Warning: SPOILERS for the Titans episode “Game Over” are ahead!
Joshua Orpin’s Conner Kent, a.k.a. Superboy, has been through a lot during Titans Season 4, from watching Lex Luthor, one of his biological fathers, die a gruesome death and then initially be blamed for it, to being possessed by one of Mother Mayhem’s serpents. These days, Conner is channeling his inner Lex and has been acting more aggressive and calculating, to the point he’s ditched his teammates, taken control of LexCorp and is secretly working with Mercy Graves. This is definitely a darker take on the character from what HBO Max subscribers who enjoy Titans have seen before, and Orpin talked with CinemaBlend about exploring this aspect of the character and his vendetta against Franka Potente’s Mayhem.
Conner made the questionable decision of approaching Joseph Morgan’s Sebastian Sanger, a.k.a. Brother Blood, at the end of "Dick & Carol & Ted & Kory,” and the came to bite him in the ass during the events of “Game Over.” But before we get into that, when I interviewed Orpin ahead of the latter episode airing, I brought up how Titans showrunner Greg Walker had told me that the show would get into “uncomfortable” territory with exploring Superboy’s Lex Luthor side. As such, I was curious about what the character is ultimately trying to accomplish by leaving his family behind and behaving like his late father, and Orpin responded with the following:
As far as Conner’s concerned, his singular goal is to bring down Mother Mayhem because she’s really the source of all his pain and anguish at this point. She has defeated him physically. That’s a big bruise to his ego. He’s never really lost a fight up until to this point, so he really feels this one, he feels the defeat, he feels helpless against her. He just wants to bring her down. He’s got so much unbridled rage and angst within him that she has become the target of all his feelings of abandonment, of uncertainty. She’s ripped away the only chance he’s ever had to really know his father, find out who this guy Lex is that he keeps hearing about from other people. She’s taken that away from him, and his response is just anger. He wants to hurt her in the way that she’s hurt him. So with that kind of singular goal in mind, his focus is to bring her down. Everything else is a means to an end. The Titans take a backseat, they’re not really on board with what he’s doing. As far as he’s concerned, they’re not up to the task, but he is. So yes, it’s a little misguided and things will play out the way that they have to, but in terms of what he hopes to achieve, he just wants to bring down Mother Mayhem by any and all means necessary.
With Conner having been delivered a physical and mental beating at the hands of Mother Mayhem's magic, he’s now filled with this rage that’s he’s looking to expel by focusing his attention on bringing her down. In order to do that though, he decided it was better to leave the other Titans behind and use Lex Luthor’s resources to enact his own plan. As we learned this episode, that involved him recruiting Sebastian to LexCorp to launch Abraxus, the game he’d spent years developing, but had failed to get off the ground. While Sebastian was busy with the game, Conner tried to take the horn that was intended to be used to bring Trigon back to our reality, but even with his impressive strength and heat vision, he was unable to lift it or destroy it.
The good news, though, is that Conner hasn’t morphed into a full-blown villain like Lex Luthor did. Sebastian augmented his game with magic so the players “become a part of it” to empower him, which translated to the game slowly killing them. When Conner learned what Sebastian had done, he secretly opened a backdoor into LexCorp’s mainframe security so that Tim Drake (who will soon become Robin) could hack into its servers and delete the game from any device connected to the internet. When I asked Joshua Orpin if he was glad Superboy still had that heroic side to him, or if he would have liked to play the character more villainous, he answered:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I really liked where we ended up, and I like Conner, despite himself, still has that conscience. When he observes that what Sebastian is doing with his game is taking over and ultimately killing innocent people, he’s unable to reconcile that despite all his lofty goals of the greater good. So yeah, that’s still there, that’s still bugging him. He can’t really corrupt the core of who he is, which is he does care about people and he doesn’t want innocent people to get hurt. It takes a little bit to bring that out of him, and he’s gotta navigate those murky, gray waters in order to find where he sits on the spectrum of good and evil.
Because Conner used his super speed to open the backdoor, Sebastian has no idea he was involved with Abraxus being shut down. Between that and Raven (with Dick Grayson’s help) severing the connection she had with Sebastian that preventing one from hurting the other without experiencing the same harm, he’s once again at a low point. So despite Conner’s attitude shift, at least viewers know he’s still mainly pointed towards the light, although it wasn’t always so clear-cut. As Joshua Orpin recalled:
It’s interesting because in earlier drafts, the writers were playing with the idea of there being a little more ambiguity around what Conner was doing and where he sits. We weren’t necessarily convinced that he was ultimately on the side of good, and we see now where the episode’s ended up that yeah, that conscience is still there and he will, when push comes to shove, do the right thing. But in earlier drafts, that wasn’t necessarily the case. We were sitting back, watching and going, ‘Oh, has he really gone to the dark side here? Is he ever coming back?’, in the same way that Jason Todd did in Season 3. Yeah, I like where we ended up. It’s a fine line, but we were able to balance what Conner is doing and what he’s trying to do with who he is deep down. So I’m happy with where we ended up. Without giving anything away, I don’t want to say where he ends up at the end of the season, but we’re gonna witness him navigate that line of morality, and we’ll see where it ends up.
There are now just two episodes left to go in Titans’ run, as it and Doom Patrol were cancelled back in January. The events of “Game Over” followed last week’s momentous episode, “Dude, Where’s My Gar?”, which saw Ryan Potter’s Beast Boy venturing into the DC multiverse to team up with Brec Bassinger’s Stargirl and finally cross paths with Joivan Wade’s Cyborg, who’s one of the main characters on Doom Patrol. While Superboy still doesn’t appear to be ready to rejoin the Titans, it stands to reason we’ll see him back with them at least once before the show is over to help them take down Sebastian and Mother Mayhem, the latter of whom, as it turns out, is still alive despite being been horribly burned by the former.
As we look to the final episodes of Titans hitting HBO Max in the coming weeks, be sure to look through our upcoming DC TV shows guide to learn what this corner of superhero entertainment has lined up for the next several years.
