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"How Long is Forever?" is the first episode of season two and the overall 14th episode of the Teen Titans series.

Synopsis[]

After Starfire falls through a time portal with a villain named Warp, she has an adventure alone in the future, and now she must find her friends' future selves and get back to her own time.

Plot[]

One morning, Starfire intends to celebrate a traditional Tamaranean holiday, Blorthog, the Day of Friendship, with her fellow Teen Titans, but she finds them bickering over trivial things; Cyborg and Beast Boy are fighting over the game controller, Raven refuses to give back Beast Boy's nail clippers as she hopes to "keep his toenails off the coffee table", and Robin is struggling to drown out Cyborg and Beast Boy's yelling with his ghetto blaster, which is distracting Raven from her book. Starfire tries to initiate her tradition, but everybody is too hung up in their own issues to listen. When Cyborg makes her drop one of her pearl necklaces, she gets fed up and assembles everyone's attention. She warns them of "Rekma", the concept of "the Drifting Apart", which would occur, and result in the death of close friendships if they are not truly valued. The Titans reassure Starfire that this is merely typical roommate behavior which they will not allow to threaten their comradery, especially after everything they've been through, vowing to be friends forever. However, their conversation is cut short when Robin’s communicator alarm rings, and the Titans rush off to their mission.

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The Titans bickering

At the technological museum, a time-travelling villain calling himself Warp, attempts to steal a valuable artifact (which would be priceless in the future) called "the Clock of Eternity". The Titans engage him, but Warp's knowledge of the Titans and his futuristic weapons fend them off easily. As he opens a time portal to return to his time one hundred years in the future, Starfire impulsively charges at him and both vanish into the time-stream. As they are adrift, Starfire rips off a lens from Warp's chestplate; this results in both of them suddenly dropping out of the time-stream.

To her astonishment, Starfire finds herself in the middle of winter, and before her stands Titans Tower, decrepit and crumbling. As she investigates the structure, she encounters Cyborg as its only occupant, who has also fallen into disrepair and is now hooked to a bulky power generator. He reveals to Starfire that she is now twenty years in the future. Specifically, what was only a few seconds floating through the time-stream with Warp was actually 20 years in real time and in that real time, the Titans have disbanded following her disappearance and have gone their own ways. Starfire assumes that this is due to Warp's tampering with the time continuum and decides to seek out the others in hopes of finding Warp and forcing him to fix whatever damage he caused. Starfire tries to enlist Cyborg's help in her quest to find him, but Cyborg explains to her that his current condition is sub-optimal. That bulky power generator is his only means of life support because his last power cell died years ago, and he has since only barely managed to adapt new equipment to his old circuits just to stay alive. Nonetheless, he regrettably tells Starfire that he cannot help her because he can never leave the tower, denouncing himself as “obsolete”. However, he is able to point her in the direction of Beast Boy and Raven, hoping that maybe they can help. However, he lost touch with Robin a long time ago.

In the course of her search, she finds Beast Boy fat and bald, carving out a miserable existence as a carnival curio living in a traveling cage that serves as his only protection against the city's criminal element. He only tells her that his crime-fighting days are long over after he failed miserably as a solo superhero following the Titans' dispersal and that his rathole existence as a circus side-show is just how he likes it. Her hope of enlisting Raven for her mission rolls up snake-eyes too when she finds her all alone in an abandoned sanitarium and has long since gone insane from loneliness. She refuses to so much as look Starfire in the eye, thinking she's just another hallucination and Starfire has no choice but to leave her as she was.

As she trudges through the cold snowy ghost town which is supposed to be Jump City, Starfire encounters Warp again, who has also aged due to her theft of the lens, which is actually a vortex regulator, the heartpiece of his time-travelling technology. He demands it back to enable himself to return into his own time, but not before Starfire demands that he restore her past. Warp explains that he has done nothing to damage her own time, because history cannot be changed at all. He elaborates that he went back in time to steal the clock because history said it disappeared, and history says it disappeared because he went back to steal it. The course of past, present, and future is nothing except inevitable. He takes back the vortex regulator from the dejected Starfire, but before he can finish her off, he is attacked and forced to retreat by another warrior. Starfire's defender reveals himself to be her oldest friend but tells her that he has shelved the mantal of "Robin" long ago and has since adopted a new mask: Nightwing.

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The Titans reunited

In his new hideout, Nightwing catches wind of Starfire's quest, but she confesses she now knows from Warp's own tongue that her mission holds no purpose. However, Nightwing deems the situation not hopeless, but "impossible", which is good because the Titans have always prevailed against the impossible before and there is no reason they may not do so yet again. With his old Titans Communicator he had kept since the Titans departed, he takes the liberty of initiating the Titans' Recall, summoning each and every one of them back for active duty, even if it's just for one last time.

He and Starfire proceed to the tech museum where it all began for their final confrontation with Warp. While he is reattaching the regulator to his chestplate, Nightwing and Starfire ambush him. As formidable an opponent Warp is, like he was all those "years" ago, Nightwing and Starfire actually prove themselves a match for him now that they're better prepared for all of his tricks. Nightwing is even able to deal one critical blow which cripples his arsenal. However, as much as their efforts manage to slow him down they still don't have the manpower to defeat him. Thankfully, that manpower gradually arrives in the form of the other Titans and one by one, they deal critical blows of their own that finally force them to retreat through another one of his wormholes. Before he can escape, Nightwing throws one of his birdarangs and lands a bull's eye on the regulator, smashing it and triggering a short circuit that makes his suit go completely haywire. The malfunction reduces Warp to a helpless infant, thereby defeating him for good. As the portal closes, Cyborg adapts the regulator to his sonic cannon and uses it to intercept Warp's portal just in time to redirect it and get Starfire back home. Before she departs, she can't help but ask her friends, now reunited for the first time in two decades, if this future truly has to be destiny with no chance of changing that. Nightwing simply dismisses her concern by saying there's no time and hands her the stolen clock of eternity, sending her on her way with a bright smile as the portal closes. Starfire reappears in the museum with the clock at the exact point in time where she started (albeit on the opposite side of the room), proving that Warp's conclusion was wrong.

Back at the Tower, Starfire tells the others her story about her riveting adventure, leaving the others in total awe, and Beast Boy crestfallen at his eventual lack of hair. Her story also makes the Titans realize how important their friendship really is and express concern about their disbanding being inevitable. However, Starfire explains that their friendship has proven to be strong enough to change Warp's past, so there's no reason it can't be strong enough to affect their future. But for the present, they spontaneously decide to participate in the Tamaranean holiday, much to Starfire's joy, and Robin can't help but express an earnest interest in his future identity...

Characters[]

Main Character[]

Supporting Characters[]

Villain[]

Credits[]

Trivia[]

  • The song Robin was blasting at the beginning was the same one Beast Boy was listening to at the beginning of "The Lost Episode" implying that Robin and Beast Boy might share the same taste in music.
  • This episode and "The Sum of His Parts" is the only time the word "die" has been used.
  • Starfire is shown having a Mumbo alarm clock.
  • Starfire says "Oh, it's never too late" at the end. It is unknown if this is the first time she uses a contraction noun.
  • It is unknown why Raven was shown with a white cloak in this episode, but it is likely due to the fact that her insanity resulted in none of her emotions being prominent, therefore representing full and complete balance; her insanity also causing her to lose control of said emotions.
  • The future world is set 20 years into the future, but has not been destroyed by Raven as she did in Season 4 (which was not 20 years ahead of present time). A possible explanation is that Raven's insanity rendered her mind inaccessible by Trigon, therefore his "gem/portal" became useless.
  • From Warp's perspective at least, Starfire committed a massive time paradox that totally proved the folly of every grasp he believed he had on the concept of time travel. In fact, the likely reason for this future of the Titans splitting up is the result of the very instance where Starfire jumped in after Warp and disappeared for 20 years. At the end of the day, this proved to be a possible future for our heroes, but there is no guarantee that it will be the one they end up with.
    • In this timeline, her undying dedication to her friends is probably the glue that held the Titans together. But when she disappeared, they lost that reason Starfire gave them not to split up because she wasn't there to remind them.
  • The cause of future Beast Boy becoming bald was due to stress.[1]
  • Beast Boy says he tried to become a solo hero but failed and he's “in the show biz now” which may be a reference to him becoming an actor in his first solo comic run in 2000.
  • When Starfire yells at the Titans to stop arguing, Robin's pupils are visible as his face is propelled off screen.

Continuity[]

  • This episode features the only appearance of Robin as his adult superhero identity like in the comics: Nightwing. As well as the only appearances of Future Beast Boy, Future Cyborg, and Future Raven.
  • This was the first episode to air in 2004.

Cultural references[]

  • Warp’s theory of time being set in stone mirrors the same theory H.G. Wells had when he wrote “The Time Machine”.
  • The two teenagers that were harassing future Beast Boy resemble members of the Mutant Gang from the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, which was another story that is set in the future.
  • This episode is very similar to an episode of the 2003 series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles called "Same As It Never Was", where Donatello is sent into a possible future in another dimension thirty years from his time, where the Shredder rules the world, Raphael is missing an eye, Leonardo is possibly blind, Michelangelo is missing his arm, Master Splinter and Casey Jones are dead and his brothers are no longer a team. Donatello's brothers all die in the end of that episode, and Donatello is sent back to his dimension.
  • This episode also has similarities to CW's The Flash's Nineteenth episode of the third season. Both episodes take place in the future and both episodes take place during the year 2024. Teen Titans aired in 2004 and if the show is following the same year that would mean that this episode would take place in 2024. The same year The Flash traveled to in said episode of Season 3. Both plots are similar as well, the team is abandoned due to Starfire's disappearance while in The Flash, Team Flash is disbanded due to Iris' death. Both main characters are attacked by a villain from the Future. Both Starfire and The Flash try finding answers on what happened in the future, many of the future team members share similar personality's, both Team Flash and The Teen Titans are reunited to take down the episode's respective villain.

Goofs[]

  • Starfire is shown being cold in this episode, but in "Kole" and "Snowblind", she is not cold despite being in colder conditions.
    • This also goes for "Troq" and where she is flying through space without any gear at all (the average temperature of outer space is -450 degrees Fahrenheit).

Gallery[]

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Transcript[]

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Click here to view the episode transcript.

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