In 2014, the Titans are torn over whether to continue exploiting Jericho, a young man they’ve come to genuinely like. But events are about to spiral out of their control.

This is the episode that has to land for the season to work. It lands. Chella Man is especially great as the sweet, powerful young man at the center of the maelstrom. Likewise Brenton Thwaites and Minka Kelly who both sell the compassion the Titans feel for the kid especially well.

But the episode belongs, in the end, to Deathstroke. Esai Morales is a superb actor and brings the quiet, mildly frantic menace the character absolutely demands. That manifests here in two truly brutal, even by the show’s usual standards, fights. In the first, Deathstroke beats Donna half to death with a precision that just about steers the show away from glee in the violence and its ‘ediginess’. In the second, he is literally seconds away from murdering Dick with the same methodical brutality. You’ve never seen a headbutt, or in this case a chain of five of them, hit this hard before. There are squelching noises. It gets ugly. But it doesn’t quite get too much to bear. The show is still the knife-happy little edgelord offspring of the DC TV family but it knows to pull some punches now, knows if it does, the ones that do land, land harder.

Verdict: The end result is a tragic, fast paced descent into the Titans’ personal Hell and a functional end to the season long flashback. Next up? Deathstroke in the present day. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart