Nature (Teen Titans Go!)

"Nature (Teen Titans Go!)"
Captain Planet disapproves of this episode.
Part of Season: 2 Episode Number: 7 Air Date: August 7, 2014 Writer: Merrill Hagan Director: Peter Rida Michail Previous episode: Brian Next episode: Salty Codgers

Nature is the 7th episode of the 2nd season of Teen Titans Go!.

Synopsis

When Beast Boy loses his ability to change into animals, he realizes that he’s lost touch with his wild side. He goes to the forest to reconnect with his inner beast, but Mother Nature is not as great as he had hoped.

Why It Has No Nature

1. This episode has 3 jarring problems! The incredibly anti-environmentalism message, the glaring plot hole, and occasional recurrences of gross-out. Details will be the explained below.
2. Plot hole: Why does Beast Boy need to reconnect with the wilderness to get his powers back? That’s not how Superhero Depowering stories work.
3. Mother Nature is incredibly annoying and doesn’t even look like Mother Nature. In other media, she’s depicted as a kind, mature, beautiful woman who is very caring, kind, serene, and maternal. But in Teen Titans Go!, she’s just a tiny fairy who looks like a little girl and has a very annoying high pitched voice (Hynden Walch), she sounds like she was smoking helium. Her personality is the opposite of what other media depicts her as, she’s loud, immature, childish, boisterous, and volatile. She works better as a servant or messenger for Mother Nature, not Mother Nature herself.
4. The whole montage of Beast Boy failing to survive in the forest is just forced to force the episode’s “lesson”.
5. There is grossout in the episode, mainly with Robin’s subplot; like drinking from an obviously dirty lake (he could’ve gotten ill because lakes like those contain harmful bacteria that can make someone severely ill and sometimes even die), looking at a decaying deer corpse thinking it’s Beast Boy, and eating bugs numerous times despite having a sandwich offscreen. (Is he hypoglycemic or something?)
6. Missed opportunity: If the plot hole was not there and Beast Boy went full animal, the plot could work to where Beast Boy tries to get his humanity back.
7. Bad ending: Beast Boy has had it with surviving in the wilderness and makes Mother Nature turn the forest into a city and he just gets his powers back with no explanation whatsoever. Also Beast Boy gets eaten by Robin.
8. Bad moral: Environmentalism is bad and urbanization is the way to go.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Only the beginning is good, ignoring the plot hole, it was fun watching Beast Boy act like a gentleman.
2. Despite the plot being terrible, similar stories with this plot has been done better, how it normally goes is “An animalistic character loses their humanity, they go completely feral and live out in the wilderness. Once they see the “cruel” parts of nature, they feel bad and try to get their humanity back. Normally taking extreme measures or getting help from an outside source, like another character reminding them of who they truly are. They finally get their humanity back and return back to their civil lives.” Although cliche, this episode would’ve worked better with this plot structure.
3. Raven is the only sensible character because she’s a voice of reason in the entire episode.

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