In Detroit, Detective Richard Grayson catches a very odd runaway case. In Vienna, Kory Anders wakes up in a bullet-riddled car. In Rachel Roth’s head, something wearing her face screams to be let out.

This is, by a considerable margin, the worst hour of TV I’ve seen this year. If you saw the trailers and worried about the ‘FUCK Batman’ moment, then you didn’t worry enough. There is so much worse here. Relentless, hideous violence, single note characters, dismal lighting, trudging script. It’s like a genre show from the early ‘90s has fallen through a hole in time and is mad as hell about it.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Brenton Thwaites is pretty good as Robin, and Tina Croft is great as Rachel. That’s it. That’s the end of the good news. Anna Diop is reduced to a bad wig and a single note character. Ryan Potter’s Beast Boy is seen for 15 seconds at the end of the episode and uses ‘RAD!’ non-ironically.

Nothing else here works beyond Thwaites and Croft. Picture the most predictable, trite, needlessly violent, po-faced superhero nonsense you read during the ‘90s when this tattered cape, energy and time sucking trope ran rampant. Got it? It’s here. I promise you it’s here. This is a TV series aimed at folks who miss Superman’s mullet. This is a TV show aimed at the people who still kind of miss the version of Arsenal whose city was destroyed, daughter murdered and arm torn off. This is superhero fiction as the theatre of cruelty. Or to put it another way, at last, DC have made the exact show everyone has accused superhero TV shows of being for a decade.

It’s not a victory, not even a small one and if I sound angry I am. This show embodies, for the entire episode it takes the characters to leave town, the worst excesses of arrogant, po-faced ‘issue engaging’ fiction. In 1988 it was two entire pages of Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd looking a bit sad at famine victims in A Death in the Family. Here it’s lip service being paid to Detroit having problems of its own without having to deal with hyper violent vigilantes. That’s the last time it’s brought up, just long enough to go ‘Look! A real city!’ before we get back to the face-maiming for the umpteenth time.

Because the violence here is as brutal and all-pervasive as it is tone deaf and dull. Robin’s demolition of a pair of arms dealing gangs, de-frosted from Central Casting’s mothballed The Equalizer section I presume, is savage. He breaks limbs. He drives faces into concrete. The sequence culminates in him dragging a villain through a car window, running his jaw long the jagged edge of the window, threatening him and then dragging him onto the floor and kicking him a few times.

The only way this brutal, needless sequence could be worse? Is if the villain was black.

I’m a big fan of action sequences. I’m a combat sports fan, which is almost as depressing as watching Titans some days. I know my way around a couple of martial arts, and I know my way around these characters. What Robin does here would land two of his opponents in hospital and him in prison. He MAIMS people. He may actively disable them. And the only excuse we have is ‘He left Gotham because he was frightened he was becoming too much like Batman.’

It’s not character development, it’s brutality. It’s not action, it’s spectacle. It plays like the worst 1980s action movies and, frequently, it’s shot like them too. Worse still, this is so far from who these characters are I had to check the credits three times to make sure I was reading the writers’ names right. Geoff Johns has been instrumental in turning DC around and modernizing it. Greg Berlanti is behind the Berlantiverse leviathan of DC shows over at the CW. Akiva Goldsman is a veteran TV and film scriptwriter.

And here after incinerating three people, they write Kory, a character who in the comics is defined as much by her compassion as her strength, giggling.

Verdict: I don’t know what went wrong here but I’ve never seen it go more wrong than it does here. I don’t know who this show is for beyond a vanishingly small sub set of fans. I don’t know why there are almost no lights on, why Robin has apparently watched The Raid too many times or if there’s any hope of Beast Boy even pretending to fit in. I do know this is the worst possible opening this show could have and it’s going to have to do incredible amounts of work to turn around. 0/10

Alasdair Stuart