In Review: Titans – Hank and Dawn

Synopsis: The origin story of Hank Hall and Dawn Granger’s relationship and the loss in each of their pasts that brought them together as the vigilante Super Heroes Hawk and Dove.

Review: This week takes us back to Hawk and Dove and provides us with a pretty cool origin story, which feels very much grounded in reality given how edgy it actually is.

The Story

The story starts with a brief clip of Hank at Dove’s bedside at the hospital and then flashes back to when Hank for a kid at school with his little brother Don. Hank is a star football player and in the crowd, Don is cheering him on. The football coach spots Don in the crowd and takes him to the locker room after the game under the pretense of showing him around. Hank comes out having gotten changed and sees the coach getting rather cozy with his younger brother and gets his brother to leave. It becomes all too apparent that Hanks football coach is a pedophile and is abusing kids.

Years later Hank and his brother are in high school and Hank has helped the football team win their latest game but has taken a serious blow to the head. Don having seen the game on television goes to the school board and asks them to rest his brother so as to prevent making the head injury worse. Hank is angry about his brother’s interference and starts a shouting match in the library.  When the Librarian tells them to be quiet Hank knocks the guy out with one punch and a fight breaks out with only Hank and Don being the last two standing. They get thrown out of school for the offense, but only after Don pushes the schools head into doing so.

At this point in the story, Don comes up with the idea of becoming vigilantes and targeting sexual predators that the police and courts have allowed back on the streets.  So the original Hawk and Dove are born, but they only go after small-scale targets.

The scene then changes to Dawn Granger who has become a fairly successful ballet dancer. We see her proud mother watching Dawn dance and cheering her on. After the show, mother and daughter go for a bit of afternoon tea. We pretty much learn at this point that Dawn’s father has abused her mother and Dawn broke his arm for doing so.

After their afternoon tea. Dawn and her mother bump into Hank and Dom on the street. Hank helps Dawn and her mum with some things and a sudden accident involving a van kills both Don and Dawns mother.

Later both Hank and Dawn meet at grief counseling and begin to form the bond that leads to them becoming Hawk and Dove.

The Acting

This was a fairly troubled story in that it dealt with a lot of sensitive issues. So the acting needed to be good.

Tait Blum puts in a fantastic and believable performance as the young Hank Hall who is so protective of his younger brother that he is willing to pretty much give his life for him and in a fashion does just that by giving himself over to the football coach in order to protect his brother. This is the most powerful scene in the whole episode and Blum is absolutely brilliant.

We also got a nice guest appearance from Marina Sirtis who plays Dawn’s mother and although she is only on screen for a relatively short time. She makes the absolute most of the time she has by bringing us a truly convincing mother figure and helping sell the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship.

Also really good were Alan Ritchson and Minka Kelly who have some pretty intense scenes together as they build up to becoming the Super Heroes that they are.

Overall

This was a solid story. The sexual abuse storyline was handled wonderfully well by giving us just enough information to discern what was happening without shoving it down our throats.

I really enjoyed watching the two brothers as young adults and was sorry to see Don killed off given that the chemistry between the two actors was so good that you could actually believe they were brothers.

Throughout the episode, we get glimpses of Raven screaming for help in Hawk’s reflection in the mirror and this recurs now and then through the episode, but never becomes too intrusive to Hank and Dawn’s story, but it does have a key role to play as the episode comes to an end.

Overall though. A really solid episode, which discusses some pretty difficult subjects and tackles them with a decent amount of sensitivity.