Teen Titans Go!

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Teen Titans Go! puts Robin, Starfire, Raven, Beast Boy and Cyborg in the awkward space between saving the world and sharing a home. This is the comedy series that began in 2013, with the original animated team reimagined around everyday arguments and spectacularly unreasonable solutions. They still have extraordinary abilities, but those abilities do not settle who should do the laundry or stop a joke from becoming a disaster. Robin wants to lead, Starfire is an alien navigating Earth, Raven is a demon girl with a dry manner, Beast Boy can change into animals, and Cyborg is part boy and part machine. Their powers make living together more complicated as readily as they make fighting crime easier.

In "Legendary Sandwich," Raven would rather watch Pretty Pretty Pegasus than listen to her housemates interrupting. She sends the others on a quest for the ingredients of a supposedly extraordinary sandwich, turning their appetite into a way of getting some quiet. Cyborg searches for bacon at a lava lake, Beast Boy retrieves underground lettuce, and Starfire goes after a distant tomato; they return having lost an arm, teeth and hair respectively. Robin, meanwhile, finds his pretzel bread at the supermarket. What starts as Raven getting the others out of the house becomes a genuine discovery when she assembles the sandwich and performs its invocation. The team immediately fight over the first bite, allowing Silkie to eat it instead. After all that danger and effort, Raven gets back to her programme, and the grand reward has gone to the pet.

Robin brings the same misplaced confidence to "Driver's Ed." His licence has been suspended after wrecking the Batmobile, so he keeps interrupting his friends with supposed emergencies that are really requests for lifts. An instructor named Ed promises a way back onto the road, but his lessons involve alarms, gunfire and police pursuit. Robin concentrates on passing the test while Ed uses him as a getaway driver. Repeated deductions keep Robin returning, and his pride makes him read the Titans' attempt to intervene as another opportunity to mock him. Eventually the car crashes and Ed passes him simply because he never wants Robin driving for him again. Robin then claims he understood the scam all along and lets a demon deal with Ed. Being a superhero has done little to protect him from a criminal exploiting his need to prove himself.

A quieter problem drives "Dude Relax!": there has been no crime alert for a week, and Robin cannot tolerate having nothing productive to do. He turns tinkering with a car, a spa mask and a game of catch into preparation for the next mission. When an alert finally arrives, his friends leave him at the tower with an electrified collar that prevents him following them. Beast Boy tries to teach him how to switch off, eventually pushing him into an encounter with the couch and a memory of his childhood circus. Robin traces his constant vigilance to animals stealing his things whenever he relaxed, including a monkey taking his diaper. Once he recognises the old fear, he finally takes his day off. The timing is terrible: the other Titans are now calling for help, and their leader has learned to ignore his communicator.

Beast Boy's taste for tricks becomes especially destructive in "Ghost Boy." Starfire thinks he has died after her encounter with a mosquito, and he pretends to be a ghost so she will do things for him. The others recognise the deception and turn the joke around: Raven makes him transparent, making it appear that a meteor has really killed him. Beast Boy announces that his unfinished ambition is to jump into a volcano, sending his friends into a journey that kills them one after another. When his spell wears off, he reveals that he knew they were pranking him and had no intention of making the jump. The reversal is brutally simple. Raven, now an actual ghost, pushes him into the volcano, and he joins the people whose devotion he has been exploiting. The supernatural consequences grow directly out of an ordinary attempt to avoid doing things himself.

Starfire's trust is tested differently in "La Larva de Amor." She leaves Silkie with the team and carefully explains how to look after him, but their distractions let him wander away. While they search and consider disguising Beast Boy as a replacement, Silkie becomes involved with Sonia Conchita Hernandez, whose jealous former fiancé Carlos threatens their time together. Sonia sees Silkie as someone who listens to her and eventually credits him with rescuing her from Carlos. Back at the tower, a discarded shell briefly makes the Titans fear that the pet has died, before they realise he has merely moulted. They still have to confess their failure to Starfire, who is furious that they broke their promise. Silkie returns just as her anger overwhelms them. His independent romantic adventure has been far more successful than the superheroes' simple assignment to keep him safe.

"Gorilla" makes the team's leadership problem literal. Beast Boy stays in gorilla form and uses it as an excuse to refuse chores and ignore Robin. He then declares himself leader on the basis of being biggest and strongest, and the other Titans accept his supposed jungle rule. Their missions become protecting monkey bars, fighting crocodiles and releasing gorillas at the zoo. Robin tries to recover authority with Cyborg's help, only to find that learning to command involves obeying a succession of absurd orders himself. He finally objects to that contradiction and confronts Beast Boy, defeating him by exploiting his ticklishness. Robin regains his position and promptly orders a sandwich. The change restores the familiar leader without giving the household a particularly fair system: the argument has travelled from chores to strength and back to somebody serving the person in charge.