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Five Thoughts on Titans‘ “Hank and Dawn”

By | December 10th, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

Well fuck Batman y’all it’s time for Titans! We have bucked our pattern of one episode of plot and one episode of a spotlight on another DC character with this Hawk and Dove origin hour. This whole 48 minutes views more like a Hawk and Dove spinoff show that I am assuming got scrapped somewhere along the way in favor of Stargirl, but what do I know. I’m still confused why Hawk and Dove are the other-than-core-Titans this show is obsessed with, now garnering two episodes with the traumatized duo.

If you wanted more Akiva and Geoff doing their thing, this is your episode. If you didn’t, it’s not. It’s kind of that simple. I’m tired of harping on the things I dislike about this show, it’s been an exhausting and very unenjoyable nine weeks, so I’ll try unsuccessfully to be brief. There are times when this episode is surprisingly restrained visually with less blood, even at the points where you expect it. Yet, I…I just am baffled by the choice to make their origin that they wanted to beat up child molesters. “Maturity.”

Anyway, Rachel shows up in weird hallucinatory moments that ties all this to stuff going on in the present. There’s your connection. Let’s dive in I guess.

1. Pills and booze, broken and bruised

Hank and Dawn are the most broken, physically and mentally, characters on this show. Hands down. Rachel’s father may be a demon and she may kill people with her inner demons, Gar may have dead parents and lived in a mansion of oddities, Kory may not remember who she is and be a fugitive, and Dick may (also) have dead parents and (also) kill people with his inner demons, but the writers have made Hanks and Dawn the most abused. Or at least the most angry. And definitely also coping the worst.

This episode begins with Dawn still in the hospital following her fall in episode 2. Hank is both drunk and still drinking on her bedside, while also stealing pills from the hospital to cope with his emotions. She’s on life support and his life is barely being supported. We then get fever dream flashbacks for both of them that are either them dreaming in real time, merely flashbacks, or Rachel-induced horror shows so she can communicate with them. I couldn’t tell you which one. It’s really not clear. Nonetheless, over the course of the episode we get: childhood sexual assault, parental abuse, dead parents, murdered siblings, substance abuse, vigilante vengeance, and a sex scene that might as well have had Leonard Cohen in the background like Watchmen. Because “maturity.” Both Alan Ritchson and Minka Kelly do the best with everything they have, they’re both fine actors, they’re just given darkness over and over again for the sake of darkness. This episode is so wildly out of place from everything that’s come before. It’s a dragged out back-up story in a larger comic arc, and didn’t need to happen unless we were getting another show with these characters. Literally we could have had the last 2 minutes of this episode in ANY other episode of Titans. Hell it would’ve worked last week.

Akiva Goldsman comes back to direct this episode and Geoff Johns is credited as the sole writer. Both have been mostly absent from the middle episodes of the season, which improved vastly on what had come before. Now we are back to square one. I am so curious what went in to the placement of this episode. Were parts of this were filmed earlier in the season? How much behind the scenes drama has there been? All I know, is that we get the origin of Hank and Dawn’s brokenness, and its not a story that helps this show this season. Especially with just three episodes left and literally none of the outstanding plot points of this season close to being wrapped up.

2. Meet Donny Hall

Anyway, rant over. The main core of the episode comes in the form of reliving the childhoods of Hank and Dawn, though Hank gets significantly more time and depth. With that: meet Donny Hall. Hank and Donny are brothers, just like in the comics. As the camera footage from 2009 in the beginning of the episode before the title credits shows us, they were the original Hawk and Dove. Again, just like in the comics. Although instead of being endowed with mystical gifts from the Lords of Chaos and Order, they just want to beat up child molesters.

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We get cuts of Hank and Donny’s childhood. Hank is a star football player, Donny is younger and super supportive. They both have different dads that are also absentee, and the mom works 3 jobs to keep the family afloat. We learn a lot of this from the football coach who is sexually abusing Hank. Hank tells the guy to fuck off and then the coach threatens to get Donny and Hank both expelled from their school. Hank is still great at football in college, but, in typical and convenient storytelling fashion, he’s had a ton of concussions and such and is uber broken physically. Part of that is Donny’s doing which ends in a jock-brawl in the library. Then, because playing football and getting hurt isn’t dangerous enough, they decide to beat up child molesters since Donny knows that Hank endured the abuse so that the coach wouldn’t hurt Donny.

It’s all very Punisher-esque. Let’s punish the guilty for being guilty. Let’s focus on the people who have hurt us. No one’s ever been there for them, the mom died from cancer at some point. They’re on their own, with a great apartment, no jobs and no career except for beating up perverts. It’s quite absurd, especially since they’re filming it. Also their costumes are literally football uniforms. I can get wanting to hurt the person that hurt you, but that’s not what they do at all (at first). It’s merely about inflicting pain. Which is not heroic.

3. Marina Sitris why are you here?????

Dawn on the other hand is a ballerina protege with rich British parents. Her mom is Marina Sitris, aka Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It took me so long to figure that out, but I was watching and was like “I know that voice.” Anyway, Sitris is married to an abusive husband who apparently abuses her, Dawn, and her sister Holly who gets name-dropped. In the comics, Holly also assumes the mantle of Hawk at various points. Dawn finally convinces her mom to leave the dad and not go back, and both seem like they could be happy. All four people seem like they could be happy. They run into each other coincidentally at a newspaper stand where Hank and Donny find they made the front page for beating up a child molester. Dawn and her mom are leaving lunch. That’s as much of Dawn backstory as we get really compared to Hank and Donny, although we do get an extended ballerina dance number, which is both impressive, and unnecessary.

Anyway…Dawn’s mom and Donny both get killed by a van that careens into them accidentally. The entire scene I had to watch multiple times because the camera angle and special effects make the whole thing look almost silly. The camera is staring straight down from above at the street as the accident happens and the van swerves and hits the two and destroys the newspaper stand. It’s literally like watching a bad video game mod. I swear there’s like a squish sound effect like if a bug was killed. For a show that prides itself on violence, I’m surprised this moment occurred how it did: completely lackluster and almost unbelievable. Sitris I haven’t seen you in forever, but you were too good for your 5 minutes, and gone too soon.

4. Let’s make it fair

Alright so of course the pair spiral after the death of their remaining family. They both start drinking a lot, and as a matter of fate (or accident) yet again, they end up attending the same church grief group. Shocking I know. They start going to bars together, talking, going on dates. If it weren’t so heartbreaking and tonally off, it’d be cute in sort of a rom com kind of way. The strongest part of the episode comes with Dawn’s testimony in the group about the world not being fair, and questioning why we can’t make it so. This is the only moment that any of the violence and vengeance crap in this show has been sold to me on an emotional level. They fight and they kill for retribution and fairness. Something that isn’t and can’t be real. It’s a misguided, eye-for-an-eye fairness. I kept waiting for it to be revealed the van killing wasn’t an accident and that it was meant to kill Donny and Hank because of their vigilantism, but no, it was a sick accident. Accidents, leading to death, leading to more death.

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Dawn eventually stays the night at Hank’s and finds his Hawk and Dove gear. He is vulnerable for the first time about his abuse, and instead of trying to help him get help, she encourages him to go kill the coach who hurt him. She tracks him down, he’s a registered sex offender now, and goes to try to beat the crap out of him. Hank follows once he realizes where she went and gets to the guy’s house in time to keep Dawn from getting killed. And then he tortures the guy as Dawn closes the door. And then they have sex in what is perhaps one of the weirdest and least sexy sex scenes I know of. They get back to the apartment and are brooding. She strips and we see Kelly’s backside. Then Ritchson strips and we see his ass too. I guess kuddos for equal fan-service? But still, it’s just odd, and would have made more sense as they, you know, drank wine and had a good time. Instead we make it weird. Also I want to take a moment to call out the number of men I’ve seen in comment sections in multiple reviews I’ve read talking about how attractive they think Minka Kelly is and that that’s why this episode good. Fuck all of you. She’s not a prop for your enjoyment. She’s not here for you. Get your jollies somewhere else. This isn’t a great episode, and if that’s all you have to say about why you enjoyed it, reexamine your life.

Anyway, the episode pretty much ends after they have sex. Dawn, sensibly, says never again, or at least not because we’re horny after punishing people. And then Rachel wakes her up.

5. “We need to find Jason Todd”

This is the strangest part of the episode. The Rachel hallucinatory interludes end with Dawn finally seeing her, not Hank. She wakes up and crawls out of her hospital bed to wake up a drunk and drugged Hank and then tells him Rachel told her to find Jason Todd. Apparently that dialogue happened off camera. Hawk and Dove are now relevant cause they’re gonna find Robin and help either 1) beat up and arrest Kory or 2) help kill Trigon who we still haven’t seen or given a name. Awesome. Love these last minute “Here’s why this matters” moments. There have been too many.

That’s all for this week folks. Sound off in the comments below, let me know how wrong you think I am, then come back for the penultimate episode next week!


//TAGS | Titans

Kevin Gregory

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