[9.1/10] This is an easy high water mark for Teen Titans. The opening montage is some of the best work the show’s ever done, using imagery of jack-booted thugs subjugating the city, while Terra says “This is who I am. I’ve done terrible things. I have no regrets” as though she’s trying to convince herself of that last part, more than simply telling truths.
What’s so compelling about Terra is that her motives are complex. She’s internalized her abuse and rejection. She asks to be destroyed at one point in this episode. She certainly does terrible things, that opening monologue puts forward, but she does them for comprehensible reasons, related to insecurity and people taking advantage of her for it. It’s a great example of the abstraction of genre storytelling allowing writers to get at these ideas in creative ways and bring them home to audiences with more inventiveness and effectiveness.
“Aftershock pt. 2” also features some of the show’s best art direction. The imagery of Slade's goons marching through the streets while the Titans plummet to their doom is striking, Likewise, when our heroes start attacking Terra through the smoke, there’s a haunting, almost dreamlike quality to it, to where you wonder if Terra might simply be hallucinating manifestations of her own guilt rather than actually fighting her foes. The cuts between the desolate present state of the city, and Terra’s flashbacks to fun times with her friends is low-key gutting when you acknowledge what she’s lost.
In truth, the show has some trouble filling in the fight quotient apart from Terra’s story. It’s honestly pretty cool to watch Slade combine Cinderblock, Plasma, and Aftershock into one super monster. But what results is a pretty generic skirmish between him and all the Titans sans Beast Boy that feels like filler until the other characters are finished with their business.
But the actual Terra material is great. The show makes Slade’s abuse toward Terra less subtextual, as he gives her physical punishment for failing to kill the Titans and running away from the fight. The episode implicitly frames Terra as a product of this abuse, and it’s the point, but it’s still tough to watch.
Her subsequent scenes with Beat Boy are uplifting though, even as they are a bit melancholy. He comes in, feeling the most betrayed, ready to do what needs to be done, only to see Terra crying and asking to be eliminated because she thinks she’s just bad and unfixable. Instead, he tells her that she still has a choice, that rather than allowing Slade to use her for evil she can take over her own powers and use them as she sees fit, and that it’s not too late.
To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about that middle part. I get what the show’s going for, but it’s a little damaging to implicitly tell abuse victims that it’s their choice (and by extension, their fault) if they end up in and stay in abusive situations. I don’t think that’s Teen Titans’s intention here, but it comes off a little like Kanye’s “slavery is a choice” nonsense.
But I think what the sow means by all of this is that people like Terra should know that they have the power and the agency to go down a different path. Terra turning her powers against her abuser is a cathartic moment of literal and figurative empowerment. The “It’s never too late to do better” is a great moral to impart.
The ending is also extraordinarily poignant. The volcanic eruption is a bit convenient, but Terra making up for her ill-deeds by sacrificing herself to save her friends and the city is a beautiful and poetic gesture. The show contrasts her opening self-recriminations with Beast Boy’s tender eulogy, one that honors the complexity of Terra as a person, while also recognizing her as a friend, a Titan, and ultimately, a hero.
It suggests that for however much she viewed herself as little more than the sum of the terrible things she’d done, Terra made up for the red in her ledger, to borrow another comic book franchise’s terminology. Her self-realization, reconciliation with Beast Boy, and ultimate self-sacrifice all end this season on a poetic high note, one that shows what Teen Titans can do when it’s firing on all cylinders.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-07-18T18:21:58Z
[9.1/10] This is an easy high water mark for Teen Titans. The opening montage is some of the best work the show’s ever done, using imagery of jack-booted thugs subjugating the city, while Terra says “This is who I am. I’ve done terrible things. I have no regrets” as though she’s trying to convince herself of that last part, more than simply telling truths.
What’s so compelling about Terra is that her motives are complex. She’s internalized her abuse and rejection. She asks to be destroyed at one point in this episode. She certainly does terrible things, that opening monologue puts forward, but she does them for comprehensible reasons, related to insecurity and people taking advantage of her for it. It’s a great example of the abstraction of genre storytelling allowing writers to get at these ideas in creative ways and bring them home to audiences with more inventiveness and effectiveness.
“Aftershock pt. 2” also features some of the show’s best art direction. The imagery of Slade's goons marching through the streets while the Titans plummet to their doom is striking, Likewise, when our heroes start attacking Terra through the smoke, there’s a haunting, almost dreamlike quality to it, to where you wonder if Terra might simply be hallucinating manifestations of her own guilt rather than actually fighting her foes. The cuts between the desolate present state of the city, and Terra’s flashbacks to fun times with her friends is low-key gutting when you acknowledge what she’s lost.
In truth, the show has some trouble filling in the fight quotient apart from Terra’s story. It’s honestly pretty cool to watch Slade combine Cinderblock, Plasma, and Aftershock into one super monster. But what results is a pretty generic skirmish between him and all the Titans sans Beast Boy that feels like filler until the other characters are finished with their business.
But the actual Terra material is great. The show makes Slade’s abuse toward Terra less subtextual, as he gives her physical punishment for failing to kill the Titans and running away from the fight. The episode implicitly frames Terra as a product of this abuse, and it’s the point, but it’s still tough to watch.
Her subsequent scenes with Beat Boy are uplifting though, even as they are a bit melancholy. He comes in, feeling the most betrayed, ready to do what needs to be done, only to see Terra crying and asking to be eliminated because she thinks she’s just bad and unfixable. Instead, he tells her that she still has a choice, that rather than allowing Slade to use her for evil she can take over her own powers and use them as she sees fit, and that it’s not too late.
To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about that middle part. I get what the show’s going for, but it’s a little damaging to implicitly tell abuse victims that it’s their choice (and by extension, their fault) if they end up in and stay in abusive situations. I don’t think that’s Teen Titans’s intention here, but it comes off a little like Kanye’s “slavery is a choice” nonsense.
But I think what the sow means by all of this is that people like Terra should know that they have the power and the agency to go down a different path. Terra turning her powers against her abuser is a cathartic moment of literal and figurative empowerment. The “It’s never too late to do better” is a great moral to impart.
The ending is also extraordinarily poignant. The volcanic eruption is a bit convenient, but Terra making up for her ill-deeds by sacrificing herself to save her friends and the city is a beautiful and poetic gesture. The show contrasts her opening self-recriminations with Beast Boy’s tender eulogy, one that honors the complexity of Terra as a person, while also recognizing her as a friend, a Titan, and ultimately, a hero.
It suggests that for however much she viewed herself as little more than the sum of the terrible things she’d done, Terra made up for the red in her ledger, to borrow another comic book franchise’s terminology. Her self-realization, reconciliation with Beast Boy, and ultimate self-sacrifice all end this season on a poetic high note, one that shows what Teen Titans can do when it’s firing on all cylinders.