Titans Season 3's official teaser is now out, and it may give us our first real look at The Joker. Not only does the Titans Season 3 footage gives a nice tease of Joker in the show, but the tease also comes in the form of one of the more iconic images of The Joker in Batman comics. If you like around the 29 seconds mark in the Titan season 3 teaser (as Brenton Thwaites' Nightwing describes Gotham's 'special class of criminals') you'll see a figure in a purple suit doing damage with what looks to be a crowbar. So is this Joker? Let's look deeper at the footage:
The 55-second-long trailer begins with Jason Todd (Curran Walters), the wayward Robin who abandoned the titular superteam in season 2, breaking into an abandoned amusement park. There, he finds a corpse smiling from ear to ear, which is the Joker's trademark, and then we hear the clown prince of crime's notorious cackle. After a flurry of different shots, the teaser returns to the amusement park scene and we see a shadowed figure violently beating someone - is it Todd? - with a crowbar, as Brenton Thwaites' Dick Grayson ominously narrates.
Batman fans know that Jason Todd's end as Robin came when The Joker took him hostage and beat him to death with a crowbar. That tragic event occurred in the infamous mini-series Batman: A Death in the Family in the late '80s, after Batman fired Jason as his Robin, for being too impulsive. It's not hard to imagine the Titans version of Jason Todd having a similar breaking point with Batman, and going to hunt Joker all on his own. It will be a little bit Death in the Family and a little bit of The Killing Joke, as in the latter story an abandoned amusement park is where Joker tried to break Commissioner Gordon mentally, after shooting his daughter Barbara. Barbara Gordon will also be joining Titans Season 3 and will be in a wheelchair, so you can see the Killing Joke influences are being fully utilized.
Titans already gave us one version of The Joker, however it was in a fantasy sequence where Batman went AWOL and started killing off his rogues. Joker was seen splattered on the hood of a car; the whole sequence turned out to be Dick Grayson's spiritual conflict with his own dark side, so that's far from an official debut.
When it was revealed that Jason would evolve into Red Hood in Titans season 3, there was a lot of uncertainty about how that would work. Since it seemed like they weren't going to do Red Hood's iconic origin story, many fans wondered how Titans' Jason would take on the famous mantle. However, the Titans season 3 trailer alluded more than once to the current Robin facing his grim fate before he can properly become Red Hood. Not only is Joker seen beating what appears to be Jason on the ground, but a bloody crowbar is later spotted, essentially confirming Robin's death. How Jason comes back from the dead before becoming Red Hood remains to be seen.
Titans season 3 will drop the first three episodes on Thursday, August 12, followed by subsequent releases every Thursday on HBO Max.
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