Elko Diner
The second season of Titans has been quite the tumultuous ride. While the conflict with Deathstroke has been fantastic and the menace surrounding his character well written, the second half of the story has seen this sidelined in favour of a few sub-plots that haven’t quite reached the same heights. With Kory torn about her home life and the different Titans torn over what happened to Jericho, this week’s episode finally sees this start to be put to bed in favour of a final push for the climax to this plot. While Gar undergoes brain surgery at the lab, Dick comes down with a virus in prison and begins hallucinating, with Bruce Wayne appearing and reiterating Dick’s journey up until this point. Raven bolts upright after a nightmare about Dick’s funeral too, flashing to visions of a diner. At the same time, Kory finds herself in LA while in Wyoming, Dawn begins driving back to LA when she hears static come over the radio; an advertisement for the same diner we heard before. Raven has her tarots read, seeing the Hanged Man come to life, Kory yearns for a family after realizing her fractured home life on her planet has caused her to lose everyone dear to her. All of these different characters find themselves converging at Elko Diner. Meanwhile, Rose and Jason find themselves living the high life just outside Gotham City while in prison, Dick continues to be antagonized by Bruce, who tells him he’s running out of time and he needs to get out to save his friends. Raven makes it to the diner after bolting upright following another nightmarish vision, only to find Kory already inside. Here, Diane and Dawn are both brought at the exact same time too. As they begin talking about what brought them to the diner, the real Bruce Wayne appears and talks to them about what’s happening. He goes on to tell them none will survive before leaving them all in confused silence. The TV suddenly flickers on with a report about Dick breaking two people out of prison, prompting Diane to leave him to his fate and walk away. As Dawn heads off too, Raven admits to having visions again of Deathstroke killing Dick. Going their separate ways, Kory and Raven head to the prison to save Dick while the others head off to save Gar from his fate. Following the unorthodox guidance of Bruce Wayne in prison, Dick begins training as we see him take his first steps to become Nightwing. While he does, we learn Rose is working with Deathstroke, or was until she phones through and quits working with him. As Kory and Raven break into Dick’s cell, they find him gone but the words “Jericho Is Alive” scrawled on the wall. Gar awakens in Titan Tower but in reality it turns out he’s hallucinating the whole thing. Gar appears to understand though, and turns into the tiger, ripping off his strait jacket and attacking the woman pretending to be Raven. With plenty to chew over for this week, Titans finally appears to be getting back on track and converging toward the final push to stop Deathstroke. How Gar ties into this whole plot remains to be seen but I’d imagine Conner will play some sort of role in helping him, given the connection these two have shared in the past. Still, I’m looking forward to the final fight and I’d imagine it’ll be Nightwing VS Deathstroke to close out the season. Hopefully we don’t get a repeat of last season though; ending things on a cliffhanger and resolving it during the first episode of the next season offsets the pacing of the whole show. For now though, Titans delivers another good episode, even if it does pale compared to some of the other slices of dramas this season.
