Titans - Season 1, Episode 10 - Koriand'r

TITANS Season 1 Episode 10 [Review]

Titans Season 1 Poster
TITANS Series 1 Episode 10 “Koriand’r”/ Written by GABRIELLE STANTON/ Directed by MAJA VRVILO/ Starring TEAGAN CROFT, RYAN POTTER, BRENTON THWAITES, ANNA DIOP, CONOR LESLIE & RACHEL NICHOLS/ Produced by DC UNIVERSE

[WARNING! This review contains SPOILERS!]

The worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life is a rather obscure B-Movie called Legend of The Roller Blade SevenThere are many reasons why this movie is awful, but for me it all comes down to one line. Shortly after our hero and heroine are married, their mentor – a holy warrior – offers the groom his sword as a present, along with this bit of wisdom.

This sword has much killing left to do. Now go in peace.”

That line was the most utterly contradictory and insane thing in a movie that was reportedly almost entirely improvised and set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by different gangs of skate-punks, bondage enthusiasts and militia-men. The final effect is not unlike playing Fallout 4 with every insane mod possible installed.

I mention this because the latest episode of Titans has a similar exchange which broke my brain in the same fashion. As Donna Troy and Dick Grayson are chasing after Kory Anders (who they just stopped from killing Rachel Roth while in a fugue state), Donna says that she’s sorry that she was right in guessing Kory wanted to kill Rachel.

You’re weren’t,” replies Dick Grayson. “Kory’s not a killer. She kills people sometimes, but none of this makes sense.”

And those lines are DC Universe’s Titans in a nutshell.

Titans - Season 1, Episode 10 - Koriand'r

With a title like “Koriand’r”, you’d expect this episode to largely focus on Kory Anders, the amnesiac woman whose search for Rachel Roth has been a subplot of Titans since the first episode. That would be logical, certainly. This is the penultimate episode of the first season and Kory has made no progress in recovering her memory all season. But if you’ve been following Titans so-far you know logic and this series are passing acquaintances at best.

Case in point. Remember last week’s cliff-hanger where Hawk and Dove found out they needed to find Jason Todd after seeing Rachel calling for help in their dreams? That isn’t addressed in this episode, beyond confirming that Rachel was calling for help while being strangled by Kory.

Most of the episode is actually focused on Rachel and her mother. The good news for Starfire fans is that this episode does finally see Kory starting to remember who she is and finding her way to the starship she took to Earth. The bad news is that this revelation is almost an afterthought as far as the action of the episode is concerned.

To say that this all feels rushed is an understatement. Kory recovers just enough of her memory to info-dump just who Rachel is and why Kory was sent across space to kill her. Yet certain key details are left unexplained, such as why Kory was in Russia when the series opened when her space-ship was parked in Ohio.

The only redeeming factor of the episode is a wonderful fight scene where Donna Troy breaks out her lasso and some rather effective acting from Conor Leslie and Ryan Potter.  Leslie is a wonder as Donna Troy and Potter delivers some good silent acting as Gar Logan begins to realize there is something not right about the Roth farm while exploring the house. Everything else is as nonsensical as Dick Grayson’s claims that Kory Anders isn’t a killer – she just kills people sometimes.

1-5 Rating

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