Tear Jerker / Titans (2018)

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Season 1

Episode 1: Titans

• Raven has a vision of the demise of "The Flying Graysons" in a circus accident, with poor Dick being powerless to save his family and watching them fall to their death.
• Dick begins the series on terrible terms with Bruce Wayne/Batman.

Episode 2: Hawk and Dove

• Dick and Rachel discussing feeling left behind by their parents.
• The entire scene on the roof where they discuss how Dick was planning to leave Rachel with Dawn and Hank is devastating.
  • Especially with the follow up involving Rachel being kidnapped, Dawn getting thrown off the roof, and Dick having flashbacks to his parents' deaths - deaths that occurred because they fell - while trying to help her.

Episode 4: Doom Patrol

• Dick beating a father in front of his young child. From the look on his face one can tell that he is disturbed by how much he is becoming like Bruce.
• The Doom Patrol themselves. While they do love and care for each other greatly and are grateful to The Chief for saving them, some of them (mostly Robot Man) long for lives they lived before.
  Raven: Are you... invisible under there?
  Negative Man: (dryly) Wouldn't that be nice?

Episode 6: Jason Todd

• The episode opens at the Graysons' funeral.
• Dick quotes The Prince from memory while staring at a picture of Machiavelli. It goes to show just how disturbed he is by the weapon he's become.
• Jason referring to the Robin suit's "lame colours" becomes this if you remember Dick's origins - the colours were his family's colours, and Robin was his mother's nickname for him. Jason not knowing that indicates that Bruce not only gave away Dick's legacy immediately after Dick left without permission, but that he didn't consider the meaning worth explaining.
• Clay says that Dick looks happy and asks him if he is. It's tough to watch when you know how isolated and struggling Dick's been since well before the start of the season.
• Dick's flashback to having fun with his fellow Haly's circus performers while cutting away to pictures of their tortured bodies.
• As much of a monster as Nick Zucco has become, his Freudian Excuse for hating Dick is a painful one.

Episode 7: Asylum

• The look of utter horror on Gar's face after he bites the orderly.
• Dick's greatest fear is the person he's become, so much so that when he hallucinates "the deepest, darkest parts of himself", he sees his younger self, telling him that he tried to blame Zucco and Bruce, but the only person responsible for who he's become is him.

Episode 8: Donna Troy

• The opening flashback, with Dick talking to Donna about the Joker.
  • The scene really shows the psychological toll that being a Kid Hero can have on that child. Dick's personality in adulthood is now a lot more understandable.

Episode 9: Hank And Dawn

• Hank as a child getting molested by the football coach to protect Don. Understandably the memory has a great emotional impact on him into adulthood.
  • Also with the way Hank recognizes the coach’s intentions towards Don, it can be argued that this is not the first time something like this has happened to Hank.
• The deaths of Hank's brother and Dawn's mother.
• Dawn asking her grief group why they can't make the world fair.

Season 2

Episode 1: Trigon

• Garfield nearly being killed by the possessed heroes, his own friends, is hard to watch.

Episode 2: Rose

• Hank and Dawn are unable to save Ellis from blowing up, Hank has to drag Dawn out of the house.

Episode 4: Aqualad

• Garth's death is 100% this. The creators were able to make him so likeable in this show that when Deathstroke kills him, you can't help but feel bad. Donna's cries don't make it any better.
  • Donna finally reciprocates Garth's feelings literally seconds before she has to watch him die. She has every right to feel saddened and angered, choosing to remain on Earth rather than going back to Themiscyra.
• The shot of Hank silently moping the floor of the Titans Tower, still littered by confetti and paper decorations of Garth's birthday party several days prior.

Episode 5: Deathstroke

• Rachel runs away and breaks down when she thinks that she has killed Rose, fully believing that she was born bad.

Episode 7: Bruce Wayne

• Just about everything involving Jason this episode. How he's now traumatized from nearly falling to his death. How everyone is blaming him for things he did not do. The way his voice slowly starts breaking. This is all capped off by him standing on a rooftop thinking of committing suicide. By the end of the episode, you just want to give the kid a hug.
  • Even worse is how when the team starts ganging up on him, he doesn't even have a snarky comeback and he barely defends himself. He just sort of accepts that everyone sees him as a screw-up.
• Throughout the episode, Dick's guilt manifests as a hallucination of Bruce, which constantly pesters him and makes it look like he's slowly going crazy. You really get the idea that he blames himself for Deathstroke coming for the Titans, but he's afraid of not only how the team will see him if they found out, but how he will start seeing himself: as a killer. It's only when Dick confesses his secret to Jason that he feels any sense of peace.

Episode 8: Jericho

• It is revealed that Slade Wilson's son, Jericho, is not always mute, as he is perfectly capable of speech before the incident with Slade's business partners, in which he has his throat slit. Slade and Adeline are forced to watch their son bleed to death.
• Jericho's death. Or rather, his Heroic Sacrifice. As it turns out, Dick doesn't kill Jericho; Jericho saves him from Deathstroke, who is of course his father. This is after he feels betrayed by Dick breaking his promise of not following him and then being fed doubts by Slade regarding the Titans' true motives. Ultimately, regardless of what happens, he dies a hero.
• The original Titans breaking up. Hank and Dawn both feels disgusted at Dick for still using Jericho despite their concern for doing so, with Dawn also breaking up with him. And Donna, while still on speaking terms with Dick and tells him to visit her if he wants to, clearly wants nothing more than be away from him at the moment.

Episode 9: Atonement

• The cat's out of the bag, Dick confesses the truth about Jericho's death to everyone. Predictably, they don't respond well. Dawn, Donna, Hank, Jason, Rachel, and Rose all choose to leave the Titans, leaving Dick, Gar, and Kory as the only ones remaining.
  • Dick's greatest fear is people leaving him if they find out the truth. He has been shown that five years ago, when Dawn, Donna, and Hank left him for a similar reason. Now, he gets hit by the same karma, but twice worse.
  • Donna, who as noted above was the only one still on speaking terms with Dick after the OG Titans' breakup, is having none of it anymore, musing how many "fucking half-truths" Dick is going to tell her. Only for Rachel to lament that, for the OG Titans, at least they got half-truths, while the new Titans were kept in the dark the whole time.
  • Gar begging Rachel to stay. Their relationship has been strayed in the past several episodes, but it is clear that they still value each other as friends, if not lovers. Rachel responds that she can't, but her tone suggests that she is saddened that by leaving the Titans Tower, it means she has to leave Gar. The look on his face is heartbreaking.
  • While Kory doesn't burn bridges with Dick, after the others have left, she immediately tells Dick that she has to leave to deal with a family business. While Dick okays that, it's telling that, with his mind in flux, what he wants is for Kory to stay and comfort him as one of the only two people still trusting him. This leaves Dick and Gar as the sole Titans remaining in the Tower.
• Hank and Dawn bitterly breaking up, as the former feels that the world is much in pain if both are together, so it is better for them to separate.
• Dick telling Adeline, Jericho's grieving mother, the truth. While her reaction is subdued, she tells Dick that, as much as she wants to forgive him, she can't.
• Dick confronting Deathstroke, deflecting his blame on Jericho's death towards him by saying that both of them are bad people, while Jericho was the only good one.
• Kory being forced to Mercy Kill Faddei after she finds out that he has been possessed by her sister.
• Dick's guilt reaches its breaking point at the end, when he chooses to commit a crime so he can be incarcerated at a prison.
• Gar realizing how much he screwed up by showing Conner the world before he is ready, instead of calling Batman for help as Dick suggested. The episode ends with him silently crying inside the Titans Tower, futilely calling and begging Dick to come home, something that will never come true since Dick is now in prison, probably for years.

Episode 10: Fallen

• Throughout the episode, Gar and Donna try to call Dick, only for theirs to go into voicemails every time. In the end, Donna calls him once more, only to be informed that the voicemail box is full, implying that the other Titans, despite their distrust of Dick, have been trying to reach out to him as well, to no avail.

Episode 11: E.L. .O.

• Cadmus brainwashing Gar by twisting his memory of fighting with Rachel.

Episode 12: Faux Hawk

• Gar being used by Cadmus to terrorize humans. After one attack at the coffeeshop where the Titans used to frequent, Gar is shown in tears, but unable to break free, since he is now under Cadmus' control.
• Jason's heartbroken reaction to learning Rose was The Mole for Deathstroke. This despite Rose telling him that she does consider their relationship as something real to her.

Episode 13: Nightwing

• Gar being forced to fight Conner. Conner, being a Physical God, effortlessly beats up Gar, since the point of this match is for Mercy Graves to show off her product — Conner — by beating the "monster" who has been terrorizing San Francisco for the past several days. Gar is meant to die in this match.
• With Rachel's help, Dick manages to reach out to Conner's conscience, which is depicted as a pitch black realm. There, he finds Conner huddled and sobbing, revealing that he is well aware of what Cadmus has done to his body, but, like Gar, can't act against it.
• Donna's Heroic Sacrifice. After Cadmus is defeated, a transmission tower that was previously damaged by the fight between the Titans and Conner breaks down, threatening civilians and Dawn who is giving a doll to a child. Seeing this, Donna immediately races up to stop the tower from falling, allowing everyone else to flee but causing her to be electrocuted. By the time Dick reaches to her, she's already dead.
• The Sad-Times Montage that follows Donna's death. Rachel comforts a sobbing Gar, while Dawn places Donna's Wonder Girl belt inside her pod in Titans Tower.
• Rachel deciding to go to Themiscyra so she can find a way to resurrect Donna. Even after Dick tells her to just let everything go, she is still adamant, clearly feeling guilty of being useless despite her powers. As a result, she has to leave Gar again.

Season 3

Episode 1: Barbara Gordon

• Dick has spent two seasons coming to terms with his relationship with Bruce and how being Robin impacted him. Now, after they've finally reconciled, Dick has to face the fact that he was right to believe Bruce was the problem.
  • This gets worse for fans that remember the comics. In "New Titans #55", Dick returns from space to find out about Jason's death and goes to the Batcave to express his condolences to Bruce, a trip which results in one of the most vicious fights he and Bruce ever had, with the two of them blaming each other and Bruce both punching Dick and throwing back his admitted insecurity over Bruce having adopted Jason but not him in his face. Here, the set up is familiar, with Dick missing the funeral and going to the Batcave to express how sorry he is, which has fans bracing for the fight which doesn't come...until later, when Dick finds out just how callous Bruce's response has been.
• Bruce's state after Jason's death, in general. He's obviously swallowing his guilt by acting extremely nonchalant, something that exasperates Dick, particularly when the latter finds out that he has begun searching for Robin candidates as soon as Jason died. After Dick gives him a tongue lashing, Bruce ends up breaking his most sacred rule: he kills the Joker, then flat-out informs Dick that he has quit being Batman, before leaving Gotham for good.
  • Dick tells Barbara that he realizes Jason's death broke something in Bruce. Even when Alfred died, he didn't see Bruce being so withdrawn before.
  • The scene where he begs Dick to assist him as Robin again deserves a mention. Bruce's hands are trembling, which visibly startles Dick, implying that he has never seen his former mentor this desperate before.
• It's revealed in this episode that not only Alfred has died, but so has James Gordon. Unlike Alfred, the Commissioner died in a fight against the supervillain Mr. Freeze, which spurred Barbara's decision to quit vigilantism in exchange for joining the law force.
• Tim Drake's crushed reaction upon hearing Robin's death. You can tell that the kid idolized him so much.

Episode 3: Hank & Dove

• Hank's death. Dove is put into a Sadistic Choice between killing Jason to save Hank or to let him live and hope Conner can quickly build a way to disarm the bomb. With ten seconds left, Conner has it and runs off at Super Speed to reach Hank's home. However, with five seconds left, Dove panics and pulls the trigger... only for nothing to happen. Turns out the gun she grabbed from Jason was the detonator. Conner arrives as the bomb blows up and Dove collapses into Nightwing's arms as the gravity of what happened finally catches up to her.
• Before his death, Hank's preemptive goodbyes to everyone are this mixed with Heartwarming.

Episode 4: Blackfire

• Dawn leaving the Titans to recuperate from Hank's loss, wanting to see "how the world looks like without Dove".
• The revelation that Komand'r became The Un-Favourite because she was born without the power to control fire, which made her an outcast in Tamaran.

Episode 5: Lazarus

• Jason's Trauma Conga Line. First, he gets beaten by a low-level gangster. Then, Bruce benches him, which he interprets as him no longer having trust in his sidekick (in reality, he wants Jason to deal with his issues without the baggage of work). Finally, Scarecrow manipulates events so Jason will fall under his control, which involves him being brutally beaten to death by the Joker.

Episode 6: Lady Vic

• Those pair of poor cops whom Lady Vic murders the day they get engaged.
• Jason sets out the drug-fuelled gang to attack the Drake family's restaurant. In the commotion, Tim has to watch his father being gunned down.

Episode 7: 51%

• Valeska Nox killing her son to prevent him from informing the FBI. And this is after Kory promised that she would keep him safe. No wonder Kory decides to immolate her alive.
• Komand'r revealing the reason why she murdered her parents. When Koriand'r left for Earth, people in Tamaran were rioting because their favorite heiress went away for so long. Rumor then started spreading that if they killed Komand'r, The Unfavorite, Koriand'r would somehow return. The sisters' parents, in the name of the greater good, chose to sacrifice their daughter. Her killing them was not an act of malice, but self-defense.

Episode 8: Home

• Jason is on the verge of reconciling with the Titans when Crane shows up and shoots Tim from behind, implicating the former in his murder and breaking any trust the former friends have for each other.

Episode 9: Souls

• Rachel tearfully coming to terms with the fact that she cannot resurrect Donna.
• Bruce appears for the first time since the premiere, and it is shown that he is so consumed with guilt that he sets the mansion he is in on fire, while making no attempt to escape. Thankfully, Donna saves him.

Episode 10: Troubled Water

• As a result of Barbara shooting a fellow cop to protect the Titans, she is fired and arrested. Vee, who is given the job to arrest her, is clearly reluctant to do it.