Moving on to the second batch of reviews, episodes 2-6.
Pie Bros
Cyborg's birthday is coming up, and Beastboy, as his best friend, plans to get him a birthday gift, which he drew a picture of them for. He takes Cyborg out for pie at their favorite pie shop (run by supervillain Mother Mae-Eye) after singing a song about how much they like pie, but while there Cyborg says he hopes BB gets him a new video game. BB, broke, gets odd jobs and fails at them in his attempt to raise money for the gift, eventually ending up working at Mae-Eye's pie shop. Cyborg makes fun of him for it, but eventually BB tells him that he'll be working through Cyborg's birthday party, and Cyborg gets angry at BB and storms off. At the birthday party, Cyborg and BB end up getting in a big pie fight, where BB explains why he took on the job. After fighting a bit more about it, they eventually make up and BB gives Cyborg the drawing before the two pig out on pies that look suspiciously like their fellow teammates...though it turns out to just be made from their clothes and hair after they narrowly escaped being made into pies by Mae-Eye.
Unlike the first episode, Pie Bros has little to justify it, and is one of the episodes that annoys me most. It is an unpleasant mess to sit through that only gets worse as the episode goes on. Considering it starts with a short musical number consisting of the lyrics "I LIKE PIE YEAH I LIKE PIE" that's impressive. The main issue comes from Cyborg's behavior in this episode. The entire episode, Cyborg acts like a selfish @$$hole. He drops a hint to BB that he wants a new video game, understandable. But when BB gets a job to pay for said video game, Cyborg only makes fun of BB for his outfit (laughing for 20 straight seconds at his hat) and gets annoyed at him for having to work through the birthday party, which is out of his control. And at the party when BB actually tells him WHY he was working in the first place, Cyborg is STILL angry at him for no reason. Not to mention acting like a rude @$$hole during the party by making BB clean up his messes. Yeah, they make up by the end, but it's just annoying and unpleasant to watch Cyborg being a jerk, especially with how LOUD he is this series. Seriously, half his lines ARE SHOUTED, it gets irritating quickly. The show victimizing him for his friend trying to get him a present and then using that as an excuse to make him a huge jerk is just...ugh.
There are occasional funny jokes I guess, but not really enough to keep your interest. Mother Mae-Eye is thrown in for no reason and doesn't contribute to anything but taking the other Titans away from the last scene and providing a job for BB; she doesn't even have any lines. Though she does wrap up the unpleasantries in a nice little bow by making it seem like she cooked up and ate the other three Titans at the end and Cyborg and BB were unknowingly eating them. I mean yeah they zoom out to show the Titans fine but for a good 30 seconds or so it just holds on the two of them messily eating these pies, it's a cheap disturbing joke that just kind of makes you feel uncomfortable until the punchline. This episode's a good warning for things to come. The trend of unpleasantness does not go away in this series and will be a recurring theme more than likely.
Driver's Ed
Robin annoys all of his friends to drive him places he wants to go. When they confront him as to why, he says that he got his driver's license suspended after he crashed the Batmobile. However, he finds a driver's ed teacher online to help him get his license back. As it turns out, his instructor, Ed, is a thief that robs banks and then uses Robin as his getaway driver while judging his driving and failing him on the test to repeat the process next time. This goes on for a few times as Robin tries to prove he's a good driver, until eventually the other Titans realize what's happening and try to warn him. Thinking they're trying to rub it in his face that he can't drive, Robin leads them on an insane car chase until eventually Ed decides to pass him just so he never has to deal with Robin again. He proceeds to brag about how he was just using Robin and gets dragged into another dimension by a demon Raven summoned earlier.
I'll give this episode credit as another decent one. Mostly because I actually kind of like Ed as a villain for a children's cartoon. The idea of a driver's ed teacher just using their student as a getaway driver is actually a pretty funny concept, and Jeff Bennet, voice of Johnny Bravo, does a good job at his Ben Stein style delivery. Him finding more excuses to mark off points for Robin is actually rather amusing ("This radio station is terrible. That's a deduction.") and he's an enjoyable addition to the cast. Heck the villains in general are the most entertaining characters on the show, really. They're the most logical and are by far the most entertaining thing this show has to offer. I've gotta give credit to Ed for being a nice comedy villain, though really they could have waited past his introduction to reveal the fact he was just using Robin the whole time.
Guess what ruins this episode? Robin, of course. Being an obnoxious d-bag all throughout. He spends half the episode bragging about how good a driver he is and after all is said and done he admits that he knew Ed was just using him as a getaway driver but wanted to prove that he was a good driver so kept doing it anyway. Knowingly aiding a criminal to prove how cool he is. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen, less likable than the single episode villain. So yes while I think this is one of the better TTG episodes we still get the issue cropping up that our main cast is terrible, which is an omnipresence of the show that can dampen even otherwise okay episodes. Driver's Ed is probably my "favorite" episode I've seen so far, a I enjoy Ed. But Robin episodes always tend to feature Robin being obsessive, annoying, and in the end a lack of development, as Robin never seems to learn from his many mistakes. Driver's Ed shows how a good idea can only get you so far when your main characters are your show's biggest problem, and that just because you have an idea that has a lot of potential, you need your cast to actually work well with it in order for it to be really memorable.
Dog Hand
Raven's father, the king of demons Trigon, comes to visit his daughter at the Titans Tower. Raven doesn't want anything to do with him, but he visits regardless, sporting a pink sweatervest and kissing up to the other Titans. Eventually, he uses his all-powerful magic to grant the Titans whatever they want (letting BB turn into objects, making Starfire talk like an Earth teen, giving Cyborg a dog for a hand, and giving Robin ridiculous muscles). The Titans convince Raven to give her father a chance, only to find that Trigon wants Raven to unleash her full demon potential to take over the world and kill the Titans with him. Her point being made, the Titans use their new powers to defeat Trigon and Raven rubs it in their faces.
"Instead of fighting your dad, maybe you should try to be more like him."
This is the line that made me hate Teen Titans Go!, and why Dog Hand is one of my most hated episodes of the series. Let's talk about Trigon. Trigon appeared in the big finale for season 3 of Teen Titans. He was Raven's demonic, Satan-like father who was determined to use Raven to take over the world against her will, essentially seeing her as no more than a weapon for him. The Titans are supportive and protective of her in her time of pain and try to stop Trigon from hurting her. It's a powerful series of episodes and a very mature way of telling a moral rarely seen in cartoons.
Dog Hand takes that moral and kicks it into the ground as the Titans act petty and selfish, chastising Raven for not getting along with her demon father because he gave them cool stuff and even being upset that she didn't use her powers to do the same thing, and then it's all tied up to Robin saying Raven should be more like her father, who in original canon tormented Raven mentally and physically. The creators of TTG do not care about fans of the original. They clearly are trying to bring those fans in by having Trigon here, who know kid would understand the weight of if they haven't seen TT since he's given short exposition to explain who he is at most before he appears in a pink sweater vest with a sitcom laughtrack playing behind him. Yes, TTG is not in the same canon as TT for...the most part, so the original Trigon episodes didn't happen, but his presence is clearly supposed to be funny to people who watched TT and knew who Trigon was. Heck "New Teen Titans" did the same premise in one of its shorts and was actually kind of funny. But if you have the main characters tell Raven she should "be more liker her father" when you are trying to have some appeal to fans of the original with the inclusion of the character, you clearly didn't watch the episodes and just looked up his Wiki page when designing the character and said "Yup this is good this is plenty to work with". This line offends me as a fan of Teen Titans and as a mostly decent person. Telling someone they should be more like the man who in some canon abused and tormented her for his own gain is despicable, children's cartoon or not. Even without context it's a d-bag thing to say and with context it's a downright horrid thing to say. This one line soured the entire show for me. It was made clear to me at this point that the writers, who by the way had claimed they had only seen a few episodes of the original by the time they were actually making TTG, don't care about what the original show stood for and are more interested in telling bad jokes and singing off-tune music. They don't care about making consistent or likable characters, they don't care about decent morals, they don't care about being timeless or respectable (Starfire says "Haters gonna hate" way to instantly date yourself), they care about getting a cheap laugh right now. Maybe that's good enough for some people. It is not good enough for me.
The rest of the episode is just jokes about the demon king being a dorky dad and Raven complaining about him. Trigon's voice actor is doing his best and does a good job but really once you see Trigon in a sweater-vest you know what you're going to get. It ends with the Titans being in the wrong yeah but it doesn't make up for that despicable line. It just reminds me of things that did this plot so much better (Shout out to The Devil is a Part-Timer! for doing the "Satan in a wacky situation" premise better and to Toradora! for playing the father issues plot similarly but realistically and seriously). Just watch the New Teen Titans short Bad Dad, it's so much funnier than this and is way shorter. This episode is just mediocrity overshadowed by one terrible line and is the point I gave up on liking TTG.
Double Trouble
Cyborg starts having trouble keeping up with Beast Boy's rough playing (after playing the caveman to BB's T-Rex) so he asks Raven to make a duplicate of himself with her magic to keep BB busy while he does his own thing. However, the Cyborg clone gets along too well with BB and Cyborg gets jealous, so he makes a clone of BB and tried to hang out with him instead. Cyborg and BB get back together and the clones end up making more clones of themselves and kicking the Titans out of Titans Tower. Cyborg and BB suddenly realize they don't remember anything past a few months ago, so the Titans track pizza orders to a shabby hotel where they find the real Cyborg and Beast Boy fat and lazily playing video games all day, revealing they stole Raven's book months ago and made clones to replace them so they can avoid doing work. The Cyborg and BB clones go off to be hobos together and the original Titans are stuck with the fat and lazy originals with no tower to return to.
So here's the thing with these incarnations of Beast Boy and Cyborg. They're presented as the lovable goofballs who are lazy but fun. But don't you think there's an extent to how far you can be a goofball before it stops being lovable and just becomes a pain? Because this episode highlights that nicely. The ending with the real Beast Boy and Cyborg being lazy for months shows they have zero care to actually be Titans at this point and you have to wonder why they even bother in the first place. They're not enjoyable to watch, they're just lazy slobs who for some reason are supposed to have an "oh you scamps" reaction while pulling insane bullcrap like this. Making a likable character doesn't just mean making them goof off, they have to have some kind of direction to them. This episode makes me wonder why for one, anyone puts up with these guys, and two, why they're even Titans in the first place if they'd rather slack off. This isn't how you make good comic relief, this is how you make @$$holes that get killed off in horror movies.
This episode also has a big problem with the pacing of its plot. The first part of it is about the initial clones. Alright. Then suddenly there are more clones that kick the others out. Okay, so the rest of the episode is about getting back in the Tower? Nnnnnoooooo, they just suddenly realize they don't have the real BB and Cyborg and have to go find them. There's no build-up to this ending, it comes out of nowhere and could have made for a stronger plot had it been replaced with them getting back at the clones for kicking them out. It's like they took a complete story, but then posted a sticky note over the end of the episode they had planned and completely changed it. It's so out of nowhere and resolves none of the rest of the episode. Plus this is our first use of Deus Ex Raven as I like to call it, where an episode's premise basically relies on abuse of Raven's spellbook, a trend that pops up a lot in this series.
Overall this episode feels like it could have been decent if mediocre but it dipped a ton when it decided to just not finish it's mainstory to make a joke about how lazy Cyborg and Beast Boy are. Content creators seem to think that laziness is funny for some reason and I really don't understand the mindset. If you don't have some REALLY good lazy jokes to tell then just emphasizing laziness isn't funny, it just makes the characters look like lazy d-bags. This episode sets a good standard for what BB and Cyborg centered episodes often feel like. Just them being lazy jerks that only get less likable as time goes on.
The Date
Robin wants to ask out his crush Starfire on a date. However, his rival, Speedy, who looks and sounds a lot like Robin, has already made his move and asked Starfire out himself. Robin decides to ruin Speedy's chances with Starfire by disguising himself as Speedy and going on the date with Starfire himself. He proceeds to try and ruin the date by being a rude jerk the entire time, but eventually Speedy manages to escape from being kidnapped and shows up dressed as Robin to the date. He and Robin fight until Robin manages to defeat Speedy, but the deep voice narrating his thoughts (don't ask, it's a running gag this episode) convinces him to tell Starfire the truth, which pisses Starfire off enough for her to disregard Robin's request for a date. She then goes out with the deep narrator voice instead.
So obviously this episode has the flaw of Robin being a d-bag in it. That's practically a given with this show. It calls him out on his d-bagness but that doesn't make it better for him or anything. He's still an unlikable jerk for the entirety of the episode that acts selfish and annoying, practically abusing the girl he supposedly likes, using her as a footrest and throwing food at her just so she doesn't like some other guy. I don't think I'm supposed to like a romantic subplot in a show when the first episode showcasing it involves one of the involved people physically assaulting the girl for petty reasons. Heck, Speedy's the antagonist of the episode and he's a more likable character...despite being exactly the same as Robin. Which is a weird decision in the first place, every other character returning from TT is mostly similar to their originals despite flanderization, but Speedy is given a new voice actor (Robin's in particular) and body shape to fit this episode's gag despite only having loose similarities to Robin in the original (though people did jokingly mistake him for Robin there but more because he was totally unknown otherwise).
Now I think it's about time we talk about Starfire. In the original series she was a powerful fighter and, despite being naive, was a unique character and a strong female figure. Here she's an airhead love interest and that's it. Starfire in this series serves little to no purpose other than being the girl Robin has a sometimes requited sometimes not crush on. She's the blandest character in the cast and has next to nothing unique about her outside of her speech pattern (she adds "the" to a lot of sentences, "I wish to eat the cheese for the breakfast") and if an episode involves her it's more often than not going to involve Robin's crush on her. Here she stands up for herself after Robin is an @$$ to her which is nice but her only purpose in the episode is to be the object of affection. She's gone from a strong female figure to just generic love interest girl. It's a shame, really. The episode doesn't have many funny jokes, it's predictable and repetitive at times (spending way too long on speedy just shouting "LET ME GO" at the Titans Tower), and there's little of interest in it. It doesn't offend me I guess but that's not really a compliment for TTG, more a welcome change of pace after the likes of Double Trouble and Dog Hand.
More to come. See You, Space Cowboy.