Dawn is still in a coma and flashes back to how she met Hank. We find out Hank and his brother started out as bargain basement superheroes and that Hank and Dawn met through a common tragedy. And we also find out that Rachel is trying to get in contact with them…

Good God this show is exhausting. It’s not so much spontaneously changing lanes on the tonal super highway as it is jumping the central reservation, mooning the cars it sails over and screaming ‘WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?!’ before suddenly being really switched and sensible again.

This episode should not work. It is a seething morass of tropes slapped together like Bernard Black cooking paint in his magic kitchen. Don’t believe me? Okay, here’s the checklist:

Hank and his brother are both victims of sexual abuse.

In later life Hank in particular sublimates this rage into partying and frequent violence which is later shaped into vigilantism.

They meet Dawn and her mom, played by Marina Sirtis, on the way back from Dawn’s ballet recital. We find out Dawn is English, estranged from her abusive father and that her mother is going back to him.

Hank’s brother and Dawn’s mom are killed in the same accident.

The pair bond through alcohol, shared trauma and, it is very heavily implied, beating Hank’s abuser to death.

The episode is under an hour long.  It’s like a checklist of trauma, a countdown of early ’90s comics angst that doesn’t have to end with Hank on his knees in the rain screaming because it’s already done that once. It should be tropey, exploitational nonsense. Truthfully the way Sirtis and Elliot Knight as Don are taken out of the equation is almost comedic it’s so horrifying.

And yet, somehow, this works and at times, is actually kind of great. Hank and Dawn don’t have the luxury of being raised by a billionaire ninja and Hank’s first costume is basically his football gear. That gives them a hard scrabble, bloody-knuckled feeling which is only accentuated by the genuinely great work done here by Minka Kelly and Alan Ritchson. Both play emotionally and psychologically bruised with the exact combination of split lip tenderness and hard-eyed closed knuckled brutality that’s needed. That, and that alone, makes the climactic murder work. Not because they find it easy, they don’t, but because these two shining young people have somehow come to a place where fighting to the death with a sex criminal is the only thing that makes them feel alive. They are horribly broken, Dove knows it and they keep doing it anyway.

Verdict: This may be the moment where Titans’ ludicrously broad remit begins to come together. With Hawk and Dove back in play, and in a team context, there’s a sense of the circuit beginning to close. I have no idea if it will but if this episode can be held together by sheer force of personality, then anything’s possible. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart