DC Universe’s Titans season 1, episode 2 recap: Hawk and Dove

Monita Roy Mohan

In the Titans pilot episode, Dick Grayson took Rachel Roth under his protection and they headed to a safe place. We find out more about where Dick is taking Rachel and who his ‘friends’ are.

The second episode of Titans opens with Hank Hall/Hawk, played by Alan Ritchson, chained up and tortured by a group of gunrunners. They want information from Hawk, but instead of unmasking him (comic book logic), they decide to use knives and shears to threaten him.

He is saved in the nick of time by Dawn Granger/Dove (Minka Kelly) who takes out all but one of the thugs. That scene felt like it had as many F-bombs as The Wolf of Wall Street.

Following the rescue, Hank recuperates in his and Dawn’s apartment in Washington. He is battle-scarred, popping pills and injecting drugs to beat the pain.

Turns out he needs a hip replacement and the two of them have to shut down one more gun supply operation before they can quit this game for good. Dawn (wearing a Superman t-shirt) looks like she’s been quietly suffering through this same promise for a while.

When she gets a moment to herself, she reminisces about a mission four years ago. Hawk was healthy and the two of them were taking down a large gang. Part way through the fight, a fellow superhero swooped in to help – none other than the Boy Wonder, Robin (Brenton Thwaites).

From the conversation in the flashback, it is evident that Hawk and Dove aren’t the kind of company that Batman approves of, so Robin’s tryst with them is a secret. While the choreography of the fight scene is pacey, the fake blood splatter is laughable.

Robin in Titans episode 2

Back in the present, we see a photo of the three of them smiling together with an unknown woman. Who could she be?

In Ohio, Dick Grayson and Rachel Roth (Teagan Croft) are grabbing some coffee. He asks her how she killed the Acolyte in the pilot episode of Titans, but she isn’t able to answer.

Dick explains that he’s taking her to some friends of his who will give them a safe place to lie low for a while. ‘You’re scared, I get it,’ he says, ‘but, sometimes, there’s no time to be scared’.

They head to a motel and Dick scrolls through his phone to make a call. There are a few familiar names to spot for comic book fans, including Lucius Fox, Donna Troy, Bruce Wayne, and Dawn and Hank.

Dick finally settles on calling Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne Manor butler and the man who practically raised Bruce following his parents’ deaths. Alfred doesn’t sound at all pleased to hear from Dick, which is, again, a departure from the comics.

Alfred has always rallied around the children in his life, even challenging Bruce’s harsh treatment of the Robins when the need arose. But lest we forget, this show is dark and gritty, so everyone is a loner in Titans.

In Detroit, Amy Rohrbach (Lindsay Gort) examines the body of the Acolyte with the medical examiner. It appears his organs burst all at once, but there is no explanation as to how. On the Acolyte’s back is a tattoo of a Raven (get it?).

Amy calls Dick asking where he’s gone, and he fends her off by saying he’s working a case. I’m not sure that’s how the police department works, Titans writers room. Amy explains that the uniform who had checked Rachel out of interrogation in the first episode was a fake and has turned up dead (Dick would know that, of course). He asks her to forward all the case information she has.

While Dick has gone to get pizza, Rachel uses Dick’s laptop to Google herself. She moves on to watching videos of the tragic night when Dick’s parents were killed when Rohrbach’s fax of the Acolyte case turns up, upsetting Rachel and her soul-self.

Dick returns to find Rachel in the bathtub, frantically reciting the Lord’s Prayer, surrounded by scraps of paper with crosses drawn on them. Teagan Croft is excellent in this scene, but why is there no urgency from Dick when he walks into the room to find an upturned chair and Rachel missing?

In St. Louis, Missouri, a family is going about their business like it’s still 1955. The teenaged kids play a board game, the Dad reads the paper, while the Mom busies herself in the kitchen. A mysterious man rings the bell and tells the father ‘you’re activated’ while handing him an image of Rachel. ‘She’s more dangerous than she looks.’

The father unlocks a cabinet full of injections that the family dutifully inject themselves with. The first place the Nuclear Family hit is Amy’s apartment. They brutally attack her demanding Dick Grayson’s location.

Rachel and Dick are back in his car. He explains that the man she killed was part of a Doomsday cult intent on stopping the end of the world. Dick asks if Rachel knows anything about this, and she replies that when she was a child she was not allowed to get too angry or scared because ‘bad things would happen’.

She realizes she’s an orphan now and is afraid that Dick will leave her. He insists he won’t. He’s a liar.

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Dick brings Rachel to Dawn and Hank, even though he hasn’t spoken to them in four years. From the look on Dawn’s face when she sees him at the door, I’m guessing he didn’t call first, either.

Rachel shakes Dawn’s hand and sees flashes of Dawn and Dick together. That’s probably not something a little girl needs to see in her head.

Dick explains the situation to Dawn but she struggles to believe Rachel killed someone. She asks why Dick didn’t go to Bruce, to which he replies, ‘he’s no good with kids’. I am baffled by this comment, but then again, Titans doesn’t seem to care about the comic book characterizations of these people.

Dawn asks Dick to join Hank and her on their last job, but Dick is adamant that he is ‘out of the life’. Didn’t we see him brutally attack a child abuser in the pilot?

Hank sees them talking and immediately starts piling into Dick. Jealous much? Rachel confronts Dick about his past relationship with Dawn. When he tries to deflect she says it’s impossible to lie to her. Somehow Rachel knows that he hurt Dawn, but the writers don’t delve any deeper.

Dick leaves his secret Bat-mobile phone inside his locked case. To get to it, he needs to do a finger-print and ocular scan. Who’s going to stay on the line for that long? What if this was an actual emergency?

The person on the other end would be dead by the time he answered. Fortunately, it’s Alfred on the line and he’s got what Dick wants. A transfer of a sum of money that Dick hides in Hank and Dawn’s apartment.

Here’s what I don’t understand about the editing and writing in Titans. Alfred calls Dick on his mobile, but when Dick picks up he says, ‘It’s me’. Who else would it be? And then, when Dick picks up the money from the bank, the camera spends an extra few seconds trained on Dick’s face. Brenton Thwaites is not emoting anything special in those seconds – it just slows down the pace.

Rachel and Dawn return from shopping (because, women!) and they’re busy chatting about Game of Thrones, a show Rachel is too young to watch but enjoys all the same.

Dick is surprised by how chipper Rachel is, and Dawn explains she didn’t treat Rachel like a kid, which was apparently the magical ingredient to make the child smile again. Wow, how did Dick Grayson not know this? Is it because he isn’t a woman? This writing feels like it’s from the 50s.

Dick reveals to Dawn that he intends to leave Rachel here. The money is to tide the three of them over till Dick comes back. He keeps reiterating how she doesn’t ‘know what I’ve become’ and how he’s ‘no good with family’. I can’t help but wonder why he decided to take Rachel under his wing in the first place if he was just going to off-load her onto the first woman friend he could remember.

The presumption on his part that other people’s lives can be manipulated to fit his needs is so aggravating. This is not the Dick Grayson we know and love.

Hank walks in to find Dawn’s hand on Dick’s and immediately jumps to the conclusion that Dick is taking ‘his girl now’. As if the writing so far hasn’t been atrocious enough, it reaches a nadir with Dick and Hank fighting over Dawn, only to be stopped by Rachel’s soul-self.

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Yet another female character is reduced to being little more than a trophy to be fought over in a love triangle. If memory serves, Dick and Dawn never got together in the comics, so this entire romantic sub-plot is an archaic attempt at creating conflict.

Hank, being the chicken he is, sends Dawn to apologize to Rachel on his behalf. When Dawn leaves with Hank to steal the gunrunners’ money, Rachel tries to convince Dick to help her, because that’s what he does.

A despondent Dick sits down and explains that was what he thought he was best at, but he soon realized that the more he helped one group of people, he’d have to hurt another. Rachel throws his own line back at him. ‘You’re just scared; sometimes, there’s no time to be scared’.

In a better show I would applaud her inspiring move, but in Titans sending Robin to fight bad guys is a bad idea. Hawk and Dove take out the criminals quickly, but they don’t account for the many more who appear out of nowhere and shoot Hank in the shoulder.

The thug who had escaped Dove’s earlier attack is back and he still wants to castrate Hawk (I think the dude has a disturbing fetish), but Robin attacks from behind and turns the shears on the thug. Any other show would have left this action to the viewer’s imagination, but not Titans which takes an extra five seconds to show the shears stuck in the man’s nether regions.

Robin takes out the rest of the goons – there’s plenty of fake/CGI blood flying around and some of the physics of the fight don’t make sense. One thing I have to commend the show creators for is the use of the Robin logo. In Robin’s suit, the logo houses his R-shaped shuriken and it’s ingenious!

Photo Credit: DC Universe

Dawn rips into a blood-soaked Dick for being so brutal. This coming from the woman who was gouging people’s faces off in the first scene. Rachel has found the money Dick had left for Dawn and Hank, along with a letter we didn’t know existed. Hiding up on the roof, she is distraught to learn that Dick was going to leave her behind, while Hank is rightly furious.

While the four birds are arguing they don’t notice the Nuclear Family arrive. I guess they got the information they needed from Amy. Somehow, two of them easily dispatch Dick.

He hangs from the side of the building for the rest of the fight, while Hank gets beaten up and Dawn is thrown off the roof. With no one standing in their way, Rachel is kidnapped… again. Two episodes into Titans and all we see is a 14-year-old girl in constant peril. It’s really disturbing to watch.

In the comics, Dick would easily have parkoured out of this sticky situation, but from the looks of it, Thwaites wasn’t given any parkour training to look remotely like an acrobat for this role. Dick climbs back to the roof and runs down the fire exit to find Dawn dying on the ground. For some reason, she apologizes, but I don’t know why.

Dick flashbacks to his dead parents while Dawn lies there bleeding to death because fridging women characters for the development of male ones is still the only way to write in 2018. I can’t tell if Dawn is going to die in this episode, because Minka Kelly has been a huge part of the Titans promotional tour, but how does the character come back from a fall like that?

The episode ends with a very CGI Raven appearing on the roof portending something. If it’s doom and gloom, then someone should tell director Brad Anderson that we already got the message.

I also can’t help but wonder why Starfire (Anna Diop) and Beast Boy (Ryan Potter) didn’t show up in this episode at all. This show is called Titans, right?

Monita Roy Mohan

Monita has been championing diversity, inclusivity, and representation in entertainment media through her work for over a decade. She is a Tomatometer-Approved Critic. She writes for Bam Smack Pow and Geek Girl Authority. Her bylines have appeared on 3-time Eisner Award-winning publication Women Write About Comics, HuffPost, Reactormag.com (formerly tor.com), Soundsphere/Screensphere, FanSided's Show Snob, and Vocal. She was also a TV/Movies features writer at Collider.com. Alongside her twin, Monita co-hosts the pop culture podcast Stereo Geeks.