My Thoughts on Titans: Season 4 (Final Season)

Where to watch: Max (U.S.)/Netflix (Canada)

NOTE: There are a few small spoilers here, but as usual, I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

Titans has always been such a fascinating mix of contradictions, right up until the end. The series is presented with a hard R-rated tone, complete with swaths of bloody violence, f-bombs, drug use and sex, yet despite being made explicitly for adults, it's also purely unapologetic about embracing the lovable comic book heritage of its source material, DC Comics' Teen Titans mythology. Titans was a show that was simultaneously colourful and stark serious, gritty and yet full of wholesome family moments, and somehow both highly faithful and yet not faithful at all to what the Teen Titans characters have traditionally represented in the wider DC Universe mythos.

Now that Titans is over, and I've finally watched its last season, I feel like I'm even more acutely aware of just how ambitiously weird its concept was. This is despite the series being positioned as the flagship offering of the DC Universe Originals lineup back during the end of the 2010's, when the DC Universe Infinite app tried to host original TV shows, not just comic books. Yeah, that little pre-COVID window of years was a strange time for DC. Despite that however, the short-lived DC Universe Originals initiative nonetheless gave us several of the best DC shows ever made, across animation and live-action.

Yet somehow, despite being planned as its crown jewel, Titans ultimately ended up being kind of the weak link in an otherwise stellar selection of DC Universe Original shows. Titans was always a pretty good show, at the very least, but it was never a truly great one, being easily outclassed by the other offerings that came from the DC Universe Originals line.

Sadly, almost every DC Universe Original show has since been abruptly cancelled by the combined likes of the fledging DC Studios, the now-Nexstar-owned CW network, and the post-merger Discovery in various cases, with Max's animated Harley Quinn series being the only DC Universe Original offering that was ultimately spared from this DC TV purge. Titans naturally got the axe after DC Studios announced that it would be pivoting future DC movies and TV shows into a brand new, fully-unified continuity that would no longer separate their worlds, though the series was at least given a fourth and final season to wrap up its storyline on its own terms.

You wouldn't know it from looking though. Titans' final bow almost feels like it's in denial about its fate, with this fourth and final season proceeding not as if it's a worthy climax for the show, but more as if it's just like any other season. It's not until a hard pivot toward the end of the series finale that Titans makes some effort to definitively conclude its events, and even then, this conclusion doesn't truly feel earned. Granted, I suppose it doesn't help that Titans' showrunners obviously planned for storylines past Season 4, with most of the show's myriad supporting character arcs and plot threads simply left hanging in the end, while this retroactive final season forces the Titans to work with what was supposed to be a mere season-long pit stop in Superman's stomping grounds, Metropolis, without ultimately making it back to their own home base in San Francisco.

After the previous Season 3 dealt heavily with the Batman Family mythology, complete with being entirely set in Gotham City, Season 4 was no doubt planned to continue a similar idea, only this time with the Superman Family. Rather than deal with cosmic forces and alien threats however, the usual antagonists that often confront Superman and his allies in Metropolis, Titans' fourth and final season merely teases this prospect by kicking off with an invitation by Lex Luthor, played in an infuriatingly brief turn by a standout Titus Welliver, before Lex is thanklessly killed off at the end of the season premiere. Lex is then quickly replaced as a potential season-long villain with the Church of Blood, a familiar enemy faction to the Teen Titans in DC Comics lore, led by Mother Mayhem, who serves as one of this final season's main antagonists.

See, that really spotlights some of Titans' innate weirdness right there; Its final season's main villain is called 'Mother Mayhem', despite so much of the show otherwise being very bleak and poe-faced when it comes to its villain portrayals. The fact that Titans' take on the Church of Blood is also quickly linked to Raven's demon father, Trigon in turn feels like a way to forcibly make Titans feel like it's coming full circle, without truly achieving that. Instead, Trigon ends up being another infuriatingly disposable threat that's completely wasted in the end, after he was already dispatched ridiculously quickly at the start of Titans' sophomore season.

This feels like another instance of taking a really exciting and awesome villain from DC lore, and replacing him with an inferior baddie for this final season. In this case, Mother Mayhem ends up being complemented by Sebastian Sanger, a struggling video game programmer who also happens to be the estranged son of Mother Mayhem. There's a potentially interesting idea that's explored here, as Raven discovers that she has a half-brother who's about to become a dangerous occult threat, while Sebastian's video game ambitions are also tempted by Superboy, who is 'inspired' to embrace his Lex Luthor DNA over his Superman DNA during this final season. This shocking turn for Superboy is an admittedly nice switch from how Superboy is mostly portrayed across other DC media, even if Superboy's sudden switch in character isn't justified all that well during this final season.

With 12 episodes to wrap up its final storyline in Season 4, Titans feels like it's kind of all over the map in its last episodes, but overall, the show's strengths still count. It's still a solid superhero action-drama with a decent amount of style, and its attempts to reinvent Teen Titans lore do lead to some legitimately compelling material that this DC franchise would otherwise never be bold enough to attempt. It's just too bad that the series had more ideas than it could fully realize after its abrupt cancellation notice from DC Studios, which is probably why Season 4 of Titans feels entertaining enough, but also undeniably disjointed.

Like I said, it's clear that Titans is trying to bring back some of that 'horror movie' flavouring from Season 1 in its final episodes, and it doesn't do a terrible job, admittedly. The Church of Blood are legitimately imposing villains that perform some genuinely freaky feats of terror, even if the season falls back on a lot of blood vomiting more than it maybe should. That loses its shock value after the fifth time. Regardless, while Mother Mayhem and Sebastian Sanger don't reach the heights of highlight Titans villains like Deathstroke or the Nuclear Family, they at least manage to be nicely imposing. That is, until Sebastian is forced into his comic book costume for the series finale, and, no, it doesn't translate well to live-action. You know something went wrong when CW series, Arrow ended up delivering a more intimidating version of Brother Blood, the villainous mantle of Sebastian from DC Comics lore.

Despite everything going on throughout Titans' fourth and final season as well, I struggle to remember some of its finer details. The magical threats stick out to me, as does the material with Superboy, Raven, and a brief addition to the team through Jinx, a familiar Teen Titans villain that's made into something of an anti-hero in the Titans universe. Beyond that though, a lot of Titans' final season feels compromised, particularly when it comes to the constant feeling that it blatantly wasn't supposed to be the end of the series. Even some of the lines of dialogue and little story details peppered throughout this final season still feel like they're teasing future seasons that we'll never get to see, and with the huge creative overhaul at DC currently in its early stages, that just creates viewer frustration that didn't need to be there.

That being said, Titans does offer at least one good tribute to the era of DC media that's now ending with the rise of DC Studios, and the upcoming DCU franchise. This comes through Beast Boy, after he's repeatedly contacted by DC's multi-dimensional, animal-governing force, The Red. The Red helps to set up Beast Boy's final resolution in the Titans universe, while also providing an excuse to bounce him around the DC media multiverse, something that eventually culminates in a spiritual crossover with most of the Doom Patrol characters, albeit not the same versions as the ones from the actual Doom Patrol TV show. Because multiverse.

Anyway, before that fairly fun crossover episode, Beast Boy is moved through a handful of other live-action DC Universes, making quick pit stops in The CW's Stargirl universe, The CW's 'Arrowverse' by way of The Flash series, former shared movie universe, the DC Extended Universe (represented by Zachary Levi's Shazam), and a quick dimensional nexus that lets him 'hear' some of the denizens of worlds like the 1960's Batman TV series, Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie, Max's aforementioned Harley Quinn series, and The CW's Smallville, among a couple of other examples. Beast Boy even quickly gets to see his animated self on Cartoon Network's long-running Teen Titans Go! series, which is a cute and surreal moment, before you remember that most of these alternate realities are now defunct, or returned to being defunct, now that the newly-formed DC Studios is shifting the franchise away from this multiverse-focused approach. Still, at least the Geoff Johns, Walter Hamada and Greg Berlanti-dominated era of DC media is given a nice, potentially accidental send-off with this multiverse scene, even if it still has some curious omissions. No love for Lucifer, Pennyworth, Gotham or Young Justice? Really?

Alas, the point stands that 2010's-era DC was WAY too overcrowded on the TV end especially. DC Studios killing the majority of DC's TV shows and in-development movie projects, and almost entirely wiping DC's slate clean, painful as it is, is definitely the right move, going forward.

As much as I feel like the series never truly reached its full potential, Titans does nonetheless feel like a relic of a bygone era for DC TV, and it definitely doesn't fit with James Gunn's and Peter Safran's new vision for the rebooted DCU. Like Gotham, Stargirl, Pennyworth and the recent Swamp Thing series, I feel like Titans ended too soon, but I also understand that it has to end in order to make room for better DC media, on Max and otherwise.

I will always respect Titans for trying to do something very boldly different with the Teen Titans mythology though. Titans may not fit with the new DCU (which, consequently, is reportedly developing its own reboot of the Teen Titans), but it also feels like the kind of gonzo pitch that the new DCU would probably be too scared to greenlight. As overcrowded as DC's TV slate was during the 2010's and early 2020's, it did at least give us a lot of really wild, experimental stories that you wouldn't see even in DC's comic books, let alone other DC media.

Titans may have ended the same way it started, as a series whose outside conceit is sometimes more interesting than the show itself, but as difficult as it is to articulate my overall reception to Titans as a whole, I will definitely miss the show, now that it's done. It was a weird show, made for a weird time at DC, but I had fun with it, and I am a little sad that Titans is probably weirder than DC will likely dare to go for the foreseeable future, under DC Studios.

IF I HAD TO SCORE IT: 7/10