In episode 9 of Titans, Garfield Logan goes on a spiritual journey to find out the truth about his past and rejoin his family. The episode is streaming on Max.
Recap
A memory of Gar plays out when he was a young boy at the zoo and all alone when a zookeeper comes along and comforts him. When she walks away to find his parents, Gar begins to hear the screams of the animals around him and panics.
Present day Gar wakes up in a cave with a bonfire where a creature approaches him which is a half bat and half lion. Gar backs away from it but it is stopped by Dominic, the man he met a while ago.
He asks Dominic where he is and learns that he’s atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Dominic explains that Gar was in the Red, a force that connects all living beings together, and he pulled Gar out.
He then goes into the history of his own superhero identity, the Freedom Beast. He was destined to protect the Red much like the people that came before him.
Gar wants to go back to his family but Dominic says that he needs his help first and helps him see visions of apes being experimented on in a lab where the virus that killed his family was also created.
He sends Gar on a spiritual vision quest where Gar sees Rachel, Jinx, and other moments from his past to realize that he needs to help Dominic.
They storm the lab and eventually reach the operating room where Dominic uses his power to fuse the doctor with the chimp who was going to die because of his experiments.
He points Gar to the office of the man that the doctor worked for and Gar finds out that it was Niles Caulder, the man responsible for turning him into Beast Boy.
Dominic claims that Niles created the virus in his quest for immortality and didn’t care how many people it killed. He tells Gar that Beast Boy’s destiny is to protect the Red which means he needs to be alone, away from the Titans.
Gar insists that he will not leave his family and reasons that since the Red is what connects every living being, then his connection to all of them cannot be alone.
Gar then travels to the Multiverse, seeing a glimpse of the Flash, Swamp Thing, Grant Morrison, and Shazam, and then briefly meeting Stargirl before being transported to Doom Mansion where Vic Stone finds him.
Review
- The series creators are scrambling to tie up every loose end before the finale and that results in episodes like this which feel like filler and do not contribute much to the central narrative.
- The Multiverse moment is great but the Arrowverse has already done it multiple times so at this point, this doesn’t really have the same kind of impact.
- Gar appears to go through his own journey away from the Titans and it will take some impressive writing to connect his thread back to his teammates. Whether that involves what he’s going through now or he just slots back in with no explanation is up in the air.
Titans season 4 episode 9
Director: Eric Dean Seaton
Date Created: 2023-04-20 12:30
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