Is Batman On ‘Titans’? DC Adaptation Shows Robin’s Complicated Relationship With Hero

Robin is the star of “Titans,” but that doesn’t mean Batman is missing. The Dark Knight has a big presence in the new DC Universe drama, despite his face never being shown in the first three episodes.

Executive producer Akiva Goldsman remained tight-lipped when International Business Times asked if audiences would ever see Batman.

“So I’m not even gonna tell you definitively that you won’t see him in Season 1. What I am going to tell you is that he is… [long pause] what we’re talking to is how we see our parents,” he told IBT at New York Comic Con. “So Dick has a view of Batman which is not necessarily accurate. It’s the view of a son about his father. And so, should Batman [appear], it would be in that context because this is a story about how we face down and come to terms with and embrace those particular ghosts of our past.”

When “Titans” kicks off, Robin, also known as Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites), is in Detroit after leaving Gotham. He is under the impression that Batman is too brutal.

“I think underneath it all is that love that a father would have for their son, but the way Bruce has been fighting and the brutality and the ferociousness that he inflicts on his opponents has driven Dick to find a different way of kind of fighting crime, and not necessarily what he learned from Batman,” Thwaites told a small group of reporters at NYCC. “And on that journey, he realizes it doesn’t have to be that brutal and that ferocious and that destructive, and so he decides to figure out a new identity and basically figure out who he is all over again.”

However, some of Bruce’s desire to help kids may have rubbed off on him. When viewers meet Dick, he’ll be trying to help Rachel (Teagan Croft), a teen with powers whose mother was just murdered.

“I think he sees in her a little piece of himself as a kid,” the actor explained. “[Robin] lost his parents and didn’t grow up with them, and I think he feels empathetic to that loss and decides to help her out because there’s no one else.”

Rachel, AKA Raven, isn’t in quite the same position Dick was in, though. She immediately knows that she can trust the hero to do the right thing.

“Because of Rachel’s empathic abilities — she doesn’t call it that because she doesn’t know what it is, but they are — she sees his past,” Croft told IBT. “She dreamt about his past, so she knows that, and she can read his emotions. So she can tell that he is not dodgy, and he knows what he is doing and that he’s trustworthy. So that’s why she trusts him.”

See their first meeting when “Titans” Season 1 premieres Friday on the new streaming service DC Universe.