Titans #25: More Meta-Mental Mischief!

***WARNING: This review contains major spoilers!***

The new Titans team are continuing their hunt for “emergent-events” caused by cosmically charged debris fallen to Earth from the Source Wall breach. Grayson continues to pressure M’gann to leave, resenting her position on the team as the JL’s “babysitter”. Steel has discovered that the more “agitated or scared” the Source-energy affected subject is, the more severe their threat rating (which I suspect could be an ambient after-effect of the Dark-Dimensional powers of The Batman Who Laughs). Three simultaneous threats emerge and the team splits to handle them; M’gann & Nightwing take the class 3, Donna the class 1 and the rest tackle the class 6. The latter turns out to be a colossal, regenerating, Mecha-Godzilla-like monster that is hell-bent on indiscriminate urban destruction in Washington D.C. Since it’s physically resistant to damage, Raven tries to summon her deep-power to subdue it but finds nothing to draw upon. As Steel unleashes all her fury upon their foe, Raven realizes that her soul-self may have been missing since their fight with Prince Travesty and his Urkesh in issue #24.

Nightwing and M’gann find their threat to be a boob-tube bound woman that unconsciously creates an alternate dimension where those near her can be trapped and forced to interact in a manner suiting whatever scenario she focuses on; namely for this story, her television show “stories”. Dick and M’gann essentially become trapped in her TV shows that switch genres every time she changes the channel. The effect of these changes are so profound, the heroes begin to lose their sense of identity and are forced to play the romantic roles the shows demand of them. The disorientation of these effects makes Dick let it slip that he likes M’gann (a DC redheaded female? Shocker.), so she begins to psychoanalyze him in order to better understand him (and therefore humanity as well).

Donna stumbles upon a secret laboratory infested with Blood Cultists (recently encountered in Teen Titans #20). A short fight and a hole blasted into the floor throws Donna into the lower level of the warehouse, where she’s met by an investigative journalist/brilliant scientist named Ben. Finding Ben’s notes, the cultists take off, but they’ve also left a present. Apparently, Ben found an emergent-artifact and has built an amplification device for it, a device the cultists have rigged to overload into a catastrophic explosion. Donna pulls the artifact out, negating all ambient Source-energy in the area, freeing M’gann and Dick as well as causing the mecha-monster to fall apart. Elsewhere, the cultists present Ben’s notebooks to Mother Blood as they explain their plans to create a WMD that will effect multiple dimensions.