Titans' first-season finale came with no shortage of surprises, with mind-bending plot twists
and an exciting tease of a post-credits scene.
But the episode's dreamlike quality makes it easy to wonder what really happened.
Confused by it all?
Don't worry.
Let's break down the climax of Titans season one.
Most of the finale is a hallucination brought on by Trigon, Rachel's supervillain of a father.
In this fake reality, Dick Grayson believes he's married to Dawn, with the two having
a young son and a baby on the way.
Gar and Raven are off at college.
Life seems to be going great for Dick until Jason Todd arrives in a wheelchair to warn
Dick that Batman has finally cracked and is on the verge of turning from a crime-fighter
to a vengeful murderer.
Dick returns to Gotham to see if he can stop his mentor from killing the Joker, but he
fails.
Once Batman starts killing, he can't stop, and everyone in Arkham is on his hit list.
Dick gives Batman's secret identity to the GCPD and helps lead a mission to raid his
home, but Batman is ready for them and kills almost all of the cops, including Kory, who
appears in this reality as an FBI agent.
Dick then blows the house up and goes after Batman himself.
When Batman reaches out to his old ward for help, Dick kills him instead, and that's when
the show returns to the real world.
Turns out, nothing in Dick's trip to Gotham was real except for the emotions he felt and
the choices he made.
Trigon himself appears in the vision as a GCPD detective, but none of the other characters
were actually there, it was all in Dick's head.
Trigon used the Gotham hallucination to possess Dick.
After Dick kills Batman, the show returns to the same house where we last saw Trigon,
Raven, and Angela, Raven's biological mother.
Dick's eyes are black and sinister, and to Raven's horror, he appears to be completely
under Trigon's control.
But why did Trigon go through the trouble of toying with Dick before he took him over?
He wasn't just playing with his food, Trigon needed the Gotham hallucination for his plan
to work.
"I offered your friend a path.
It wound down many roads, but ultimately, he chose his own way."
The season's seventh episode ended with Dick burning his Robin suit, symbolizing his rejection
of the darker urges he faced going after his parents' killer.
Trigon needed to drag Dick back down to that dark place, and the Gotham hallucination was
his way of doing it.
He pushed him to the point of committing one of the darkest acts he could imagine, killing
his own mentor.
Dick didn't really kill Batman, but it felt real to him, and that was enough.
Once he stepped over that line, he opened the door for Trigon's influence.
At the end of episode 10, Kory and Donna Troy both try to follow Dick into the house where
Trigon was summoned, but they're blocked by an invisible barrier.
Only Dick is allowed to pass through.
So why did Trigon want Grayson and none of the others?
Why possess him rather than kill him?
Titans showrunner Greg Walker told TVLine that Trigon lets Dick into the house specifically
to turn him to his side, and the reason why, quote, "has a lot to do with [Trigon's] plan
for Rachel."
It suggests that Trigon needs more from his daughter than to simply have her bring him
into the world.
Whatever his master plan is, this is only the beginning.
In the season's second-to-last episode, we learn that Angela is just as committed to
bringing Trigon into the world as her former captors were.
She doesn't switch sides, she was working with Trigon all along.
"Who's this?"
"Rachel's mother?"
"They look cozy."
The reveal begs the question of why Angela was being held in the asylum the Titans freed
her from in the season's 7th episode.
It could be that making Angela appear to be a prisoner was all a part of the plan, giving
the Titans a reason to trust her when it turns out they really shouldn't.
Episode 8 of Titans ends with Rachel restoring Kori's lost memories, which turns out to be
a bad idea when Kori then attacks her.
Kori remembers that she's an alien from the planet Tamaran, sent to Earth for the express
purpose of killing Rachel in order to stop her from summoning Trigon.
But by season's end, Rachel has successfully brought Trigon into the world; in a way, the
damage is done.
Even if Kori wanted to kill Rachel, what would be the point?
Maybe now she won't have to and can use her formidable powers to fight Trigon instead.
For the most part, the real Beast Boy appears to be absent from the finale, but his presence
can still be felt in Dick's hallucination.
Shortly before Dick leaves for Gotham in his vision, his son gives him his favorite toy,
a stuffed tiger, to protect him on his journey.
The tiger was a gift from Gar, which is more than just on brand for the Beast Boy, it could
also have a deeper meaning.
It could be that Gar now has some kind of psychic connection with Dick, acting as an
antidote of sorts to Trigon's influence.
It might be just the sign Dick needs to snap back to reality in season 2.
Episode 9 focuses on Hank and Dawn, aka Hawk and Dove, showing us their origin story as
Dawn recovers from her fight with the Nuclear Family.
But their flashbacks are curiously interrupted by calls for help from Rachel, which seem
to be intruding before they ever met her in real life.
What's going on?
Why did Rachel send her messages into the past, and how did she do it?
In the comics it was shown as early as her first appearance that Rachel's psychic powers
could play havoc with time.
It seems likely that the same thing is happening in Titans, and she might not even know she's
doing it.
Either way, the heroes seem to take notice of her cries for help.
When Dawn wakes up in the hospital, she tells Hank they need to go find Jason Todd.
With one Robin under Trigon's control, maybe teaming up with the second one can help turn
things around.
The last moments of the season finale feature the potential introduction of two more DC
heroes, and they might just change the show's whole dynamic.
The scene features a naked figure, hidden in shadows, raging through Cadmus Laboratories
in Metropolis, with dead or dying scientists sprawled out across the floor.
As the man opens up a cage to free a dog, he shows a telltale "S" symbol.
Just before the screen goes black, the dog's eyes glow bright red.
It's all but certain that the naked man and his dog are none other than Superboy and Krypto.
While DC Comics have had multiple characters with the name of Superboy, one of them was
Kon-El, a clone of Superman developed by Cadmus Labs.
How would he and Krypto play into season 2?
That's still a mystery, one that will probably have to wait until Dick is back on the side
of the light.
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