Titans Season 3: Is It Good?

The Titans are finally back! The third season of the popular HBO Max TV series comes back today on Netflix, and the question is: will this return to Gotham City be able to put the show in order and clarify what viewers have been trying to understand since its first season?

Source: HBO Max

Nightwing, Beast Boy, Superboy and Starfire have now become beloved superheroes in San Francisco and are nationally famous as Titans but, when everything seems to be working well for them, a traumatic event and a mysterious villain - Red Hood, bring them back to Gotham City. With Batman out of town and Raven in Themyscira to resurrect Donna Troy, it's up to the Titans and Commissioner Barbara Gordon to save the city, with a little help from Jonathan Crane as The Scarecrow.
As you can see, this third season of Titans features far fewer characters than the previous one, and the Titans team is stripped down for a simpler story that comes with fewer distractions for the viewers. From the very first minutes of the first episode, "Barbara Gordon", we find ourselves once again catapulted into a mission of the superhero group that tries to stop Gizmo from stealing a biological weapon. However, this group is soon headed to Gotham due to a bereavement and the appearance of Red Hood.

Source: HBO Max

Another element that must be appreciated in these first episodes is the rhythm of the narrative, which is relevant for the purposes of the whole series. The events along all the first five episodes happen so quickly that viewers barely have time to breathe, and thanks to that, the series manages to bring us some very interesting development.
Unfortunately, due to the rhythm of these first five episodes (it is clear that they have really been written all together and without limitations due to the pandemic), the following ones can match neither in rhythm nor in quality. Actually, since "Lady Vic", the pace slows down and the characters begin to make questionable decisions as if they haven’t learnt anything from the previous seasons.

Source: HBO Max

Having started to slow down the narrative does not allow viewers to realize that in fact, the Titans have been in Gotham City for not even a week. All the tragedies they are going through happen one after the other and rightly have an effect above all on the ex Wonder Boy. In fact, the five episodes that open the season are not only the best of the season along with "Souls", but also what a show about these characters should be.
Luckily, starting from episode 11, "The Call Is Coming from Inside the House", the series picks up the pace and closes in a much more solid way than the previous season did. And despite all these flaws, the casting behind the series starting with the main characters like Hank and Dawn is surely the show's delight.

Source: HBO Max

The third season of Titans therefore ranks not far below the second, but with more focus, it would certainly have been another thing and we hope that the fourth can learn from these mistakes and correct itself, as the third season did with the errors of the second. It is not completely to be thrown away, indeed it has many interesting episodes and demonstrates that it has learned from the criticisms leveled at the first two seasons and tries to improve them, but at the same time it fails to build a completely satisfying narrative arc also because of production problems due to covid.
We can say that the season is good, but it always seems to suffer from the syndrome of the continuous search for one's identity as its protagonist. In the finale, the series still struggles to understand what it really wants to be. We therefore hope that when the series returns with more dilated production rhythms, as suggested by the actors, we can finally have a season truly focused on the Titans and not on the former shoulders of Batman and friends.