Batman, Robin & Beyond
This, more than anything else, will be me collecting my thoughts on Terry, so there's a chance it won't make the slightest bit of sense to anyone else. There will likely be some DC/DCAU blurring within.
Alright, first and foremost, let's ignore most of Epilogue as I'm working on the end of season three and get down to the beginnings of Terry. He is, more or less, what you'd expect from a Robin: he's bright, he's athletic, quick-witted, he has a troubled past as a delinquent and he makes mistakes. You have to ask yourself, in another time and place, would Terry have been a Robin, rather than the Bat? I honestly don't know. While he has all the makings of a good Robin (including bright eyes and dark hair, I really do think Bruce is trying to start a harem here), he also has never been a Robin and this is part of what makes it interesting to me. His circumstances meant he could have gone either way, but the world needed a Batman so this was the role he filled. He didn't necessarily fill it by thinking 'the world needs a Batman'. His background in that is much more personal and much more like Dick's. I have to wonder if that's part of the reason he was taken on.
Bringing it back to basics, Terry has a distinct lack of control. That could well be a side effect of living in a Gotham without Batman. He's grown up in a world where screams are normal and people ignore them. He doesn't see eye to eye with his father, he doesn't see his mother and younger brother all that much, high school is high school with all the troubles that come with that and like most of us at that age. Now, considering, Terry must have only been sixteen when the seiries starts and he was fourteen when he was getting himself into a lot of trouble, that's not a huge difference. This may be where the theory that Batman is shaping him as much as anything because of his age. He's learning what works and what doesn't. As he tells Barbara, he makes mistakes, but he also doesn't make those mistakes twice. He learns quickly and pushes with a hard determination, that I think he knows could turn into an obsession, much as it had done to his predecessor.
Batman, as a role, has always been about choices and Terry has made this choice about three times. First, when he steals the suit because he needs to bring a sense of closure to his fathers death. Again, when Bruce offers him the role in a more permenant way and lastly, after Return of the Joker, when he finally understands why the previous family fell apart. They had never been active in his lifetime, so it was a different world back then and until that point, at least in my opinion, Terry appears to have been wearing the training wheels. Taking on someone like the Joker, you can't have them and he makes that choice by doing his own thing rather than Bruce's because he's his own kind of Batman, no matter how much respect he has for Bruces.
There's a chilling echo in the DCAU for the old batfamily with those old cases. The case in regular DC implies death, so the death of an era and a family is symbolised in those. Terry is disconnected from all of this and while he bares the weight of being Bruce's successor, he doesn't have all of that emotional baggage that Dick or Tim would have brought to the role. It's one of the ways he differs from what's expected; Terry has all the hope and optimism of a Robin but is growing into the grit that makes him Batman. He redefines the role for a new era: his era, where things are different. Criminals aren't static and neither can Gotham's protector be.
There's also another layer to this; Terry can fuck up and run to Bruce, but he also takes responsibility for his own mistakes and does try to sort things on his own. Bruce tries to protect him and even Barbara ends up with a grudging respect for the fact a Batman may still be needed in Gotham. But can he stand on his own? I think Epilogue shows he can, but he has also learned an important lesson: everyone needs help sometimes.
To that end, what function does a Robin have? Here's where I'm going to blur, because the people I'm describing with be DC (mostly because Toon!Tim amounts to Tim and Jasons unholy lovechild so it'll get covered). What does a Robin bring to a world, in comparison to a Batman?
The way I see it, Robin is the soul to the body. It's two sides of the same coin, the side with hope, the side that can deal with the victims with a brilliant smile and a gentle touch, a beacon of hope in the skies because you never see Batman, but you can see that red and gold (and green, sometimes) and feel a little bit safer. A Batman without Robin is a Batman in darkness...except when the Batman is young, inexperienced and then he's Terry, who is a strange crossbreed.
That's all well and good as it is, but there are more personal things Robin's bring to their role. For Dick, it's his acrobatic skills, his ability to deal with people on a very friendly level, his enthusiasm for everything and his heart which keeps him (and Bruce, to a degree, sane). For Jason, it's his ability to deal with the streets, to not over-think things and again, he has that enthusiasm. For Tim, it was his mind; he is a good detective, he's manipulative and oh yes, enthusiasm again. Now here's where we crash and burn: Tim has lost his enthusiasm, where Dick never did (this is why Nightwing is a whole different creature from the Bat) and lo and behold, as the series progresses, DCAU!Dick loses his enthusiasm because there's a lot of darkness out there.
The point being, Terry is slowly losing that enthusiasm. He needs to be reminded to smile and not let it all get him down. He brought hope to Bruce back in the early seasons of Batman Beyond, but by the end, he could use a little hope himself. So is that the effect of Gotham? Or is it the effect of going without a 'family' to help him? This is where I think it gets important: there will need to be a Batfamily in the DCAU for Terry's time. As we've seen, there has to be a family there. There has to be a support system, in DC or DCAU. DCAU is showing what will happen if that support system falls apart and if Terry's father hadn't been killed in a fluke, the legend that was Batman may have died. Why? Because they didn't pull together as a family.
Are you paying attention to this, Battle for the Cowl? This is how they were destroyed. A Batman needs a Robin. Screw that, Gotham needs a Batfamily, not just a Batman, or they will end up bitter, angry and feeling alone, as Terry appears to be in Epilogue. There has to be hope, knowledge, experience and bonds of family to get them through. Gotham has the Bats. The Bats need eachother.