Five years in the future, Dick and Dawn are happily married with one child and another on the way. Kori is an FBI agent, Rachel and Gar are a couple at University. The world is saved. They won.

And then, Jason Todd in a wheelchair arrives at Dick’s house. There’s a problem. With Batman…

This show is so weird. Want to know how weird? This wasn’t the season finale when they shot it. Seriously, the next episode, focusing on Trigon, was originally the season finale and now opens season 2.

Then there’s the fact this entire episode plays like a John Carpenter movie and mostly in a good way. From the filthy streets of Gotham, rendered with less subtlety but WAY more violence than the recent CWverse foray there, to the closing reveal this is an episode that nails every card to the table. With a batarang. That explodes.

Because make no mistake, the show that opened with Dick Grayson running a man’s face along a broken window frame closes with, in no particular order:

The vast majority of Batman’s rogues gallery beaten to death.

The Joker extremely, confirmably dead.

Batman dead under Wayne Manor.

Which Dick orders the GCPD to blow up.

After Kori has been murdered by a cold gun wielding Batman.

After he’s killed roughly every SWAT officer left in the city.

After Dick’s beaten a domestic abuser three quarters of the way to death.

After already warning him off once.

The depressing thing about this is not the violence, it’s that so much of it is so hard to see. Maxim Savaria and Alain Moussi play Batman here and you may know Moussi from the rebooted Kickboxer movies. If you’ve seen them, you’ll know they’re terrible but that he’s an incredible, precise martial artist. If you haven’t seen them, well done, keep it up. Here though? Batman may as well be a stick with an angry face on a balloon on one end. When we see the aftermath of his work, it’s disturbing. When we see him fight… we don’t, because the scenes are cut like a caffeine overdose. Janky, terribly lit, dull.

At first it seems like this is just one of a legion of failings. The domestic abuse subplot goes nowhere, does nothing and hits every trope you can imagine on its way nowhere. Dick and Hank butt heads yet again. The whole thing feels forced and GRIM!! Rather than grim. The soundtrack, sounding like John Carpenter on the worst night, is great though.

But the whole point is this is terrible. The entire episode is a honey trap designed to make Dick make the choice to embrace his darkness. It’s not that he was let in to the house by Trigon at the end of the last episode because he was pure. It’s that he was let in because he was already tainted. That gutsy reveal, as well as the gleefully grim tone and a nice turn from Dever means the episode finishes far stronger than you would expect. And so does the season.

Verdict: Titans has never been consistent, especially sensible or even remotely calm. Its pilot episode remains the single worst hour of TV I’ve seen in years. But, somehow, it’s taken those ridiculous fragments of angry shrapnel and started making something actively good. It’s still got zero chill, zero tact and is way too fond of horrific violence. But it’s getting there. And if the new arrivals for next season are anything to go by (Superboy?! KRYPTO?!) the ride is only going to get stranger. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart