***This review contains minor spoilers***
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“Titans” season 2 is still dark and gritty, but the show transitions into a more traditional superhero tale, complete with material taken straight from years of Teen Titans/Titans/Young Justice comics. Unfortunately, there’s way too much of a good thing as all the characters and plotlines fight for airtime, and almost none of it feels fulfilled in the end.
While the first season of “Titans” was kind of an edgy-road trip featuring cults and interdimensional demons, season 2 takes the more expected superhero-show route. We get Titans Tower, and training rooms, and heroes leaping into action to save the city. All while dealing with classic foes such as Deathstroke and Cadmus labs. Despite that, there’s still the trademark violence and profanity, which helps ground some of the comic book stuff. And there’s some great stuff mined from all the years of the various comics. The problem is, there’s just way too much for a thirteen-episode season. Besides having to wrap of the Trigon cliffhanger from season 1, they still cram in: the early days of the Titans with Garth and Jericho, the origin of Conner Kent, Starfire’s complicated history with her sister, Rachel’s evolving powers, Dick’s journey to becoming Nightwing, a traitor, various romances, and Ravager’s origin. Not to mention fighting Dr. Light, Deathstroke and Mercy Graves. All this stuff had potential, but every time it got interesting, it moves on to something else. And in the end, none of it gets properly wrapped up. It’s fine to leave something for season 3, but now they have all this to deal with plus whatever the new threat will be.
As far as the main character’s storylines go, Dick’s journey is the most complete, while Starfire’s opens up the most cans of worms without a payoff. But they both fair better than the other returning characters. Garth and Rachel have interesting stuff happen to them, but we really don’t get an actual story arc for either of them. Also this season, Wonder Girl, Jason Todd, and Hawk & Dove are promoted to the main cast. Wonder Girl gets very little to do all season besides some cool action moments, and the others start off with some interesting material before getting shoved into the background.
Newcomers this season are Conner, Ravager and Deathstroke. Conner’s introduction is fantastic, but he gets sidelined not lot long after that. Besides Dick, Ravager gets the most complete character arc this season. Meanwhile, her father goes down as one of the most intimidating villains on any superhero show, and he’s brought to life with great acting and physicality. Sadly, his story ends anticlimactically to make room for the much-less interesting Cadmus/Mercy Graves stuff…and even that gets wrapped up too smoothly. As far as Mercy goes, although she’s unbelievably ruthless and the make at least one attempt to humanize her, she’s pretty one note. And after appearing in the shadows all last season, Bruce Wayne finally steps into light. While Iain Glen is a fantastic actor and has pulled off action scenes in the past, is take on Bruce is very meh. He lacks the gravitas we expect from the character, and does not look like he’s in enough shape to throw on the Batsuit and take out a gang of bad guys. Basically, he’s almost the exact opposite of what we saw and heard about him up to this point.
The second season of “Titans” has a lot for comic book fans, as they add plenty of the source material to transform our band of misfits into heroes. But, too many characters and too many storylines in too few episodes give us non-stop appetizers, but in the end you feel like you never got the main course.
*** out of *****