Teen Titans – Review: Trust

The Brotherhood of Evil has begun its master plan to eliminate all of the young
superheroes around the globe, starting with honorary Titans Wildebeest and
Hotspot. This new threat brings Robin to Morocco. But with an unknown enemy, how
can anyone know who to trust?

Reviews by Bird Boy
Media by Bird Boy

Titans Voices
Scott Menville as Robin
Hynden Walch as Starfire, Madame Rouge
Dee Bradley Baker as Widlebeest, Thief
Bumper Robinson as Hot Spot
Glenn Shadix as Brain, Monsieur Mallah

It’s always a good thing when you start out with a great intro an episode and you expect to get a lot out of the story. It’s never a good thing when you see the “surprise” ending to the episode while you’re only half-way through it. Unfortunately, that’s the truth behind “Trust.”

A thrilling chase of Wildebeest in the beginning and the sudden loss of him (or apparent loss, I’m sure we’ll see him again) set the stage for this episode. A bit of chess with Mallah and Brain, a conversation with Rouge and we’re on our way to Hot Spot’s location.
Rouge is after Hot Spots Titans communicator; by having a communicator, the Brotherhood of Evil can listen into the Titans conversations and…learn the locations of where they converge to fight bad guys. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as, even though the Titans have video on their communicators, they don’t just leave the things open all the time.

Anyway, the episode revolved around Rouge attempting to get Hot
Spot’s communicator. Hot Spot is a real neat character; we saw a bit of him in the “Winner Take All” episode in season two. There’s a lot of cool lighting and fire effects for Hot Spot to throw around, especially his spiral kick at the end—that was really impressive, both for the character and the animation for it.

About halfway into the episode, Rouge takes the form of Robin and tricks Hot Spot into eventually powering down (since Rouge can’t touch him) so she can take the communicator. Rouge calls Robin on the communicator (why? I have no freakin’ clue. Brain just wanted the communicator) and asks, as Hot Spot, to come his aid. Hot
Spot wakes up from being knocked out and then destroys the communicator after he finds out that it’s really Rouge and not
Robin.

Robin arrives and we’re treated to a Robin vs. Robin fight. Some neat animation in here, but it really was just a generic fight.
There wasn’t even anything that impressive about it; in fact, it seemed to go on a bit longer than necessary. Hot Spot shows up again to kick Rouge’s butt and he and Robin are safe at the end. But wait, there’s a surprise ending! See, Hot Spot didn’t really kick Rouge’s butt, it was the other way around; Rouge was really Hot Spot at the end. And on top of that, Robin gave Hot Spot his communicator so they could stay in touch!

Can I just say…what the hell? Is Robin that stupid?
How could he possibly have not known that it wasn’t Hot Spot at the end? I hope it turns out that Robin knew all along and that it’s revealed that way in a later episode—only then it wouldn’t make sense, since he flew off at the end and basically left Hot Spot under a pile of rubble. Considering he came to his aid to save him,
I doubt Robin would just ditch Hot Spot.

In addition to Robin being an airhead, Hot Spot was pretty dense as well. I don’t know if the character is really like that as I haven’t read any comic books with him. But for this show, or at least this episode, Hot Spot showed a high amount of stupidity. About forty clues that the Robin he was talking with was actually Rouge and the fact that Robin told him to power down four or five times after its revealed Rouge can’t touch Hot Spot due to his heat…it just astounds me. I know it’s a kid’s show, but Teen Titans never used to pander this much to the younger crowd.

Animation in the episode was pretty generic. Nothing amazing and as
I said, the fights were pretty dull as well. Music was also pretty run-of-the-mill, especially the music during the Robin / Robin fight. It wasn’t very action-oriented at all and sounded like something you’d play while taking a bubble bath.

I really didn’t enjoy the episode (as if that wasn’t obvious). It had a great start, but about halfway through it began to drag on and on. They really didn’t need to focus a whole episode on this, considering we saw the same thing (fight and run from Rouge) it really did feel like a waste of time.

Season five better start picking up; three episodes in and it has already got the makings of an incredibly generic and dull season.
Perhaps that’s because of those three episodes, we barely saw the
Titans work as a group in any of them; it’s all been new characters and new characters apparently can’t sustain a whole episode for themselves.