Why Titans’ Version Of Batman: No Man’s Land Doesn’t Work

Titans season 3 borrows heavily from the classic Batman: No Man’s Land storyline, but fails to realize the full potential of the original.

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Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Titans season 3, episode 11, “The Call Is Coming From Inside The House.”

The final episodes of Titans season 3 adapted the Batman storyline No Man’s Land in the worst way possible. Titans is not the first live-action DC Comics production to borrow from the classic Batman story, with both the television series Gotham and the movie The Dark Knight Rises building off the setting of a Gotham City shut off from the rest of the world and at the mercy of a supervillain’s schemes. Unfortunately, Titans fails to carry off the same concept, due to inconsistent writing.

Playing out in real time over the course of one year in all of the Batman comics published in 1999, Batman: No Man’s Land remains one of the most ambitious crossover events in DC Comics history. The story found Gotham City, recently devastated by a both a plague and an earthquake, being cut off from the rest of the United States, after various forces convinced the American government that the city was beyond saving. This led to a long war, as the heroes of Gotham City fought to restore law and order, while the criminals and the supervillains established their own private kingdoms.

Since that time, Batman: No Man’s Land has become one of the most mimicked storylines in comic book history. The second game in the Batman: Arkham series, Arkham City, was built around the same concept and Harley Quinn season 2 put a darkly humorous spin on the idea. Given that, it’s not surprising that Titans would also want to adapt the classic storyline as well. Unfortunately, the execution leaves much to be desired, with normally intelligent characters doing stupid things for no reason and numerous plot holes and continuity problems regarding how bad Gotham City has become abounding.

Titans Is Inconsistent About Gotham City Shutdown

Titans season 3 tried to establish the idea Gotham City had been shut off from the outside world and that the situation in the city was growing more desperate, just like in Batman: No Man’s Land. As Titans season 3, episode 11, “The Call Is Coming From Inside The House” opened, Nightwing and Superboy discussed how electricity, phone service and Internet service were down across the city, water was still shut down after Scarecrow poisoned the reservoir, and most of the stores were closed. What few businesses were still operating were gouging the populace, as Starfire observed a corner pharmacy charging one young mother five times the usual cost of her baby’s medicine as an “emergency premium.”

Despite this, many Gothamites were able to see Red Hood’s broadcasts demanding Nightwing fight him publicly. Scarecrow was also able to have a large pizza delivered to Wayne Manor, despite the lack of fresh water, supplies and widespread rioting making travel through the city all but impossible. Yet the delivery man’s only comment on this being at all unusual was that there was a higher than usual delivery charge, due to Wayne Manor being outside their usual area of service. While it’s possible this pizzeria was close enough to the outskirts to be unaffected by the problems in the inner city, this scene still undercut the idea of Gotham City becoming a lawless wasteland.

Titans’ Nightwing Is A Terrible Leader

In the original Teen Titans comics, Dick Grayson was a skillful tactician, who accounted for the strengths and weaknesses of his teammates and planned accordingly. In doing this, the first Robin forged a well-oiled, crime-fighting machine and a foster family that replaced the one he’d lost as a child. By contrast, the Dick Grayson of HBO Max’s Titans is a bull-headed loner who shows little concern for the benefits offered by strength in numbers and is oddly unconcerned about the fate of his allies following a violent and public confrontation with the GCPD. This seems to be because the writers of Titans are forcing Nightwing into the role Batman occupied in No Man’s Land, trying to save the city by himself before finally joining forces with the allies he alienated over the course of a year. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work given how drastically different Nightwing and Batman are as characters.

While various comic book writers have differed in their portrayal of how deeply Dick Grayson emulates his mentor in the angst and paranoid department, the Nightwing of HBO Max’s Titans seems to go out of his way to go it alone, even when it makes no logical sense for him to do so. A prime example of this can be found in Titans season 3, episode 11 when Nightwing retrieves some Kryptonite dust from Bruce Wayne’s safe purely for the purpose of incapacitating Superboy and Krypto the Superdog. Beyond inviting comparison to the now infamous “Martha Moment” in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it makes no sense for Nightwing to respect Red Hood’s demands that he face him alone later that night and poison the only two allies he has left. At the very least, one would expect Nightwing to task Superboy and Krypto with finding the missing Starfire, Blackfire and Beast Boy or trying to protect the city.

The Villains Ignore All The Titans But Nightwing

The villains of Titans season 3, Red Hood and Scarecrow, are fortunate that Nightwing seems to be devoting more effort to disabling his teammates than they are, as their most recent plans are wholly focused on Nightwing and ignore the other Titans completely. This focus makes sense for Red Hood, who, as the second Robin Jason Todd, has a complex about proving himself better than the first Robin, Dick Grayson. However, one would expect a paranoid criminal mastermind like the Scarecrow to be setting up contingencies to cope with any sort of resistance to his grand plans for Gotham City, now that it is closed off from the rest of the world like in Batman: No Man’s Land.

Instead, Scarecrow spends most of episode 11 luxuriating in Wayne Manor without giving any thought to the Titans besides Nightwing. This oversight is all the more vexing given that Wayne Manor was the Titans’ base. The only thing stopping the rest of the remaining Titans from storming Wayne Manor as a group and bringing down Red Hood and Scarecrow in a matter of seconds is the distractions offered by other unrelated subplots, such as the retcon to Starfire’s powers and backstory and Raven taking Beast Boy to search for a Lazarus Pit.

There Are No Other Heroes Working To Save Gotham City

One plot point that Titans fails to address is why there are no other superheroes, such as the Justice League, trying to deal with the problems in Gotham City. The series previously established that its world does have a Justice League and that Superman and Wonder Woman are active heroes. Granting that the Justice League in most media has generally respected Batman’s desire they stay out of Gotham City and let him handle the problems of his hometown in his own way, it beggars belief that they wouldn’t get involved in the wake of reports that Batman had killed the Joker or that the Titans had poisoned Gotham City’s water supply. The original No Man’s Land addressed this point, with a tie-in JLA story showing that the Justice League was busy preventing outside threats from coming into Gotham City, as Batman, Huntress and Oracle dealt with the enemies within. There is no indication in Titans that their Justice League is similarly occupied.

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