Review: ‘Titans’ Season 1 Episode 7 - "Asylum"

“Asylum”

Writers: Bryan Edward Hill & Greg Walker

Director: Alex Kalymnios

Starring: Brenton Thwaites, Anna Diop, Teagan Croft, Ryan Potter

Review by Adam Ray

The last episode was an intermission. It was a welcome way to see deeper into this gritty DC Universe. This chapter finally brings the full Titans team together in the type of action that we’ve been waiting for. With the information given to us last time, there’s a possibility of Rachel’s past at last becoming clear. The group mobilise all together and we see Dick and Kory as assertive interrogators. These characters and the dynamics we’d associate with them are finally at their strongest.

The tone of the series has never wavered. It has stayed in the realms of dark realism. This episode has made great strides into showing differences from that formula without really leaving it. The whammy put on the characters through their rough trip in the asylum is a real showcase of some of the weird science from the DC universe. We’ve seen that side on the increase with all the members of the Doom Patrol. This episode, in true standard, takes it in its stride, which is a great way to present the oddities of comic book science.

It’s a style just so unique to this show. Seeing slips through the past, and what looks like a very slick Batcave, through the traumatic visions of the past. Sure Kory, Gar, and Rachel’s powers are deeply speculative and ‘out there’. At no point does the show dwell on it, at least not as much as in the early episodes. By all accounts they should be remarkable, but the characters are holding them as self evident truths. It might not sound like it, but that’s a great bit of realism. The characters have accepted these strange powers and that’s a welcome part of them becoming the team we all know and love.

Conclusion

With the odd as their everyday life, and their epic dispatching of shady men in asylums, we have to wonder how they’ll handle the truly otherworldly. All comics fans know where Kory is from, and what Rachel’s father really is. How a show will handle this kind of the distant planet of Tamaran and an interplanetary demon like Trigon. Only one way to find out, I suppose, and the series has my undivided attention.

(This review was originally published on the Dark Knight News website on November 27th 2018)