Summary
“Brother Blood” brings several characters to important crossroads and gets extremely weird in the meantime in a solid midseason finale.
This recap of Titans season 4, episode 6, “Brother Blood”, contains spoilers.
So, folks, we’ve reached what amounts to the midseason finale, and it’s impressive how much “Brother Blood” feels like one despite the majority of it taking place within the confines of S.T.A.R. Labs. But Titans is dealing with some big ideas here, several characters are reaching major personal crossroads, and it all seems to be coming together into the most daring, ambitious season of the show thus far.
Titans season 4, episode 6 recap
“Brother Blood” opens with Conner shaving his heat using his own heat vision reflected in a shard of glass, which is badass barbering but has the unfortunate consequence of transforming him into a try-hard, insanely smug Lex Luthor wannabe for the entire episode.
I have mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand, Lex’s DNA constitutes half of Conner’s biology, but “Brother Blood” doesn’t really explain what causes the immediate and drastic change, and it’s implied that it’s just him acting out and trying to find his way after his recent stressful experiences. Conner is technically still a child, so this makes a degree of sense, but he hasn’t been characterised that way until now, really, so just suddenly introducing this fundamental change is very odd.
With the Lex side of his heritage becoming dominant, though, his genius also begins to come to the fore, which is good news since it allows Conner to come up with a solution to the whole Blood Moon problem involving LexCorp satellites. This is one of a couple of problems that the gang attempt to solve remotely from the labs, and it’s a success. When Mother Mayhem figures out what’s happening, an attempted hack into the LexCorp servers clues Conner in to her location, and he heads there to confront her alone, which isn’t a good idea.
Meanwhile, the gang brainstorms a way to get Sebastian out of Mother Mayhem’s clutches after she snatched him in Episode 5. Jinx theorizes teleportation, which is apparently an old but unreliable magic trick that they can pull off thanks to the technology in S.T.A.R. Labs. She also has a spell for Raven to retrieve her powers, which involves her eating a lock of Jinx’s hair. Both of these ideas coalesce in the same place, which is right in the heart of Mother Mayhem’s domain, just in time for the big action-packed finale.
Mother Mayhem spends the whole episode in that lair trying to convince Sebastian to drink from the Well of Blood by cycling through flashbacks of his earlier life, all symptomatic of a man being trampled on for his agreeableness, his intelligence, his differences. It’s a relatively decent way of providing some context for why Sebastian might make the decision he eventually makes, which is to drink of the blood and become, for the first time in his life, someone who is a little more than simply ordinary.
This all occurs in the big climax, in which Raven regains her powers and becomes White Raven, a concept cribbed from the Teen Titans animation representing Rachel’s purest, most primal and powerful form, a stark white in contrast to the darkness of her father, Trigon. Jinx also gets stabbed by Mother Mayhem, seemingly fatally. When Sebastian finally drinks the blood, he lets out a devastating scream that buffets everyone present, with the Titans winking out of there, leaving Sebastian behind to settle into the blood pool and presumably become even more dangerous.
