Each member of the Titans has a role to play, and Cyborg seems comfortable dealing out brute force when it comes to handling bad guys. He's the kind of hero that can take on nearly any villain with confidence and ease thanks to the abilities proffered by his cybernetic enhancements.

Cyborg would be the first to attribute his abilities to his non-human additions. However, he never thinks twice that his mechanical side could also prove to be a hindrance in some situations. During a visit to the park on a beautiful summer day, the Titans are awakened to the possibility of Cyborg's ultimate weakness, his power cells.

Yes, like a cellular phone, Cyborg can run out of batteries. In the midst of a football game, Cyborg's cells run out of juice, causing him to collapse. Fortunately his reserve power should allow him enough time to get back to the Tower to replace his power cells.

It's funny because the issue of Cyborg's power needs never really came to mind. The concept of long-term power cells makes more sense than the alternative, which would be to recharge a short-term battery each night. Could you imagine if Slade attacked in the middle of a recharge session?

On his way home, Cyborg comes in contact with a young boy with a prosthetic arm made of wood. He exclaims that Cyborg is his hero because he is just like him. This takes Cyborg by surprise, and as luck would have it, his Titan communicator starts buzzing.

A villain named Mumbo is running amok in the City, and Cyborg is far too stubborn to ignore the call of danger. Mumbo has been busy robbing countless jewelry stores and banks throughout the shopping district, using his magical powers to grift his way across town.

The Titans corner him in a junkyard, where Cyborg meets up with the team and uses some old car batteries to extend his reserve power further. Unfortunately, Mumbo uses water to short out Cyborg's supply pack, and he ends up dumped into an underground cavern just as his power runs out.

To my knowledge, there was never a villain named Mumbo in the comic series. In all honesty, he comes off as a second rate Joker, with magical powers, but the level of insanity is really the point of comparison. This is fine because the center of the episode isn't really the villains at all, but more Cyborg's microcosmic struggle between his machine side and his human side.

The Titans believe that Mumbo has towed him away in a stolen garbage truck, and they pursue Mumbo in a hilarious chase sequence aboveground. Meanwhile, a machine named Fixit who lives beneath the surface scavenging and repairing discarded machinery rescues Cyborg. Thankfully, Fixit restore Cyborg to full power, but insists that he not leave until all maintenance has been completed.

It doesn't take long to realize that Fixit intends to replace Cyborg's human side and make him entirely mechanical. Little does Cyborg know, underneath all of his metal prosthetics his mortality plays as much a part in his success as a hero as his augmentations do, and to strip away his humanity would be as detrimental as removing his machinery.

In the comics, Vic Stone (a.k.a. Cyborg) is sort of a walking paradox. He was never fully accepting of his cybernetic prosthetics because he felt that a part of him had been stripped away, in part due to his parents' work with STAR Labs and their proclivity to use him as a test subject. This angered him and made him bitter, but below all of this he is really just a half-robot with a big heart.

Science always played a large role in Vic's life, being surrounded with it at an early age, losing his mother and father to their work, and eventually becoming enhanced by science to both save his life and make him ultra-intelligent. He developed a friendship with a woman named Sarah Simms, who worked with children with prosthetics who looked up to Vic as a role model. Much in tune with the message at the end of the episode, Vic spent time showing the kids that it was actually their human similarities that connected them, not the prosthetics that replaced their missing human pieces.

Seeing this aspect of Vic Stone translated over into the animated series is refreshing in its ties to the source material. However there is one note that always stuck out for me with Vic Stone of the comics, and that was how he found himself tied to his humanity.

At one point in the comic series, STAR Labs desired to add further enhancements to Vic's cybernetic modifications, which would ultimately replace more of his skin with metal. This was a problem for Vic in two ways. The obvious, which "Sum of His Parts" captures perfectly, is the physical loss of his human flesh.

The second aspect is the intangible loss of his identity, and part of how Vic identified himself was as a Black man. By stripping away more of his skin, which was the most physical identifier of his ethnic background, he felt that more of what helped define his identity would also be lost in the process. This was profound in that it was a particularly unique representation of humanity in a comic book.

This was important to Vic Stone, and to suggest that a group of scientists wished to replace more of what he felt defined him, as a Black human being, was far more sinister than having a robot named Fixit desire to make him entirely robotic.

I understand that the series may need to dodge any use of ethnic plot threads because it is, after all, a cartoon. However, I think the episode could have dealt with the same level of lost humanity as it did, but added yet another layer of depth by supplanting the Fixit character with STAR Labs Scientists obsessed with making further advances in the name of science.

All in all, the inner struggles present in this episode are refreshing to see in a series that is mostly about kinetic flash and teenage humor. Everything works, and once again the series successfully re-tools plot threads from the comics to better suit the animated format.

Next Week: In observance of our Federal Holiday, groan, Tax Day, it looks like we will be taking next week off from Titan territory, however I will return on April 21st to get the ball rolling on the second half of our Season One retro reviews with "Nevermore," which gives the team a deeper look into the complex spawn of Trigon, our very own Raven! See you then!

Mario Anima