WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Titans Season 3, available now on HBO Max.
Titans never shied away from the fact that Season 3 would revolve heavily around Jason Todd’s (Curran Walters) dark turn, becoming a vengeful Red Hood in shattered Gotham City. And in the first three episodes of Season 3, it’s confirmed that the precipitating moment for this is indeed Joker killing the Boy Wonder, beating the Robin to death with a crowbar at an amusement park near Gotham’s pier. However, Titans doesn’t exactly follow Jason’s resurrection from the comics, making this transformation the biggest mystery that’ll have to be solved.
In the comics, Superboy Prime’s punch shook reality up and Jason was revived, with the animated take on Death in the Family subverting the lore even more as the boy’s body was stolen out of its grave by Ra’s al Ghul and reanimated in the Lazarus Pit. This restorative pool, like the comics, would send Jason mad and turn him into the Red Hood, wanting revenge against criminals and the Bat-family for letting Joker live.
It’s way different in Titans and seems to have a few moving parts, leaving Dick’s team stumped. While Jason is hammered by the crowbar, there’s no explosion like in the source material, with Joker sitting beside his body and waiting for the cops to take him to Arkham Asylum. However, the Titans would get footage showing that someone stole Jason’s body from the morgue, which hints that Jason himself may have had a role to play in his body not being in the Wayne Manor grave.
It feels like he’s laid down contingency measures in case he ever died, which fits how he had a secret lab in Gotham making a mysterious yellow drug. He actually took some of the substance before trying to hunt the Joker down, and from the clues dropped, it seems to make people fearless. We know Jason was struggling with depression after trying to hunt Deathstroke in Season 2, so after Slade’s torture session, this drug may be what helps revive him.
The fact that Dick finds chemistry notes and can’t trace the substance at all says a lot. It might even be tied to Scarecrow, because while an incarcerated Jonathan Crane helps Dick out on the profiling to find Red Hood, the doctor’s toxin might have been appropriated. Instead of injecting fear, it could be that Jason found a way to inject fearlessness, so if his adrenaline levels have indeed been altered, it might be why he’s alive again.
Still, there are question marks around how he breaks bad so quickly and why he’s not mentioning anything about Batman murdering Joker. The Bat did get revenge for the teen, but there’s still a gap as to why Jason’s only mad at the Titans — not Bruce, whom he returned to when he ditched Dick’s crew. It’s also intriguing why he’s using gangsters to target the Titans and clean the city up rather than going after them himself, as he knows their secrets.
Jason’s grudge has already claimed the life of Hawk, manipulating Dove in the death as well, so Jason has ways of systematically breaking his former family apart. Whether all this — including wanting a better class of criminal for Gotham — is tied to his past mental health or if it’s something new he conjured when he returned to life remains to be seen. But what’s certain is that it’s going to be a bombshell because killing parents and innocent kids just doesn’t fit his M.O. More so, Dove had Ra’s ruled out as a suspect as Dick said he was in Kadeem, hinting that the Lazarus Pit isn’t in play right now. So only time will tell what — or who — brought Jason back, demented his mind and what the endgame is of all these sick traps.
The first three episodes of Titans Season 3 are available now on HBO Max. Episode 4 will release on Aug. 19.
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