The biggest problem with Titans to date is that it doesn't actually feel like an adaptation of DC Comics' Teen Titans. The reasons for this go beyond a lack of the usual trappings one expects to see in a superhero show, such as costumes and grand displays of superpowers. The show is also hampered by slow pacing and more mysteries than there are solid facts that the viewer might use to consider answers to the questions raised by the story so far.

A look at the first issue of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's New Teen Titans reveals a stark contrast between the source material and the Titans show. The comic book introduced its seven main characters and a common enemy within a span of 25 pages. The television show has yet to develop most of its core cast and has barely started to bring its protagonists together after three episodes. It has also failed to reveal a clear villain for the heroes to rally against.

Related: DC's Titans: Cast, Character & Powers Guide

This pacing might have been tolerable had the entirety of Titans' first season been released all at once, as with Netflix's superhero series such as the recent release of the third season of Daredevil. Indeed, the series seems to have been written and filmed with the binge-watcher in mind. Unfortunately, the weekly broadcast network scheduling favored by DC Universe seems to be at odds with the intentions of the show's creators, resulting in these incongruities when one watches the episodes one at a time.

There's No Actual Team And Little Teamwork In Titans

Teen Titans

The largest single issue with Titans is that there still isn't a proper team after three episodes, much less one that calls itself The Titans. In fact, most of the series' announced protagonists haven't met yet. It is also unclear precisely how the whole team will come together and why they would need to do so.

Perhaps the best example of this is Beast Boy. Though he figured heavily in the early advertising for the show, Beast Boy barely appears in the first three episodes of Titans. His total screen time barely totals over two minutes, even including a scene involving a CGI green tiger breaking into a big box electronics store. Gar's only interaction with another member of the team so far is his introducing himself to Rachel, as she plays pinball in the arcade at a skating rink.

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Even those characters who have met in the show don't act much like the Titans from the comics and barely seem to tolerate each other's existence. Even early on, while the heroes in Marv Wolfman's comics frequently butted heads, their arguing had an undercurrent of respect and love under it all. In the show, Hawk seems to be one step away from punching Robin at all times, and while this does fit his combative attitude in the comics no explanation is given for it on the show save for the revelation that Dove once had romantic feelings for Robin. Then again, it is hard for the characters to develop engrossing relationships when half of them are suffering from identity issues (i.e. Kory's amnesia and Rachel's fears over what she is becoming) and the other half are introverts who don't open up to others easily, like Robin.

Robin is The Only Core Character With A Costume In Titans

Titans Dick Grayson Robin and Jason Todd Robin Face-Off

Visually, the show suffers in that Robin is the only one of the main cast who has a traditional costume. This is something of a flaw in what is nominally meant to be a superhero show. While Hawk and Dove have costumes, we only see them in action for one episode and they are only supporting characters in the story so far. We know from images from the set that Starfire and Raven are supposed to get costumes at some point, although we don't know when.

Page 2 of 2: Titans' Slow-Burn Approach is Too Slow

Titans The Nuclear Family

Titans Has No Clear Main Villain

A larger problem with the series is that the story lacks a central villain to tie the cast together, with one-quarter of its first season aired. While it seems likely, based on the central story's focus on Rachel Roth and her awakening powers, that the main antagonist will be Raven's father in the comics, the demon Trigon, there has been surprisingly little to suggest that in the show. In fact, Trigon's name hasn't even been mentioned once!

None of the bad guys from the first episode of Titans have carried over into the series at large. Robin easily defeated the child-beater he had been stalking. Starfire flame-broiled the Russian mobsters who threatened her life. And Rachel's darker self saved her from The Acolyte - a mysterious man who killed Rachel's mother and spoke vaguely about bad people using Rachel to bring about the end of the world and his need to kill her before that happened.

Related: Is Lewis Tan DC's New Batman in Titans?

The closest thing the series has to an on-going enemy so far is The Family - a quartet of assassins loosely based on a group of villains called The Nuclear Family from the Outsiders comics.  While The Family offer a menacing presence, with their facade of an ordinary American family that reeks of forced conformity, it is unclear if they are highly-advanced robots like their comic-book-counterparts or if they are humans enhanced by some form of super-serum, with electronic implants that might kill them if they fail in their mission, ala Suicide Squad. A meeting with their handler in the third episode does little to clarify matters, with the handler threateningly toying with some kind of electronic remote control, yet warning the children of The Family not to eat the (presumably poisoned) butterscotch candies they were given earlier after reporting their failure to capture Rachel Roth.

Titans Has Too Many Mysteries And Too Few Answers

Titans Teagan Croft As Raven

From a plotting perspective, Titans has serious problems with introducing mysteries and not resolving them. While exposition can be boring and a show can quickly grow tiresome if it attempts to explain every aspect of its world to its audience, Titans falters in that it explains very little and establishes even less.  We know that Robin had a falling out with Batman, for instance, but it is not explained why. There is also an interesting paradox in play, where, in their efforts to change up the characters from the comics in a way that might hold the interest of established fans of the Titans franchise and give them something new to enjoy, the show's writers have made the characters more inaccessible to newcomers.

Related: Superman Exists (In Some Form) In The Titans Universe

Starfire's story is a prime example of this. When we are introduced to Kory Anders in the first episode, she is waking up in a crashed car, next to a dead body, with no memory of who she is or anything beyond the fact that she is trying to find a girl named Rachel Roth. She has no idea how or why she is able to summon fire and can turn a living human into a charred corpse in seconds. All we really know about her, as Rachel says after Kory handily beats up three men in a fight in a diner, is that she is a "total badass." Unfortunately, she doesn't display much personality beyond that and the only relation between the character from the comics and the Titans version of Kory is that she has a short temper.

This lack of development and explanation is prevalent throughout the first three episodes of Titans. It is never made clear if Hawk and Dove, who have superpowers in the comics, have any metahuman abilities in the Titans universe. Nothing is revealed of just what exactly The Family are or the nature of the organization that is employing them to find Rachel Roth. And then there's the question of just what is happening to Rachel - a mystery that holds no surprises for fans of the original comics, but proves surprisingly underdeveloped from the perspective of a newcomer.

It's quite possible, if not likely, that many of these issues will fade away in retrospect after the full season is released and can be binged straight through, but the show's current slow-burn approach makes it hard to consume 45-minute increments once every 7 days. Titans shows a lot of promise for what it could become, eventually, but it's most certainly not there yet and needs to get there soon.

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