Titans Episode 9 – Hank and Dawn Secret Origins Revealed

Everyone loves a good origin story and Hawk (Alan Ritchson) and Dove (Minka Kelly) AKA Hank and Dawn. This beloved couple of the DC Universe has had an interesting go at it. For all intents-and-purposes, we will only be focusing on their Titan series origin instead of delving into how close or distant it is from the comics.

In the origin of Hawk and Donnie, the original Dove (Elliot Knight), the duo pull a Phoenix Jones in video recording their vigilante antics. All these memories show up in a dream as Hank waits for Dawn to wake up from her coma.

Flashing back even further into their youth, Donnie, Hank’s little brother cheers him on in his pop warner football game as the coach takes a liking to Donnie, Hank realizes the coach is a pedophile and sends him home in order to sacrifice himself to the disgusting animal that takes advantage of the young boy after threatening to revoke his scholarship.

Fast forward to their college years and Hank suffers some serious brain trauma after several concussions and Donnie is the one that rats him out to the Athletic Director for his own good, a fight breaks out in the library and the two brothers get expelled. The two get the idea of taking out child predators to avenge Hank’s childhood trauma all those years ago in the prep-school locker room.

In Dawn’s origin, Titans flashes back to her ballet dancer days and confronts her mother (Marina Sirtis) who decides to return to her abusive father to the disappoint of our heroine. On their way out of the restaurant, the two future loves meet at a news stand as Donnie and Dawn’s mother are struck by a moving truck after it had been in a collision. In their commiseration, the future heroes join forces.

Although I wash this episode had aired a few weeks earlier after Dawn had ended up in the hospital, it is still a great origin story, even though it feels like a filler until we hopefully get to Dick becoming Nightwing (fingers crossed).

Ritchson and Kelly are believable as the love-struck, grieving couple that find each other as they prop each other through the pain of their lost loved ones. You really do want to see Hank and Dawn end up together as you hope for her to wake up.