Summary
“Super Super Mart” begins to connect previous seasons to this one as the Titans try to protect Sebastian from his apparent fate.
This recap of Titans season 4, episode 4, “Super Super Mart”, contains spoilers.
Words are the weapons of a critic, so I’m keen on the idea of them being magic. Narcissism? Maybe. But it’s not an entirely outside-the-box idea to imagine language, spoken or written, to have a transformative power, to mean much more than a simple arrangement of letters, or even a dictionary definition. Titans feels the same way, I think. Thus far the plot has hinged on the idea of magic words. We don’t know what they mean or what they do, yet, but it’s something to do with harvesting blood, Rachel being stripped of her powers, demented billionaire supervillains throwing up snakes, and a red moon that might destroy the world.
Titans season 4, episode 4 recap
You’ll recall that at the end of Titans season 4, episode 3, Mother Mayhem tried to force Sebastian to say those words aloud. This week’s outing, “Super Super Mart”, is dotted with various flashbacks to the late-90s that reveal how Mother Mayhem herself was recruited in very much the same way. She was moving between jobs, letting untapped power run amok until she was presented with a card full of words by a man in a diner. She spoke them aloud, and everything changed.
When Sebastian begins repeating these words to Raven in the present day, she clamps a hand over his mouth. She recognizes them, obviously, and what they might mean, especially in how they relate to her father. There are some new additions to the gang since the first season, such as Tim and Jinx, so we thankfully get a primer on Rachel’s demonic world-destroying father Trigon while the Titans are on their way back to the asylum (again, from the first season.)
This is how the pieces begin to come together. The Titans assume that the Organization is responsible, and the asylum being littered with relevant clues — old photographs of Mother Mayhem and Sebastian’s neighbor, restraints that no longer restrain anything, a book of fairytales featuring characters that look very much like the Titans themselves — only adds to that theory. Burning the asylum down in the first season seems to have freed Mother Mayhem from it.
The clues littered around the asylum begin to trigger the next flashbacks, as we see Mother Mayhem’s son being wrested away from her because the prophecy speaks only of a girl. She’s muzzled and isolated for 18 years until she’s fed to a snake, whispering “Sebastian” all the while.
This all relates to Rachel. She’s the chosen one of the prophecy, the girl everyone was waiting for. She has the same birthmark as Sebastian, who also seems to factor into the prophecy, which has to occur within the next eight hours before the blood moon disappears. All the Titans have to do is keep him safe until then. Easy!
Not really, of course, since they’re immediately set upon by 200 undead former asylum employees and a zombified Deathstroke, which is probably not the cameo people were expecting from him. As Jinx advises, the usual approach with zombies is to behead them, but that doesn’t work with Deathstroke. When Conner punches his head off — there’s some fun gore in this episode — he simply strolls over to it and reattaches it to his spurting neck. We see that Mother Mayhem is remotely controlling him, and he’s able to stab Conner, somehow penetrating his skin, until Jinx is able to use her magic (and a knife) to sever the connection.
This is a minor victory, though, since by the time everyone returns to S.T.A.R. Labs, Conner is throwing up blood and snakes. Naturally, he keeps this completely to himself, since you know how he has been this season. Bernard gives Sebastian a secure room with Rachel, where they’ll both apparently be safe but almost certainly won’t be. What grim developments will the next episode hold? Well, I guess we’ll see.
