In the previous Episode of “Titans,” the quirky sorceress Jinx joined the team as a temporary replacement for a depowered Rachel. Kory, during her statue-stupor state, gets a dream vision of her Tamaranian mentor, who warns her of her destiny approaching during the events of the “red moon.” The team rescues Sebastian Sanger from the clutches of May Bennett, aka Mother Mayhem, and takes him along with them. Garfield is plagued by recurring visions, which also forebode a “blood moon” and the elemental force of Red. The fourth episode reveals May Bennett’s background as to how she eventually became Mother Mayhem and doubles down on action as the team finds itself targeted by the cult of blood.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Titans’ Season 4, Episode 4: Recap And Ending
The fourth episode plays two narratives of varying timelines in a back-and-forth sequence, one of which concerns the present-day Titans, while the other one deals with May Bennett’s backstory. The episode began in 1996; we see May Bennett as a regular working woman, going through her white-collar job and getting pestered by her addict boss. It is shown that she is conscious of her supernatural powers and possibly unknowingly uses them to manipulate her annoying boss to commit suicide. Subsequently, she gets fired and meets a young Dr. Adamson from “The Organization” as she is sulking at the office bar. Series fans will remember Adamson and his mysterious cult, “The Organization,” from season one, who was concerned with reuniting Rachel Roth with her father, the interdimensional demon Trigon. As we speculated from the first episode itself, this season will once again deal with Rachel’s origins and Trigon as part of this season’s central crisis. However, Adamson manages to manipulate May into joining their Trigon-worshipping cult by making her utter the mystical phrase “Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos.”
We are brought back to the present day, and a hinted-at ominous event has already started taking shape as the moon in the background is shown crimson in color, something that is troubling both Rachel and Sebastian. Rachel, herself a victim of mystical curses and premonitions that haunted her psychologically, understands Sebastian’s plight. She forms a bond with the estranged Sebastian pretty quickly and inquires about his involvement with Mother Mayhem and her cult. He reveals Mayhem tried to make him utter the infamous phrase of Azarath, which Rachel asks him not to utter in full. This information makes Rachel disclose her speculation to Kory and Dick that The Organization is making a return, something that is surprising for all of them since, in season one, the team blew up their hideout, “Agnews Asylum,” with all the members inside. Dick decides to check on the place to discover any related clues.
In the flashback, we see Adamson luring May and her new friend at the organization, Gina, with the prospect of bearing Trigon’s child. May and Gina go through a test of faith to prove their worth, and Gina betrays May to gain the glory all by herself. To her surprise, May completes the quest, too, and is hailed as Trigon’s queen.
En route on their journey to the spot where Agnews Asylum was, the founding members of the Titans—Kory, Raven, and Gar—give a quick history lesson to the newest recruits like Jinx, Tim, and Sebastian. They discuss how Kory came to earth to fulfill a prophecy by killing Rachel Roth, aka Raven, daughter of the demon Trigon, the inter-dimensional demon possessing immense power. After arriving at the spot, they find a certain department store named “Super Super Mart” has been set up as a front to keep the Asylum away from public eyes. Team discovers the secret entry point and descends underground; May Bennett watches their activities using a human thrall.
As the team reaches the inner sanctums of the underground hideout, they discover a sealed-off section of the Asylum that was unaffected by the fire all those years ago. A photograph of May and Gina helps Sebastian identify them as the lady who approached him in custody and Gina as the neighbor next door, hinting that Sebastian was being watched over by them all along. They also stumble upon a picture book that symbolically hints at the demise of the entire team. Dick and Kory deduce that the fire at the Asylum actually helped May escape, as she was probably held captive there. Tom Drake finds a stash of tapes that give another look into the past as they reveal the conversation between May and Gina during their stay at the Asylum. The tapes reveal that May Bennett had a child with Trigon, but the child was a boy, and he was taken away from her as the prophecy of Trigon foretold a girl child to be the chosen vessel of Trigon’s arrival on earth. Rachel realizes May is a victim of the manipulations of the cult, but whereas she was saved by her friends, May drowned further. Rachel’s mother, Angela, also bore the child of Trigon, and the prophesied chosen one was none other than Rachel herself. They also learn from the tapes that Sebastian is the son of May Bennett and that, after coming of age, Sebastian will ascend during the Blood Moon to join his father. A common birthmark given by the cult is also found on both Rachel’s and Sebastian’s shoulders.
An already distraught Sebastian gets even more flustered over this revelation that his acquiring powers might lead to the death of Titans and urges the team to put an end to the entirety of it. Jinx starts to act skeptical and suggests ending Sebastian’s life to prevent the prophecy from taking place. Members start quarreling, and Garfield reveals it’s only a few hours till the blood moon ends, which means they have to keep Sebastian safe with them for a limited period of time to evade the prophecy. As they discuss, May summons the Hounds of Hell, who turn out to be a horde of zombies, to obliterate the Titans. With Jinx’s stupefying spell, the team manages to evade the horde momentarily, only to confront a fearsome zombie named Deathstroke. Conner manages to decapitate him, but to their shock, witch-controlled Deathstroke manages to reattach his head and even manages to make Conner bleed by stabbing him. ( which should be impossible since Conner is invulnerable to most physical attacks due to his Kryptonian genes from Superman) Dick distracts Deathstroke while most of the team escapes to safety, and Jinx uses herself as a decoy to make Zombie Deathstroke move elsewhere and stabs him in the eye to disrupt Mayhem’s connection.
The team reaches STAR Labs, where Bernard provides them with their most impregnable facility to keep Sebastian safe. Conner retires to the restroom, where he vomits blood and sees the vision of a snake, a fact he hides from the rest of the team. Rachel wishes to stay with Sebastian to help him, and the episode comes to an end, hinting that Conner isn’t being his best self.
Thoughts
This episode sheds some light on the mystery that has been building this season by exploring the backstory of May Bennett and revealing her shocking connection with Sebastian. This season, like previous others, adapts two iconic Teen Titans runs, both Wolfman-Perez in the mid-80s and Geoff Johns’ run in the 00s, and Jinx, Raven, and Church of Blood played the pivotal part to add mystic-horror elements to their runs also. Unfortunately for the Titans, the powerhouse of the team who is too eager to prove himself, Conner Kent, falls victim to Mayhem’s witchcraft, and it seems a Trojan element has been inserted into him through the stab wound, which will cost the team profusely in the next episode. It seems like Jinx’s repeated leg-pulling about Superman’s weakness for magic finally got to Conner in a roundabout way. This episode also had some R-rated gore-filled fun, as the chainsaw zombie decapitation scene and punched-out Deathstroke decapitation scene come to mind. Sebastian’s doom-fated transformation seems inevitable, but it’ll be tragic to see a genuinely good character succumb to his evil destiny, over which he has no control. The team dynamic was pretty good in this episode, and according to our prediction, the callback to season one was always on the cards. There is a strong possibility of Trigon’s return before the midseason break happens after episode six.
See more: ‘Titans’ Season 4, Episode 3: Recap And Ending, Explained
