdly-wholesome underdog superhero show is BACK, baby! honestly, this episode was a lot more... clunky than most of last season, but i think it worked well both as payoff to the themes and arcs set up in s1 as well as a set-up for s2. 

(SPOILERS follow)

1. first things first: trigon is a terrible villain on his own merits, sure. one can scarcely believe that this is what eleven episodes of slow-burn, classic horror build-up was meant to lead to. his dialogue was cringey, his mythos made no sense, and he was defeated with little fanfare. 

but you know what? trigon was never the point. just like the nuclear family, or even the phantom batman that haunted dick’s flashbacks, trigon was shorthand for toxic familial relationships, empty authoritarianism, being consumed by your worst self and calling it ‘freedom’. the battle was over the moment rachel rejected trigon’s gaslighting--the moment she realised she could be herself and still be happy and loved. it happened the moment rachel used her powers to give someone else the chance to realise that for themselves. 

once that power has been taken away, what is trigon? nothing. and so he was dismissed by the merest shift in will on rachel’s part. he wasn’t given the slightest iota of sympathy--he was a malignant parasite that fed off the worst parts of others, and he was dismissed as such.

2. there were some honestly breathtaking moments that i believe were beautiful on paper but faltered in their execution. there was so much going on that would’ve looked so much more dynamic and consequential on, say, a comic-book page, with fancy text-boxes to give an insight into the characters’ mind, and a big, wonderful splash-page of the different heroes going ~dark eschewing the need to really build-up to it. on screen, however, there was a lot of standing around stiffly while trigon monologued evilly, and the black eye makeup and the washed-out lighting did them no favours. and remember the moment when dick caught rachel on the trapeze? it’s such a beautiful, loaded moment that i can see working wonderfully on a comic-book page, but comes off stilted on the screen. 

but that’s part of the charm of the show to me, tbh. it’s literally a comic book come to life, with all of its attendant delights and frustrations.

3. i don’t understand why everybody is talking about the titans like they knew about the old team all along when the word ‘titans’ wasn’t mentioned once in s1.

4. dick smiled so much in the latter half of the episode, you guys! it really felt like he’d let a gigantic weight roll right off his shoulders, and his meeting with bruce wayne was everything i’d hoped for--an adult child (i realise that’s an oxymoron, but you know what i mean) returning to reconcile with his father, aware enough to realise the real damage that bruce had done to him, but mature enough to understand where bruce’s trauma ends and his own begins, and to let go of resentment--if not forgive him--and meet him as an equal. bruce isn’t a phantom anymore. he’s a man like any other--a father like any other. dick’s experiences with own fledgling family--his failure with them--has given him this precious, hard-earned perspective.

5. like i always say, don’t let the grimdark window dressing and all the cussing fool you guys--this corny, awkward show can be both ridiculously insightful in the way it seeks to reject one-sided, toxic relationships, and replace them with hard-won, healthy ones. it’s been over a season, and only now the titans are earning the right to call themselves that--because before becoming a team, they had to become a family.

6. all said and done, tho, as an episode of television, trigon is haphazard and stilted, the writing is patchy and the dialogue ranges from anodyne to cringey, and as a result, the acting and the choreography also suffer. i know the show is better than this; here’s hoping this faltering start is because of the production team’s decision to repurpose last season's finale as this one's premiere, and that the season will really come into its own from the next episode.