Titans S01E09 Review: The Extant Dove

Titans, Season 1, Episode 9: Hank & Dawn

This is... an interesting episode! It's another episode that puts almost exclusive focus on the 'guest stars' of the show than the actual titular Titans themselves, and it's honestly an interesting decision. We're in the final three episodes of Titans' first season, and honestly, it's been kind of a coin-flip with the main cast. Dick and Rachel are handled relatively well, but I've always felt like the writers have absolutely no clue what to do with Kory and Gar. They've shown up in almost every episode, but they feel far more flat than Jason Todd, Donna Troy, Hawk, Dove, or even the Doom Patrol. It's like the writers wanted those characters to be the main cast of the show, but are forced to ape the 2003 cartoon cast or something? I dunno. It's really bizarre to have so little headway with characters like Starfire, but then we take an entire episode to detour to Hawk and Dove's backstory.

Sure, the entire flashback is framed as a shared hallucination-dream shared by Hank and the comatose Dawn, with Rachel occasionally interrupting the flashback to try and get them to help out (and get Jason Todd for some reason?) but it's ultimately still a very standalone episode that honestly feels more like it's intended pilot episode for Hawk and Dawn more than an episode of Titans... particularly one that's so close to the conclusion of the ongoing Rachel storyline. It's weird. I really like a lot of the storytelling decisions and guest stars that Titans has done throughout the season, and I guess they kind of build up to the Raven-Cult stuff relatively well, but honestly Titans feels more like a bunch of guest star spots more than an actual season about the supposed four main characters themselves.

That said, though, let's talk about Titans' ninth episode, "Hank and Dawn". We get some... pretty interesting backstory as we delve into Hank Hall's backstory, about how Dawn wasn't actually the first Dove -- the first Dove was his brother, Don, and we get to see how the two of them are truly a pair of teenager superheroes, running around with cameras and shit and beating up pedophiles and making themselves a name online with their amateur vigilante videos. It does admittedly betray Don Hall's character a bit since he seemed pretty damn all right with brutalizing people outside the law, but I really can't think of an argument for not brutalizing pedophiles. So.

We then get another flashback to Hank's childhood, where he and Don basically gets threatened by this scumbag of a creepy, molesting teacher, and how the innocent Don clearly has no idea what's going on. Hank ends up telling Don to go home and stays behind with Creepy McCreep the teacher, who uses the additional threat of ruining Hank's chances of getting a scholarship to basically get him to do... well, unsavoury things. That got surprisingly dark, honestly.

We then get a brief montage of Hank's subsequent career, and apparently just as how he was back when we first met him in this series, he's just pushing himself and pushing through a fuck-ton of injuries and an addiction to pain medications just to be able to be a good football player. This leads to Don, ever a good brother, looking up for Hank and getting him benched to spare him another injury in the field. An argument leads to the two of them fighting a bunch of other students in the library, and... and we get an interesting scene where Don suddenly argues with the principal, telling him that his brother had given everything to the school, and basically asks the school to "kick [them] the fuck out".

The brothers then have a discussion about how football is a way for Hank to channel all the anger and rage within him in a productive, good way, and that locker room incident gets brought up a couple of times. Don ends up getting the idea of forming the Hawk-and-Dove superhero team (Don apparently takes martial arts courses offscreen). While all of this is going, we get brief scenes of Dawn with her mother, who's trapped in an abusive relationship. It's another pretty dark, sobering scene where Dawn's mother keeps insisting that "he's better now", and "he's stopped for a while" and that Dawn's stepfather only gave in to his temper after Dawn's sister Holly got into some trouble.

And then... fateful car accident! Just as the two families meet each other, a car accident kills both Don and Dawn's mother, leading to a quasi-montage of the two of them meeting each other in a grief counselling session, and basically befriending each other. It does cheapen Don's character a bit, turning him into an Uncle Ben style "origin story death" character, but the buildup to Hank and Dawn's story is admittedly done well with the brief montage we got. The two actors really play the part of awkward broken people finding someone to relate with in an absolutely cute manner.

Dawn ends up finding out about the whole Hawk and Dove vigilante thing while staying over at Hank's place, and Hank, apparently, lets everything out to Dawn and that he never actually went after the pedophile coach because he didn't want to make it 'real' or for Don to find out.

This leads to Dawn ending up looking for who the coach is, fight the coach (Dawn, too, practices martial arts offscreen), and we get a brief but brutal squabble between the two until Hank shows up. Hank tells Dawn to go home, but Dawn ends up staying and watching as Hank beats the shit out of the coach. The episode is kind of ambiguous on whether Hank kills the coach or not, though.

As the two have sex, the flashbacks end and we get Dawn waking up in the present day after all of the Rachel vision thing, and it's... it's honestly a pretty well-done origin story for Hank and Dawn. I'm genuinely surprised to see just how intricate they ended up revising and making this new origin story for this pair of characters. It's an interesting and very solid standalone episode, which, again, makes me wonder about the structuring of this first season, considering how it's really keen on taking things slow. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Don Hall, a.k.a. Dove I, was, indeed, in the comics, the first Dove. Brothers Hank and Don would become the superheroes Hawk and Dove, in the comics receiving their powers from the mystical Lords of Chaos and Order, who selected the brothers to represent the different views of handling out justice. Hawk and Dove would become crimefighters and members of the Teen Titans, until Don was killed during the Crisis on Infinite Earths.  
• Holly Granger, Dawn's sister, mentioned briefly in Dawn's argument with her mother, would become the third Hawk after Hank Hall and Sasha Martens. 
• The punk that Hawk beats up in the prologue scene, Dwayne Wainwright, is the civilian alter-ego of minor villain Sudden Death, a minor villainous metahuman punk with energy absorption powers that fought Hawk and Dove.