Magic is the name of the game in Titans Season 4, and that means that Raven is going to need some help–especially since Mother Mayhem drained her of her powers last week, leaving her blonde and gem-less. Dick Grayson goes to ask someone for help and guess what, they used to bang. Spoilers follow for Titans Season 4, Episode 3, “Jinx.”
“Jinx”
Any good quest has a few sidequests, and this week Dick Grayson is the one running around. This episode does the critical work of tying a few disparate storylines together but feels as much like a setup as Episode 2 did. The big stuff isn’t happening yet, and it doesn’t feel like we’re getting a whole lot of forward movement with the characters.
Rachel lost her magic last week, Gar has been hearing voices, and Kori is coping with her newfound powers. Meanwhile, new character Sebastian has been having visions and hearing voices. As it turns out, that’s all connected, and this week brings it together.
Dick Grayson, Playboy
One of Titans‘ bad habits is repeatedly putting Dick Grayson in close quarters with women he’s had past relations with, and this season is no different. After the Titans’ devastating loss to Mother Mayhem, Dick and Kory head to prison to meet her–Jinx. In the comics, Jinx is an elemental magic user who draws her power from touching the ground, and in that way, she seems to be very true to the character. The prison guards walk her out in shackles, but as they do she frees her foot from her shoe and before anyone can do anything, digs her foot into the dirt and disappears in a cyclonic gust of wind.
This sends Dick and Kory running off to one of the more impractically-named cities in DC’s USA, Bludhaven, to find her. They do, but Kory opens the tiny chest containing her object of interest–a small, beating heart that turns Kory to stone instantly. To remove the spell, Dick takes Jinx to see an elf who reigns over a secret nightclub and ends up kicking most of the queen’s guard before knocking out the queen herself.
It turns out that Jinx could’ve removed the spell the whole time and was trying to get his help paying off a debt. In other words, this was an excuse for a nightclub fight scene. Brenton Thwaites is easily the best live-action Dick Grayson at this point, though, and I’m not going to get too mad about another fight scene with him at the center. Surely he has a stunt double for some of the more acrobatic stuff, but they’re doing a great job of making it look good.
Connecting Storylines
Elsewhere in the Titansverse, Gar stays with Rachel to keep an eye on her now that she’s quite powerless. Instead of being angry about it, she’s relieved to not hear the needs and worries of others in her mind, though that free feeling doesn’t last long. Gar dashes out of the bus for those voices he’s been hearing, and she follows him. He takes her hand to show her what the sky looks like to him–everything is turning red–and the two find that grisly tree adorned with hanging bones. Gar hears the voices calling him a skin-walker, a shapeshifter from Navajo culture, and they warn him of the coming blood-fueled apocalypse.
At the same time, Tim and Conner are at Star Labs, where Tim is trying not to let his crush on Bernard be too obvious. They end up connecting symbols from the warehouse last week to symbols in Sebastian’s failed game. Sebastian gets a call from what he thinks is one of the developers he spoke to previously, but is actually Mother Mayhem.
This leads to one of the harder-to-watch scenes in one of these shows that I can ever remember seeing. While Sebastian is trying to prove to the guy that they talked, the guy is possessed by Mother Mayhem. He picks up a pair of scissors and points them at his face, open. It’s going to cut away right? They get closer. It has to cut away. They get closer. And then the scissors actually go into the guy’s eyes as we look on. It’s legitimately horrifying, even for a show as bloody and violent as Titans.
Despite how separated the different storylines are this week, they all tie together and it feels like we’re going to see some real plot movement soon. Titans likes to take its time with setup, but hopefully, after 3 episodes we’re almost done.
