DigificWriter

After finishing Season 1 in its entirety, "Hank and Dawn" now shares a place with "Dick Grayson" as my favorite episode(s) of the series because both episodes hit two of my favorite storytelling conceits: flashback episodes and dream sequence/alternate universe episodes.

It also doesn't hurt that "Dick Grayson" reminds me of a piece of script-based fanfiction that I wrote for an alternate take on the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which, unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of).

stlavin95

Yes we do need a title

DigificWriter

Title suggestion: "From sidekicks to heroes" .

stlavin95

Works for me

DigificWriter

Some bullet-point thoughts on "Trigon":
* Contrary to what seems to have been the "majority opinion", I thought ending Season 1 with the episode "Dick Grayson" was a brilliant decision, setting up the series to return extremely strong

* However, "Trigon" didn't quite live up to its brilliant setup, and, IMO, the reason is that I don't think the episode was presented to us as originally shot, but was instead cobbled together from both originally-filmed material and new pick-up stuff that didn't quite work and was more extensive than it needed to be

* I did enjoy the continuation of Trigon's dream sequence manipulation as established with the Season 1 finale, with the most exciting being Jason's scenario where he and Dick went toe-to-toe

* In a negative contrast to that, though, I was extremely let down by Hank and Dawn's scenario, which felt anticlimactic and not worthy of the characters

* As neat as it was to see Trigon manipulate some of our characters into going dark, the episode started to go downhill as Raven somewhat anticlimactically freed Dick and then had a haphazardly rushed confrontation with her father that was more than likely a much larger part of the episode as originally filmed

* Compounding the problems with that scene, we then transitioned into a series of scenes that were not only clearly pick-up scenes, but that also didn't mesh well with the first half of the episode

* We didn't need to see Jason randomly interrupt a television interview just to throw out a provocative one-liner that was very clearly included only to facilitate the introduction of Slade Wilson, a sequence that took way too much time and would have played much better as a 'stinger'

* We also didn't need to have Ian Glen's Bruce Wayne show up for as long as he did; we did need to see him and Dick talk in order for Dick to finally move on and overcome the psychological trauma he'd been dealing with for all of Season 1, but the sequence would have been better served if it were to have come as the denouement of the episode rather than as setup for a pointless sequence of scenes where the Titans team heads to San Francisco and sets up shop in what is presumably Titans Tower

After the brilliant conclusion to Season 1, Titans unfortunately returned with less of a bang than it needed to and with an episode that suffered from clearly not being presented as originally shot but was instead hybridized and rewritten in a much more haphazard fashion than it should have been.

canthaveyou

New Thread:
Titans #2: "From sidekicks to heroes."