Template:EpisodeInfobox/Season4"Mother Mae-Eye" is the forty-nineth episode of the Teen Titans series and the tenth episode of the fourth season.
Plot
The Titans wake up from sprawling around in the Tower's Ops room and are all hungry…for pie. Luckily, an obese but merry and kind old woman is there to serve them pie, care for them and spoil them like 6- to 9-year-old children. That woman, going by the name of Mother Mae-Eye, even turns the Tower into a giant gingerbread house and its environs into a veritable "candyland" with magic.
The Titans having pie
However, Mother can also be quite stern to her young charges, as the Titans find out when the H.I.V.E. Five raid the local mall. She smooths Robin's ("Robby-Wobby") wild hair and replaces his "dangerous toys" with baby stuff (diapers, toys and milk bottles), dresses Beast Boy ("Beastie-Boo") into a fluffy pink bunny pajama suit so he can't transform into animals, Raven ("Rae-Rae") into a frilly light yellow Shirley Temple dress (made from her blue cape and hood) and braided pigtails with girlish bow ties, Cyborg ("Borgy-Bear") into a raincoat, rain hat and galoshes, and Starfire ("Twinkle-Star") into an over sized Christmas-colored sweater before she lets them out to "play" (that is, fight the H.I.V.E. Five). These implements, however, hamper the Titans' fighting skills, and they all end up thrashed by the H.I.V.E. Five before Mae-Eye steps in and gives those "nasty children" a "good sound spanking".
During the fight, Starfire is trapped in one of See-More's eye bubbles, and as Mammoth, who was defeated by Mother Mae-Eye, is slammed into her, she hits a lamp, which breaks and gives her a solid knock on the head. But as she recovers, she sees Mae-Eye no longer as a kind old woman, but as a monstrous, green-skinned three-eyed hag. Back in the Tower, she discovers even worse things: Her friends are under a spell which prevents them from realizing the danger they're in, and Mae-Eye is actually feeding on the "love" they profess to her - and in order to get all of that "sweet nourishing affection", she intends to bake the Titans up in a giant pie while pretending to tuck them in for the night!
Mother's true face
Starfire of course protests vehemently, but is unable to fight Mae-Eye alone and quickly overpowered. Although Mae-Eye tries her best to get her under her control again, Starfire deceives her and comes to her friends' rescue. When the mind control proves too persistent and an army of gingerbread men created by the hag moves in on them, Starfire has no choice but to give the others a knock on the head as well, freeing them from the magic.
In a moment of quiet after a lengthy battle with the gingerbread army, the Titans muse over how Mae-Eye could have come into the Tower, and finally it turns out that she had smuggled herself in with a pie Cyborg had unwisely bought from an old witch that remarkably has the same appearance as Mother. Then Mae-Eye attacks them, pursuing them all over Titans Island. With no way to defeat her directly, Robin resorts to tricking her, and finally they manage to banish the hag back into her pie. And in order to pay them back for their latest defeat, Robin decides to grant the H.I.V.E. a gift of free pie...
Characters
Main Characters
Villains
Trivia
- This has been voted the weirdest episode ever created.
- Mother's true form can be seen in mirrors throughout the episode.
- Innuendo: Starfire blushes and covers herself when See-More uses his see-through vision, meaning he possibly saw her naked.
- When Mother Mae-Eye changes Robin hair, she changes it to Tim Drake's hairstyle.
- Starfire's Mumbo alarm clock was in the oven with the Titans, before it melted.
- During Cyborg's flashback to the gypsy who gave him the pie, the city of Kandor, the capital of Superman's home planet of Krypton, is seen on the counter next to her.
- When Mother Mae-Eye is force feeding Starfire pie, Starfire spits it out and reveals yet another fascinating fact about Tameranian biology: she has nine stomachs.
- This is one of the few episodes where Raven put on a big smile, though this was due to the fact she was mind controlled.
- When the mind control was broken, Raven reveals she hates wearing dresses (especially dresses that look like only Dorothy would wear on her trip with the lion, the tin man, and the scarecrow).
References
- Early in the episode, Mother Mae-Eye declares that the Titans must be surrounded by "sugar, spice and everything nice", a reference to the nursery rhyme "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" as well as the opening narration to another fellow Cartoon Network show "The Powerpuff Girls".
- The monkey's paw in the gypsy's collection parodies the horror story The Monkey's Paw.
- During Cyborg's flashback to the witch who gave him the pie, Control Freak's remote is seen on the counter next to her. Puppet King is also visible in this scene.
- Beast Boy's bunny outfit and the scene where Starfire has a bar of soap put in her mouth by Mother Mae-Eye are references to the movie, A Christmas Story.
- Likewise, Raven's dress is similar to the kind that little girls like Shirley Temple used to wear from the 1930s to the 1950s.
- The way Mother Mae-Eye visually and mentally deceived the Titans is similar to the antagonists of the 1988 film They Live where hideous blue-skinned aliens used disguises to look human, become the upper class and politicians and used messages to order humans to submit to authority.
Errors
- In the scene where Mother is putting the Titans to bed at 5 o'clock, when she is saying good night to each of the Titans they appear to be tucked into individual pie tin-styled beds, but when she says "time for beddy-bye" before this occurs they are all in one large pie tin-styled bed.
Gallery
Click here to view the gallery.
See also
Mother Mae-Eye (Transcript)