These flashbacks represent the larger discussion on a cycle of destruction and abuse from Gotham to Bruce, Bruce to Dick and Jason, to the present. Dick tells Crane about these training methods as audiences’ flashback and see glimpses of them. ![]() With that equipment Bruce would track his protégés after he released them into the wilderness and expected to survive. You’re not supposed to see people coming and as Dick reveals it’s filled with surveillance equipment. It is isolated, but a familiar space for both Dick and Jason Bruce would take them there to train. The cabin becomes a place of double meaning in the episode. On a plot level maybe “Blackfire” achieves a sense of sprezzatura with Dick Grayson’s plot. ![]() The idea of Jason being reconstructed comes through in the character red hood which now features several obvious patches and joins from where it broke in episode 2. Crane counters that it was Dick through his impatience, and Bruce with his manipulative distance, did all the breaking after their run in with Deathstroke. While this connection makes “sense” and in hindsight there are a few tells the lack of build up makes the moment read as someone out of nowhere.ĭick at first thinks Crane is the one who broke Jason and turned him to villainy. The whole kidnapping was a performance as he reveals the knowledge that Crane, and Jason had been working together. The surface level apperance of those actions are quickly shown to be false as he takes Crane to Bruce’s Cabin in the woods. He did that several times with Deathstroke. At first it appears he is falling back on old habits of lashing out after a rough episode by kidnapping Jonathan Crane. The conception of sprezzatura as defensive irony can be seen in the Dick Grayson plot of the episode. “Blackfire” is another example of that lack of grace as characters interact in ways that both make sense and feel hollow, resulting in plots that make sense in the moment but are unemotionally unsatisfying, or making statements that appear to be profound but reflect the same twisted logic they appear to deny. On macro levels they’ve had two seasons that either come to unfulfilling conclusions (season 1) or sprinted to the finish in ways that undercut the core emotional arc of the series to set up something unrelated (season 2). As a larger comment on the show itself, it calls forth Titans history of making the complicated look complicated, and worse, messy. As an action sequence it was slick as Dick took out the guards one by one until the remaining survivor got wise long enough to at least draw his sidearm. On a base level, the Jonathan Crane idea of making the complicated look easy was about the way Dick Grayson took out all the guards as he kidnapped Crane from the Gotham Bureau of Prisons. It is a comparison that does not appear in the show’s favor. The discussion of sprezzatura can be read as an indirect meta comment on the show itself, comparing it with the Italian concept of how to behave at court. in The Absence of Grace Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books as a form of “defensive irony” or the art of masking one’s intentions behind disinterest and reticence. ![]() It was more recently theorized by Harry Berger Jr. ![]() The concept was theorized in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 book The Book of the Courtier as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”. Sprezzatura as episode scribe Stephanie Goggins describes it via Jonathan Crane is the art of making the complicated look uncomplicated, effortless. It also marks a rare shift where Dick Grayson is not in the ‘A’ plot of an episode as Titans takes a baby step forward into being the functional ensemble show it wants to be.Īs Dick Grayson drives the kidnapped Jonathan Crane to his cabin in the woods, the good doctor waxes poetic about the concept of sprezzatura. Unlike Dawn’s work in the previous episode “Blackfire” marks the rare episode where the ‘A’ and ‘B’ plots are not connected. In the fallout of Hank’s death Titans appears to take another difficult step forward with “Blackfire,” which by its very title indicates a disconnect from the show’s Gotham based Red Hood drama and firmly in the personal realm of Starfire.
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