In the final issue of Future State: Teen Titans, two Titans pay the ultimate price in battle, and a major mystery remains unsolved.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Future State: Teen Titans #2 by Tim Sheridan, Rafa Sandoval, Julio Ferreira, Alejandro Sanchez, and Rob Leigh, on sale now.
DC’s Future State event has given readers a glimpse at some of the darkest timelines the DC Universe has ever seen, as well as some of its biggest mysteries, and the Teen Titans stand at the center of it all. The team and its former academy are still haunted by the sins of their past.
But before they can deal with the forces that ravaged their world for good, the Titans lost a longtime team member, Red Arrow, and their most enigmatic figure, Red X, before they got answers to some serious questions in Future State: Teen Titans #2.
The future that the Titans are living through has been decimated by the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, who are each using one of their former teammates as a vessel. The most terrifying and notorious of them has easily been Wally West, or rather Famine within Wally’s body, whose killing spree against other speedsters has been brutally effective. In the face of such incredible threats, Nightwing has taken the mysterious Red X back under his wing, even though the latter of the two is primarily responsible for the situation that they’re in, and they’re bringing a nuclear option into the fray with them, the Dial H for Hero dial. But as soon as the Titan’s final battle with Wally West begins, Red Arrow is killed by the possessed Wally West during her attempt to avenge the death of Kid Flash.
With the rest of the team focused on buying Raven the time she needs to work her magic, Red X brings out the modified H-Dial, trading Nightwing his mask for it in Red X’s mask in a sweetly somber moment. Red X runs out onto the battlefield, unmasked to face the horrors ahead of him, although his identity is still not revealed.
With fused together into one menacing mass by Raven’s magic, Red X summons the spirits all of the fallen Titans are summoned to the fight through the H-Dial’s power. Together again one last time, the team is more than enough to take down the combined Horsemen. It’s a glorious moment that is undercut by the unceremonious death of Red X just seconds after the short-lived reunion, the hero’s face still obscured by the shadows.
The fight may be over, but the battle hasn’t been won just yet. Still, the deaths of Red Arrow and Red X were not in vain even if they were unfortunate payoffs for the two characters. Emiko never got to take vengeance for Wallace’s death at Famine’s hands, and Red X died without his identity ever being revealed.
The mysterious Titan’s connection to the earlier incarnation of the team, as well as his particularly close relationship with Nightwing certainly point to him being Damian Wayne, as does just about all of the evidence regarding the hero’s identity down to the very mantle he chose to take up. With Future State: Teen Titans not offering any solid answers, perhaps Red X will finally be properly unmasked in the pages of the upcoming Teen Titans Academy, which is slated to finally explain just how the Titans’ world became the nightmare that so few of them survived.
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