Season Finale. To Dick's shock, a wheelchair-bound Jason Todd approaches him with a desperate plea: return to Gotham and stop Batman from his murderous rampage.
Tropes featured in this episode:
- The Bad Guy Wins: Trigon successfully corrupts Dick Grayson with a worst-case scenario nightmare, with Rachel powerless to do anything against him.
- Black Eyes of Evil: Dick gets these along with the dark veins around the eyes that Rachel gets, after surrendering to his Dark Side.
- Blatant Lies: Trigon tells Rachel that Dick chose his path, but every time we saw Dick choosing to return to his family there was A Glitch in the Matrix and something happened to make Dick change his mind.
- Cliffhanger: For the entire first season. The whole episode is Only A Dream designed to trap Dick Grayson in a scenario wherein he embraced his inner darkness. Trigon is summoned, things are looking bleak.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Dick isn't happy that Dawn has asked Hank to help paint the room, even though she's pregnant and needs help doing so. Dawn in turn isn't happy that Dick is working with his ex-girlfriend Kory.
- Dead Guy Junior: Dick's hallucination son is named Johnny, after Dick's father.
- Hallucinations: The entire episode is Trigon messing with Dick's head.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: An inversion as it starts off this way with Dick married to Dawn in a happy family life, then goes From Bad to Worse in order to drive Dick over the Despair Event Horizon.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: This is how Dick sees killing a wounded Batman after he killed an entire SWAT team and Kory.
- Right Through the Wall: Dick stays at a No-Tell Motel during his return to Gotham, and the sound of someone having sex in the next room serves as Mood Dissonance when he's on the phone to his family in California. Then the banging suddenly gets a lot louder, activating his Chronic Hero Syndrome.
- My God, You Are Serious!: The reaction of the detective when Dick tells him Gotham City's wealthiest citizen and known playboy is really Batman.
- Mythology Gag:
- A reversal of both The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family as Jason is wheelchair-bound and James Gordon's dead. Also references James Gordon, Barbara Gordon, and Superman, and shows a shot of the Batsignal.
- A dead Harvey Dent is shown with his blood covering half of his coin.
- Even in a simulation, you can't kill the Joker.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Batman brutally murdered his Rogues Gallery, including throwing the Joker off a building and onto a car, then stabbing him with a Batarang when he's in the ICU.
- The Only One: Justified as Dick is not the only hero, but the only friend that Bruce Wayne has who's still alive.
- Shout-Out: When Kori tells Dick that she is working for the FBI, she mentions avoiding "the guys in the basement".
- Start of Darkness: As Jason explains, Joker killed Commissioner Gordon. Batman ended up flipping his lid and vowing revenge. The entire hallucination is supposed to be the start of Dick's.
- The Stinger: "Subject 13" escapes from captivity from Project Cadmus, but before he goes, he rescues a dog from a green glowing cage.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Kory goes to use her fire powers on Batman, only to find he has a freeze gun, presumably taken from Mr. Freeze himself.
- Wretched Hive: Firmly establishes Gotham as such. Though it has always been, in the dream at least it has gotten worse. The cab driver refuses to drop Dick anywhere downtown, and even the place he does drop him looks like the Wrong Side of the Tracks.
