Titans 2×06 Conner introduces us to the goodest good doggo and a toddler in a superpowered teenager’s body, and all I want to do is protect them both.
After last week’s breathtaking episode ended on a breathless cliffhanger, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when the episode title and preview for this week’s episode foreshadowed the fact that we’d be taking a bit of a detour in story before we saw the resolution to Titans 2×05 “Deathstroke.”
However, if we did have to detour from the story, I’m glad that “Conner” was the detour that we got.
Richard Hatem wrote 1×06’s “Jason Todd,” 1×08’s “Donna Troy’ and 2×02’s “Rose,” and here continues his streak of writing a fantastic, character-focused episode that don’t detract from the main plot or the journeys of the main characters.
Unlike “Aqualad,” “Conner” uses the storytelling to make us care about the character, rather than simply telling us we should care about the character. It also also does a good job connecting the new character thematically and narratively to our current cast of characters.
In fact, this episode of Titans is less of a detour than a parallel route to the main story. It doesn’t take away from either the narrative beats or the thematic arcs of the main characters, but instead runs directly parallel to main plotline. “Conner” supports the main plotline of Titans and expands on its themes in such a way that when Conner’s story intersects with the Titans, it feels like a natural convergence rather than a random mash-up or throwaway Easter egg.
Fans familiar with the Young Justice take on Conner find a decidedly different characterization here in Titans.
Whereas the Conner we know and come to love in Young Justice starts out sullen, angry and rude — kind of like a toddler in desperate need of a nap — the Conner we meet in Titans is earnest, wide-eyed and rather excitable, like a toddler who just tried ice cream for the very first time.
(As an aside, I like both versions of Conner, and I like the fact that they’re both believable ways of a depicting a newly born teenager with a massive identity crisis. But I will say that while both versions of Conner made me want to wrap them in a hug and protect them, I did like the fact that the Titans version would actually let me.)
As Dr. Eve Watson tells us, Conner essentially has the emotional and mental maturity of a two year old — one who happens to have the intellectual capability of the second smartest man in the world (you know Bruce Wayne is number one), and the physical/superhuman abilities of the strongest hero on the planet.
His great power coupled with his stunted emotional maturity, his traumatic entrance into this world, and the fact that he has the world’s biggest identity crisis means that this is a character that requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the actor.
Luckily, Joshua Orpin is more than up to the task.
It’s a difficult needle to thread to be a toddler in a teenager’s body, to be someone who is innocent and wide-eyed but with adult traumas and villainous anger issues — but somehow Orpin is able to pull it off.
As he walks through the world, you truly see his awe at experiencing everything for the first time. When he comes up against memories that aren’t his and experiences that he’s inherited, you can see the rage and gentleness warring within him.
I’m sure there’s a temptation to play all these emotions in big, exaggerated ways; instead, Orpin gives us a nuanced, subtle and gentle performance of a boy trying to figure out who he is, what he can do, and how much choice is inherent in his life.
If identity was the overriding theme of the first season of Titans, then choice has been a major theme in this season.
While we don’t know the full story yet of the sins of the Titans that led to Deathstroke’s vendetta against them, we can assume that it boils down to the fact that the team had a difficult choice to make — and chose to make the wrong one.
Choice is the overriding thematic arc for both Kory and Rachel, the former who must choose between her birth home and the her adopted one; the latter who must come to understand that goodness and heroism is a choice, even if it often feels like on that it beyond her.
Conner then aligns nicely with the character arcs of the two of the powerful members of the updated version of the Titans. As an individual who was made from two of the most powerful, yet opposite, men on the planet — and who has inherited traits and memories from both — he, too, must come to understand and accept that he has a life filled with difficult choices ahead of him.
He could’ve taken the revelation that he was made, not born, as proof positive that his life and his choices are out of his hands — that his destiny was created in the same laboratory from which he emerged.
Luckily, it is Dr. Eve Watson who finds him first before anyone else, and Eve who tells him, “You are not a monster. You’re a person.”
Which means he will suffer the same lows as any person in this broken world might, but that he has the capacity to choose to be better.
“Just remember that people are not what they say they’re going to do,” she tells him, in one of the episode’s most affecting scenes, “they are what they do.”
And what Conner chooses to do in the next few scenes is to be a hero — even at the cost of his own life and safety.
Stray thoughts and lingering questions
- Of course, we all know that Conner isn’t going to die — even if it was kryptonite bullets that Mercy Graves shot him with. My guess is that as the next episode is titled Bruce Wayne, it’ll be some handy WayneTech and Bruce Wayne know-how that’ll save Conner’s life.
- 1000 words and no mention of Krypto? For shame on me. Obviously I loved him and think he’s the goodest good dog, but he couldn’t at least have warned Conner that something bad was coming? My dog warns me about people I don’t even need to know about, like the UPS man.
- Last week, I was sure that we were going to see Kory fly and save Jason, and that Titans fans just don’t lose. Except that it was Conner who saved him instead, so I guess Titans fans do sometimes lose.
- Did everyone catch the look on Jason’s face as he thanked Conner? I know that the comics have a Tim x Conner connection, but I wouldn’t mind a Jason and Conner bromance in the show instead.
- As I just spent 1000+ words talking about how much I like Josh Orpin/Conner, please know that this is no shade on him. However, it is a little frustrating that he gets to display the full extent of his powers immediately while the women on the team who are incredibly powerful — Kory, Donna and Rachel — are either often depowered for the sake of the story and are constantly shown holding their powers back. I’d like it a whole lot better if they were allowed to be as powerful every episode as Conner got to be in his introduction.
- Speaking of powerful women, I hope that this isn’t the last we see of Mercy Graves or Dr. Eve Watson!
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