Summary
“Home” finds Jason considering his place while the other Titans attempt to figure out what he means to them.
There’s no place like home, but what if your home doesn’t want you anymore? This is the predicament that Jason Todd is faced with in the latest episode of HBO Max’s Titans. He might once have been one of the gang, but now he’s a kidnapping, murdering drug addict aligned with one of Gotham City’s most notorious criminals. Can all be forgiven? Will he — or anyone else, for that matter — still be around for the decision to be made either way? Things are certainly heating up, ironically as they get wetter, and it’s increasingly unclear exactly where various character arcs and dynamics are going to end up.
Titans season 3, episode 8 recap
Things do begin uncharacteristically positive, though. Following on directly from the end of last week’s episode, Gar and Molly talk about wanting to save Jason, and the giant Titans symbol on the Gotham skyline, replacing the infamous Bat-Signal, suggests that they might just be the heroes to do so. Love is in the air, too. Dick and Barbara have a date at a swanky gala, and Conner and Blackfire have spent the night together, romantically pulling up galaxy maps and pointing out their home planets. Yes, one of them has been destroyed and the other is totally inhospitable to its queen, but let’s not worry about that too much.
Besides, there are other things to worry about, such as Tim Drake. He turns up at Wayne Manor in “Home” boasting about having figured out Nightwing and Batman’s real identities — and he’s right on the money. Tim’s a mega-fan of the Bat-family, having followed Dick since the night his parents died at Haly’s Circus. There are certain trapeze moves only Dick and his late father could pull off, and since Robin and now Nightwing have been using them to fight crime, it wasn’t hard for Tim to put the pieces together. He’s adamant about being the next Robin, though you have to wonder why anyone would want to be given the fates of the previous two, and Dick wisely recognizes this, continuing to play coy even after he realizes he has been rumbled.
Speaking of once and future Robins, Jason is in withdrawal, and his lack of anti-fear toxin has given him a crisis of conscience. Crane’s full plan to poison Gotham’s water supply is revealed, and Jason, reunited with his emotions, thinks it’s a bonkers idea. To prove it, he attacks Crane and knocks him out, leaving him on the floor of the pumping station where he’s attempting to bore through the steel floor with a concrete drill. Jason’s clearly not as on-side with Scarecrow as he once was, which coincides nicely with Tim tipping Dick off to his current location. With Barbara’s help, Dick is able to track him down, though crashes his motorcycle when he tries to give chase. As Dick parts with his consciousness, Jason looms over him.
Just as we’d forgotten about Starfire’s personal plot, which involves her regularly becoming entranced and trying to cook her family and friends, “Home” provides a reminder when she interrupts Blackfire and Conner’s bed-breaking sex with plumes of fire (Conner’s super-speed dash of embarrassment is a great comedic beat, by the way.) Since Blackfire is as surprised by this as anyone, Starfire reasons her predicament isn’t related to her sister and is instead someone trying to tell her something. To try and get to the bottom of it she, flanked by Blackfire and Conner, re-enters the Manor’s isolation tank and experiences some more visions that it’s still difficult to make complete sense of.
Speaking of visions, Dick, who wakes up in hospital to find Barbara at his bedside, is having some of his own. When she makes him read out from the eye test chart to prove he isn’t concussed, it morphs into the Bat-symbol, but he stays quiet about this even as the visions continue to plague him. Crane, meanwhile, wakes up on the floor of the pumping station to be greeted by a kindly security guard, who inadvertently gives him an idea before Crane unceremonious offs him from behind. This is the second of Crane’s two nasty kills in this episode — the second is Leslie Thompkins, who he later visits and breaks down to all child-like. After discovering she has set him up to be ambushed by the GCPD, he breaks her neck and escapes once again.
But the main arc of “Home” is Jason’s, since it finds him free of Scarecrow’s chemical influence for the first time, and suddenly forced to grapple with his grief and regret. He visits a peep show and forces the participants to roleplay as Hank and Dawn so that he can apologize for killing the former; the girl gives him some sage advice that the only place such transgressions can be forgiven is home, so Jason, using Molly as an intermediary, gets a message to Dick courtesy of Gar that he wants to meet, alone.
Dick’s willing to hear him out. After shooing away Tim, who has been following along and resolves to bring in both Scarecrow and Red Hood to prove his worth, he also says he’s willing to welcome a regretful Jason back home, though in the tunnels he’s still besieged by odd visions. The others aren’t exactly thrilled with this turnaround, except perhaps Gar, who has experienced a similar thing courtesy of Cadmus and believes that Jason can be redeemed. Everyone agrees to at least take him in and assess the situation, so they all head out to do so, though not quite fast enough to stop Crane from shooting a meddling Tim Drake outside the pumping station.
With Tim’s lungs filling up with blood, everyone heads inside, and an overeager Starfire lets off a fireball, triggering a massive explosion. This alerts the GCPD, but just as Barbara is ordering a SWAT team to be dispatched, the ceiling above her desk, which has been leaking all episode, releases a torrent of water. When we cut back to the pumping station, Starfire — and the audience — realize Scarecrow’s plan. He baited her into attacking to blow through the steel floor, releasing the anti-fear toxin directly into Gotham’s water supply. Ominously, as Barbara watches that very same water being mopped out of her office, the new Titans signal turns a deep, blood red.
