It's been ages since I did a cartoon review. I want to do this to show I'm not dead and because I want to relive some old memories, and what better way to do that than by taking the piss out of Teen Titans again?
I had stopped reviewing episodes of the show because I wore out my choices more egregious episodes, and thus I could not offer any meaningful feedback to episodes I simply didn't have any connection to. But the more I thought about it, some came back into my conscious, so this may not be the only new episode review you'll see.
So I don't forget, I may cover the Red Star episode next time, and perhaps the movie night episode and the Atlas episode.
Today, I'm gonna cover that one episode where Starfire got these bizarre changes, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be an allegory for puberty, but let's find out, while I also throw shade at Starfire some.
Episode
The structure of this episode is unique, in that it is carried out in a storybook fashion; a narrator provides the details, well mostly. The story behind this is that Starfire gets a big ass pimple, and true to her character, she is flagrantly unaware of human customs and thus would not understand that everyone gets pimples... although to be fair that is fucking gargantuan. So, maybe I'm just an asshole.
There is one weird thing I noticed about this episode, even as a kid. In some scenes, characters' eyes are weird. This is noticeable on Beast Boy and Raven, where their eyes are less like the anime-type, and more like the Timmverse type (for reference, Alfred Pennyworth in Batman TAS and that one episode of Static Shock)
It wasn't for a sight gag, and as far as I know never happened anywhere else. I don't know what happened with this and why they did it, but it was weird. The first time I watched it, I cut out after the bathroom scene, and it always felt like some kind of fever dream to me, moreso than Whatever Happened to Robot Jones.
So to be fair, Starfire confides with Raven over the growth and she basically shares my impulse sentiment, that it's no big deal. But for the sake of a plot, things get worse. They always get worse, as more stuff happens to Starfire and she tries to hide it. As it happens, I'm like, what is the angle here? Is it just in a vaccum? I mean to be fair, why not have it where each Titan goes through a weird scenario and it is all just in a vaccum, it'd make for some good diversions from the action.
During a fight with Plasmus, who if you didn't know, would get his redesign in this episode after getting exposed to more toxic waste, and even in spite of this, he is still able to turn back to normal when he is not awake, and this has never been explained in the show, do I look like the kind of guy who reads comic books? It's clear this show has a certain niche in mind, but if we have to read comics just to understand the characters, though many of them were changed for the show, you'd be hung up on a lot of confusing details.
But to this show's credit, as I saw the new Plasmus first, it was a good thing I saw this episode after that so I wasn't caught off too much.
Anyway, the fight, and Starfire winds up getting exposed and in a bizarre twist... her fears are well founded as she is laughed at by everyone. Okay, I have always felt the show takes the obvious routes when it comes to most things and rarely ever tries to subvert expectations, because when they do, it leaves me confused or agitated.
The reason they did this was to give justification for Starfire leaving the planet with no reservations, but because they needed to fill more time, they had to include that scene, and drag it out a bit, lest they wanted to subliminally voice their contempt for Starfire. And yeah... she's a mess. I hate to know what she was like in the comics, because it seems here she was lobotomized considerably and I cannot take the character seriously. It is especially a problem when we get to episodes like Troq, where the emotional weight lies on her shoulders, and yeah, as someone who understood The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the racism allegory flew right over my head, but to be fair the greater implications of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle also did.
I bring up Troq, because I feel like this episode might've also served as an allegory for a real world occurrence. Puberty. The mutations Starfire goes through occur for no particular reason, at least that's how it would seem at first, but when we get there. Starfire travels to a distant planet for solitude, and comes across a mysterious woman whose eyes suggest she has something to hide, and we go into a favored trope in action shows.
An exposition dump.
The puberty theory comes into play when the woman goes into a Tamaranian phase, one that is completely normal, but oh shit, we still have a few minutes of run time, let's have this woman turn out to be a cannibal and up the anti on the phase by having Starfire rendered helpless in a cocoon. I know they needed something to push the plot along, but it feels kinda... rough. As if the writers were backed into a corner multiple times in desperate need of pushing things along.
Starfire leaving earth? Make everyone laugh at her and not feel welcome. The cause? Relegated to an info dump on a growth cycle related to her planet we didn't know about until now. The climax? Have Starfire immobilized as we get a twist antagonist that happens to eat her kind. With the weird storybook framework and the sudden crash into a standard episode format, it feels as though it's two concepts tacked onto one another. At first it wants to be an oddity, another it wants to not be, and I'm complaining because it just wasn't implemented well, they had to commit to one idea or another to get something to work.
Starfire makes it through the phase and is rid of her new features, save for the ability to shoot beams from her eyes, if they debuted here. One thing I'll give the episode credit for is that the seeds for the enemy's demise here is handled well. We kew there was a venus fly trap in this episode, that's what kills her, and everyone returns home with one last attempt at a joke. Chicken pox.
Final Thoughts
Compared to other episodes I covered, I kinda prefer this. It has an interesting idea that wasn't considered, to have a brief anthology where each Titan goes through something weird, perhaps have it themed around elements of teen life or growing up. While I probably wouldn't have liked what they came up with, it would've been interesting at least.
That said, the entire episode felt off... for the first act at least before normalcy was re-established. I feel like the writers gave up at some point, either that, or they included the weird stuff in order to help bolster the run time. You can tell when something is bolstered by how inconsequential most of its elements are. Now, did they actually bolster? Probably not.
I just feel like they could've gone about the puberty element better, like this is setting up for a longterm change, but Starfire returns almost entirely to normal physically, ignoring the eye lasers. It's as if the writers wanted to keep things from changing way too much, as if they would lose audiences over any inconsistencies. The fact things return to some shred of normality by the end of many episodes and arcs lend heavy credence to this. Now look, even Danny Phantom implemented changes in character designs, lest they feared Starfire's design would kill or strengthen- not gonna finish.
For the first time, I'm really just mildly disappointed with an episode of the show. And that's all I really have to say. See ya.
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