Original Sins of Titans (2018), Issue #1
I'm rewriting Titans because I love it. That's the whole reason. But if you're going to fix something, you have to see what's broken first.
Basically, Titans gets progressively worse each time you rewatch it. The first time, all you see are actors' face cards and cool music. As you go for round two, you see mistakes. But as you rewatch it yet again, you notice choices. Real writers, actual human beings, sat in a room, pitched these ideas, nodded, and later filmed them. And if mistakes can be forgiven… Choices? Choices are a whole other story.
I'm not here to dunk on Titans. I love it. I just wish it was done better. And if something's not written right, it's not written right—that doesn't mean you can't love it.
I love it enough to rewrite it. That's the whole project. Here's masterlist if you're interested
⸻✃No Clear Theme✁⸻
A strong theme is the spine of any story. Titans had scoliosis.
Some projects earn themselves a reputation as the f-boys of storytelling. Titans is an honorary member of their frat party. It flirted with many ideas but never committed to any of them. There was found family because of the whole “Dick Grayson collects strays” route. Responsibility with Rachel not being able to ignore Trigon’s presence. Legacy with the infamous “F-bomb Batman” line. And more topics that were thrown in because they were stylish, not because they served a certain purpose.
Look, the story doesn’t have to be a therapy handbook or the most intricate metaphor web. It just needs to have an identity. Something that the viewer knows the show will provide. Columbo had a humble and bumbling everyman outsmarting the arrogant rich class. When you put the episode on, you know you’ll get to see how merit wins over privilege. Even seemingly “plotless” Downton Abbey had the thematic trajectory of changing times and family perseverance. You can clearly feel and name what the series is about. Titans? Titans is all about shock factor, crude language, and blue tint. Otherwise, you don’t know. You don’t know why you would watch Titans.
Smallville isn’t a flawless masterpiece, but one thing it provides in full measure is the thematic journey. Coming of age. Feeling like there’s so much more to you, while fearing it as much as you desire it.
⸻✃Messy Structure✁⸻
The show’s writing didn’t have a big picture. Not thematically, as I stressed out earlier, and not structurally. They didn’t even try to connect the plotlines.
Season 1 was about Dick’s anger and leaving Batman behind, but it didn’t connect well with the Trigon planet-ending prophecy. Actually, they didn’t connect at all. Two storylines, zero overlap. This problem progresses exponentially because for some reason, writers of this TEAM series struggled to create a story that involved the TEAM. Kory’s subplots never, I kid you not, NEVER had anything to do with others. Yes, Gar and Conner tagged along but only because they had nothing to do otherwise, not because it connected these characters. Gar had no agency. The last season basically separated him from the team and left him in that red, almost Doom Patrol limbo till the end. Rachel defeated Trigon with a snap of her fingers and became irrelevant because writers didn’t know how to handle such an overpowered character.
Season 2 had Deathstroke, Cadmus, Titans break-up drama, Dick’s hallucinations, then Dick’s jail time, then Dick’s Nightwing outfit reveal, the Jericho is alive movement, Rose and Jason romance, Hank’s MMA career, and some magical Bruce Wayne hallucination that Dick must’ve infected girls with. Choose your fighter.
Season 3 could be the closest to handling a theme, with Gotham’s crime pairing well with a trauma-driven arc surrounding Dick and Jason... But then they underdeveloped Red Hood and forced Scarecrow into the mix. Why? They had the cards to fix the previous seasons, okay. They had them. They could explore Jason from the point of view that actually makes Titans rethink their choice and makes them admit their mistakes, their insolent behavior, and the way they let others down. But NOPE. Red Hood is Scarecrow’s meth-making intern. That’s the gist. This is my pain point, I swear. Why Jonathan Crane? Why? Titans writers were fans of Breaking Bad. We see that. But were they fans of Titans?
Actually, I have a theory here. I went to a film school too, okay. I studied screenwriting. I joined Stage 32 and watched far too many screenwriting tutorials on YouTube. All that jazz. You know what all these have in common? The story examples they use. Almost every writing course will mention Breaking Bad as a casestudy for TV and Star Wars: A New Hope as a casestudy for feature. You see where I’m going with this one? Maybe Titans writers thought they could fix the previous seasons if they remembered their school days, but instead of getting inspired by the neat structure and flow of BB they just decided to adopt the yellow suits, drugs, and weird professor/failed student dynamics? Just a thought to mull over.
⸻✃Stupid Plot Choices✁⸻
This could be a part of the previous point, but it drove me nuts so much, I had to make a separate one.
You can’t choose Trigon as your opening big bad. You simply can’t. There’s a reason storytelling tools are called “RAISING action” and “conflict ESCALATION.” Any story has to be building up, even if the stakes and scale are relatively small. In Titans the stakes aren’t small. They are huge. So huge they couldn’t work with themselves anymore.
Their lineup literally looks like this: Trigon, THE evil incarnate and destroyer of the universe ✄ Deathstroke, a mercenary who kinda has metahuman strength ✄ Red Hood and Scarecrow, two drug dealers who are absolutely normal human without any superpowers but with addiction to their own stuff ✄ Brother Blood, game developer.
Yeah, Brother Blood is also Trigon’s son, but honestly? Just because of this complete de-escalation, you could never treat Sebastian seriously. You couldn’t treat any of the villains seriously. Titans just defeated the universal threat, the greatest evil this planet has yet seen, and you want the audience to feel scared of Deathstroke? Did the showrunners think that there would only be one season of Titans and want to use their darkhorse as a one-shot? Because that could possibly explain why it was a desperate move to scale down to other villains, though not really when you remember that Titans didn’t defeat Trigon in season 1. There was always a plan for season 2. They knew Trigon would only be defeated in season 2. And about that…
Yet another bizarre plot decision. The only reason why you don’t defeat the big bad in the last episode of this big bad’s season is because you have a concept, a greater scheme behind it. We don’t solve the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death at the end of the first Twin Peaks season because the whole idea is to make this mystery unsolvable (which unfortunately had to be scribbled off because of execs meddling, but that’s beside the point). Titans didn’t have a reason NOT to defeat Trigon in the last episode of season 1. There was no clever idea, no secret knowledge Rachel was yet to obtain, and no escalation to the trouble before it got better. To be completely honest, I had to check out the Titans fandom wiki page to actually grasp what happened and how Rachel defeated the demon after all. Rachel realized that the key is her dream. As the viewer, I still don’t realize what she realized. She tells Trigon that now she sees that her real family are Titans but to finally demolish him, she also says, “You know what they say. Genetics is destiny.” So contradictory, it’s dumb.
It would be a pretty ironic watch, you know, a drinking game, if the show didn’t treat itself so seriously and wasn’t aiming at a status and a rating far above what was actually going on. Which brings us to the next and probably final point of this issue.
⸻✃Inconsistent Tone & Identity✁⸻
Dark, mature, and edgy? Or a soap opera in spandex? Titans never chose.
The series was the edgelord’s paradise. All these emotionally constipated characters, the forced grit, and drama for the sake of drama. Oh! And the show loves “exploring” trauma. They keep piling up characters' hardships and difficult upbringings but they don’t ever resolve them. The facts are brought up for the sheer shock value and nothing more. You can’t just spell it out that Donna was traumatized when she witnessed her father’s death. You have to show it. Yes, “show, don’t tell” is still a thing. You can absolutely keep the original sequence that shows what the traumatic event was. It’s okay, especially if you are really proud of how it showcases the character’s psyche. But it has to show in the present day. The behavior, the temper, and the response mechanism your character possesses in the present have to be tied to that origin.
Donna’s father died in a fire, and she moved to Themyscira. So? Is she afraid of fire now? Is she emotionally distant from men because she’s afraid of losing a loved one again? Is she overreliant on men because she wants to replicate the feeling of having stability that her father provided? No. Donna is okay. She has friends, both male and female, she has a social life, and she’s got a normal stable job. Maybe she’s been avoiding relationships after Garth’s death, but it honestly doesn’t seem that evident. She never comments on it, so we could assume she just doesn’t want to expand her love life because she feels okay on her own. She is a total jerk just like the rest of the Titans, but it’s a topic I’ll cover next time and isn’t connected to that fire. We didn’t need to be taught that Donna was traumatized in that fire because it meant nothing for her arc.
All the edginess was slapped on to spice things up. You can’t convince me there was thematic (or any) value to the time Dick was running around San Francisco with a gun, hallucinating about Bruce Wayne, visiting strip clubs, and finally bursting into some random dude’s bathroom. It didn’t move the plot and emotionally it could only mean that Dick lost his mind but the show never acknowledges that he’s gone crazy. It’s actually implied that his hallucinations are right and he should follow their lead.
The show tried so hard to be “adult” it ended up looking like a teenager’s fanfiction. A very poorly written one! Most fanfic writers care for characters enough to give them enough of a story structure—they use basic conflict escalation for starters! Even shipping tropes has more logic and spine than Titans' writing. One-bed trope? Basic escalation. Characters were on the road when a natural disaster happened, that’s the inciting incident. There’s one last room left and they get the key, that’s raising action. They open the room and see only one bed and no couch, that’s escalation. And they finally get down and dirty. Perfect climax, may I say.
Titans (2018) didn’t get a perfect climax. Guess you can say the writers weren’t the most attentive lovers. That’s why I decided to sweep in as Titans’ mistress. Figuratively speaking, of course.
There will be separate posts with each of these problematic spots rewritten and fixed. With a minimal amount of spoilers since Titans (Rewrite) is an audio drama that you will be able to listen to pretty soon!
Epilogue
I didn’t want to fix Titans (2018) out of spite. I wanted to see what would happen if the same idea and same actors got the story they deserved.The tragedy of Titans isn’t that it was bad, it’s that it could’ve been incredible. That’s the kind of story that deserves resurrection. And I'm just trying to dig up the Lazarus Pit.
