Titans was the reason why I signed up for DC Universe in the first place way back when the platform was first announced. I’d been in the DC fandom as a fic writer and frequent shouter, so I was prepared for the worst with the show… but I wanted to watch it anyway.

For the most part, I really liked a lot of the first season. It has its issues – and, I have like three posts in-progress about it that I may finish eventually and post on here – but for the most part it’s the kind of show that I like. It’s a show made with fandom in mind, not just fans so definitely it has a lot of content that feels tailor-made for me.

So here’s the thing with the first episode of Titans‘ second season: it feels like the finale of the first one. I think that’s because… that’s what it actually was.

When I first heard of the Titans line-up, the first season had been announced as having twelve issues.

Fast forward to the end of the first season and… we stopped at eleven. One of the things I didn’t love about the S1 finale – aside from how very very weird it was – was that it felt like it was unfinished. I’m used to wonky season finales (hello, Young Justice) but I felt like this one. was just… too much. It was a single sour spot in an otherwise serviceable first season.

Titans second season picks up mere moments after the ending of the first one – ignoring the Superfamily stuff in the end credits scene – and pulls the core team of Titans together. Hawk, Dove, Donna Troy, Jason Todd, and Kory all come together in order to join forces and save Dick, Raven, and Gar from Trigon-in-Progress.

It’s a pretty solid lineup, honestly.

If you’re a comics fan, you might remember that there was a brief period of time when Jason Todd was on the Teen Titans shortly before his own murder? (Like he was so excited to be the Robin on the team even as he chafed underneath Dick’s shadow and there was so promise that I, reading the arc in 2011, felt an intense pain over.)

This feels like that lineup and it makes me think that we can expect a little… Death in the Family coming up at some point if the series gets renewed.

Anyway, because it’s a season finale re-purposed as the start of the new season, things actually get wrapped up really fast with Trigon in a way that make it feel a bit sloppy. In a little under an hour, this episode showed the Titans facing their deepest fears, “killed off” one bad guy, and introduced another one.

So much happened and a fair amount of it fell flat for me personally because well… this should’ve been at the end of season one. I won’t get into it because I feel like some of y’all want to get into titans but haven’t yet, but the decisions they made at the end of the episode before the villain reveal were kind of… pointless in a season premiere.

Because the expectation they heighten is a bit useless… after all, we get a new episode this Friday. So it doesn’t have time to build up steam in any way.

I’m going to wrap this up real quick by talking about some things I thought about (in bulleted list form):

• Gar and Raven are really adorable still. I love them.
• Kory is my wife and Dick is my husband and I need them to bang like a screen door in a Florida summer
• In my scrapped (for now) S1 review, I was all “Kory’s not a Mammy figure” but now… I’m definitely thinking that she is. At least a little bit.
• the villain they introduce in the end is one of my all-time favorite villains and I can’t wait to see how they handle him and the storyline I remember from the comics
• Yeah they’re going to do Death in the Family (or allude to it) by the next season
• Hawk and Dove are still Very Boring To Me – but I do like that Hawk is kind of begrudgingly charmed by Jason. That’s cute.
• The Bruce/Dick BadBatDad issues throw me back to my time in the DC fandom as a writer and hm… I’m here for Dick’s unresolved daddy issues because it’s honestly hilarious knowing that writers still can’t figure out how to write them getting along (there’s a moment where Dick says something so outlandish that I nearly lost it as I was sitting at my desk)
• Who do I have to fight to get a Midnighter cameo

I’m honestly excited about the future of Titans. It’s one of my favorite teams and the arcs they look like they’re going to explore were my favorite (and most fucked up) ones.

If you’re watching Titans, we should figure out a way to chat about it because it’s going to be a wild ass ride for sure!