Titans Season 4 Finally Delivers The Goods With Beast Boy

This post contains spoilers for the fourth season of "Titans."

The fourth season of "Titans" is not perfect by any means, but it's a sizeable step up from previous years. The titular superhero team finally has some sort of rhythm, and a change of scenery to Metropolis is proving to be a locale worth exploring. The addition of a few iconic Teen Titans villains doesn't hurt, either. But the mid-season finale has arrived, and folks, it's finally happened. After three seasons of morphing into a tiger (and the occasional bat), Beast Boy (Ryan Potter) has finally spread his wings and turned into something even cooler. 

As a longtime "Titans" watcher, I was almost content with the fact that Beast Boy would always turn into a tiger, and the occasional bat or snake. But his character development remained ever so stagnant, until now. In season 4, "Titans" finally gives Beast Boy the time of the day, introducing new abilities and a very powerful connection to all animal life that already has serious implications for the series. In other words, he can now turn into a really cool-looking, massive green ape.

The sixth episode had the superhero team fight Mother Mayhem (Franka Potente) and her goons as a last-ditch effort to stop the Brother Blood ritual from happening. Although we've seen Beast Boy stretch his limits as of late, the mid-season finale confirms that he can actually turn into large animals that are not feline. As his ape form ravages the Cult of Blood, we get to see Beast Boy in action unlike never before. He turned into a virus earlier this season, but that's admittedly not as cool as a giant friggin' ape.

Thankfully, it seems like this will not be the last time we see Beast Boy turns into a non-tiger animal. Being able to morph into an ape was long overdue, anyway. He apparently turned into a variety of creatures in a previous episode, including a velociraptor, but it occurred off-screen. "Titans" season 4 has slowly been working its way into introducing new limits to his metahuman abilities, tying them to a mysterious supernatural force.

Shockingly enough, the fourth season of "Titans" is making explicit moves to evolve Beast Boy as a character. Throughout the last few episodes, Beast Boy has been experiencing visions of a red-tinted world and a large tree at the center of it. These moments have allowed him to have a few premonitions of his own, including predicting the bombastic final fight against Mother Mayhem at her lair. The Red, a force that connects all animal life, has made its way into "Titans" and is the apparent source of Beast Boy's newfound abilities.

Sort of like the Green, which connected Swamp Thing to all plant life in the comics, the Red serves a similar purpose for Beast Boy. With a deeper connection to the animals, it's a no-brainer that we'll see a larger variety of transformations from now on. Even though "Titans" consistently skimps out on its heroes using their superpowers, utilizing Beast Boy at his full potential should be the priority if it turns out to be the last season. Let him be a T-rex in the finale, at the very least.

New episodes of "Titans" debut on Thursdays on HBO Max.