A table-setting Hawkeye serves up quite the stinger
Hawkeye slows things down for a character-driven hour that could've used a little more oomph
TV Reviews Hawkeye
Emotionally, “Partners, Am I Right?” fulfills a crucial role in Hawkeye’s first season. This is the episode that ups Kate and Clint’s friendship, forces him to reevaluate the trauma of potentially losing her, and then has him decide to cut ties so that it will be even more meaningful when they inevitably come back together again in the final two episodes. On paper, it’s a perfectly logical thing for the season to be doing at this point. In practice, however, it’s missing some of the spark of the past few episodes. “Partners, Am I Right?” isn’t bad, exactly. Hawkeye has a base level of competence that keeps this show very watchable. It just feels like it’s going through the table-setting motions rather than fully putting its heart into it. But, hey, it does give us another (brief) glimpse of Florence Pugh’s Yelena, and that’s fun!
It’s a reveal that will play best for those who saw the Black Widow movie, but didn’t happen to see the casting news that Pugh would be appearing in this series. (The Black Widow post-credits scene shows Natasha’s adoptive sister/fellow Black Widow being steered towards a revenge mission against Hawkeye.) For everyone else, it’ll either lack a little surprise, because they knew this was coming; or lack a sense of payoff, because they don’t know who she is. Still, I suppose that’s always a risk Marvel runs with its expansive, multi-pronged universe.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see where Yelena goes from here, and I’ll be spending the rest of the day living off the thrill of seeing Emily Dickinson square off against Amy March in a rooftop brawl. But the actual mechanics of the Yelena reveal also speak to a certain clunkiness that characterizes this episode as a whole. Black Widow assassins pretty famously don’t wear masks (well, expect for those high-tech identity-changing ones). So the fact that Yelena spends most of her fight with Clint looking like Night Monkey is a moment the episode sacrifices some of the MCU’s worldbuilding in favor of delivering a big reveal, which can’t help but feel just a touch lazy.
There’s weirdness like that all over this episode. Clint and Kate are shocked when their quest for that stolen Rolex leads them to Maya’s apartment, even though it seems pretty reasonable to assume it was in the hands of someone from the Tracksuit Mafia. (Or to do literally any kind of recon before breaking in?) Elsewhere, the whole subplot with Kate befriending the LARPers in order to find a cop willing to retrieve the rest of Clint’s trick arrows from an NYPD evidence locker is a needlessly complicated detour that I’m not sure even makes much sense. Just walking up and announcing she’s friends with Hawkeye is enough to get them totally onboard with evidence tampering? And somehow the “trade” she offers involves them making her two new costumes?
Those are small enough details that they probably wouldn’t bother me in an episode that either dazzled me with style or fully hit me emotionally, but “Partners, Am I Right?” doesn’t quite manage to do either. Action-wise, it seems like the impressive chase sequence from last week is more of a one-off than a new standard for the series. And while Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld are talented enough to make the material they’re given work, none of the weightier scenes quite hit the highs of Clint’s devastating phone call with his son from last week.
Still, I have to give Hawkeye major credit for the fact that it’s finally making Natasha’s death feel meaningful in a way nothing else in the MCU really has—not even her own goddamn movie. Ever since the first Avengers, I’ve found Nat and Clint’s friendship to be one of the most emotionally moving parts of the Marvel universe, and it’s lovely to see it treated so seriously here. Clint’s joy at getting his family back doesn’t negate the grief and guilt he feels over losing his best friend. Watching Kate take a tumble off a roof brings Clint back to the moment he lost Nat on Vormir in Avengers: Endgame. There, Natasha pulled free from his grasp to nobly sacrifice herself. Here, Clint cuts Kate’s rope in hopes of saving her from ever having to make that kind of choice.
The later moment where Clint pushes Kate away by telling her they were never really partners is classic grizzled hero stuff, but it makes complete sense for the character and Renner plays it perfectly. Where this episode stumbles a bit is in giving Kate’s perspective the same amount of depth. The central idea here is that despite her outward confidence and constant teasing, Kate idolizes Clint to a degree that potentially prohibits a truly equal partnership, at least for now. The power imbalance is too big, and Kate’s inherit, maybe even unconscious belief that her favorite Avenger is always going to be there to save the day is going to get her into trouble when she leaps into danger assuming Clint will have her back no matter what.
It’s a theme that’s actually drilled home by Kate’s mom Eleanor in a couple of offscreen lines of dialogue. “Obsessed, completely obsessed with Clint Barton, ever since the attack,” Eleanor tells Jack (weirdly, right in front of Kate). But I think “Partners, Am I Right?” needed to find a more active way to dramatize that thread from Kate’s perspective too. Her impromptu holiday celebration with Clint is incredibly sweet, but the moment she confirms that he’s Ronin feels like it should be a bigger deal—either as a moment where her image of her idol is challenged, or, more unnervingly, a moment where she becomes instantly willing to justify murder because she’s so onboard with everything Clint does.
The latter is sort of what the episode goes for. Kate refuses to accept Clint’s distinction that there’s a difference between hurting people and protecting them; that he’s a weapon, not a hero. I just think the episode could’ve kicked that idea up a notch, especially since the ending requires we find emotional resonance in a separation we know is only ever going to be temporary. Or maybe the real solution is that those more meandering first two episodes should’ve been condensed into one, and the emotional drama of “Partners, Am I Right?” should’ve come a little earlier in the season.
If those are nitpicky critiques, it’s only because I think the show can hold up to them. There’s still a ton to like about this supremely watchable hour, especially in the melancholy of Renner’s performance. And, on the whole, I’m still finding Hawkeye to be a breath of fresh air among these Disney+ shows. What’s off here is only by a matter of degrees, and that’s hopefully something that a show about two master marksmen should be able to course correct in its final two episodes.
Stray observations
- I enjoyed how quickly last week’s dramatic cliffhanger became this week’s awkward family hang out.
- Two great Renner deliveries: The moment Clint refuses to give Kazi his gun back, and his completely neutral “okay” in response to Grills announcing the snickerdoodles are still warm.
- So what do you want to bet that the person whose secret identity is tied to that vintage Rolex is Clint’s wife Laura? Make Linda Cardellini a superhero, you cowards!!
- It wasn’t until Clint refused to answer Eleanor’s question about whether or not he has kids that I remembered his family is supposed to be a massive secret he hid from even his close colleagues. Weird that he was just openly wandering around New York City with his kids in the premiere then…
- Another clunky storytelling choice: Having Laura make that cryptic phone call to Clint right in front of their kids when she could’ve just walked into literally any other room in their house.
- I truly lol’d at Kate’s aunt owning a “Thanos was right” mug.
- Which is going to have a bigger payoff: Clint’s quarter trick, or the fact that Jack “CEO of Tracksuit Mafia” Duquesne regularly mixes up aphorisms?
- Please, will someone feed that dog something other than pizza and Chex Mix?!? I’m starting to get worried.
290 Comments
Just walking up and announcing she’s friends with Hawkeye is enough to get them totally onboard with evidence tampering? And somehow the “trade” she offers involves them making her two new costumes?I mean, I took it as more believable than the usual copaganda.
It wasn’t until Clint refused to answer Eleanor’s question about whether or not he has kids that I remembered his family is supposed to be a massive secret he hid from even his close colleagues. Weird that he was just openly wandering around New York City with his kids in the premiere then…I would make a guess that it was only really important while he was still a SHIELD agent/in the Avengers. Now both of those groups are gone and he’s (trying to stay) retired, so it’s not that big of a deal anymore.So what do you want to bet that the person whose secret identity is tied to that vintage Rolex is Clint’s wife Laura? Make Linda Cardellini a superhero, you cowards!!Sticking Cardellini in the thankless mom role is probably the MCU’s highest crime.
Well, making Cardellini the MCU version of Mockingbird seems to be the bigges theory on the Internets.
I’d be delighted by something like this, but it just seems like she’s hardly even worried about the watch if it’s personally attached to her. It’s also a men’s style, which is not altogether a problem, but still seems to point away from her.
Yeah, it’s a man’s watch. A woman could wear it or have it as a keepsake, I suppose. Anyway, Laura can still have an agent background.
My wild-ass guess that I just came up with four seconds ago is that someone was pointing Ronin in various directions and that watch, which after all, has a tracker, is part of those missions. And that cleaning up the watch is just as important as cleaning up the suit and sword.
So, maybe Ronin had a co-worker Clint is still protecting. And maybe that’s the person who killed Maya’s dad.
Where there’s a Yelena, is there a Melina? There’s also Sharon the Power Broker to think about.
My issue with the watch belonging to Laura is… why would the Kingpin care? It’s obviously extremely important to them, since they didn’t care about anything else at the auction* , and it’s not clear why he’d be that determined to find Laura (find and apparently kill, according to Hawkeye). It would make more sense if the watch belonged to someone more important, or else someone with a direct connexion to the Kingpin.
[cue final scene of show: Hawkeye handing watch to Daredevil. Although no, I have no idea why he’d have a watch at the Avenger’s compound, and it would mean wiping away the continuity of the Daredevil series]The other problem with Laura being a superhero is just the logistical one: it’s one thing to have Clint running around saving the world while Laura looks after the house in the country (farm?) and the three kids, but if they’re BOTH on highly unpredictable time-consuming missions overseas all the time, you’d have thought that at the very least we’d have seen some hint of this in the behaviour of the kids toward them (so far there’s been plenty of undercurrent of “Dad always has to disappear in a hurry”, but no hint that I’ve caught of “you both always have to disappear in a hurry!”, or mention of the as-close-as-a-parent full-time child-minder-for-weeks-at-a-time they’d have had. Let’s be honest, having both parents work full-time office jobs is already a considerable logistical issue in a family with young children, let alone if both parents work jobs that can take them away from the home for weeks or months at a time on zero notice… Although, without having run the numbers on ages, I suppose Laura could have previously been an agent before retiring to become a full-time mum? That might make sense, and fit with her evident comfort in that world, and friendship with Natasha. And, you know, explain how Hawkeye, a clearly reclusive guy who doesn’t spend a lot of time socialising, would meet her. And might explain why they’d both be willing and able to keep the entire family secret for decades. But it wouldn’t really explain why Kingpin was so determined to kill someone who may have been a government agent twenty years ago?
*which seems to make clear it’s not Maya’s own idea – you’d have assumed she’d want the Ronin sword and suit as well as just the watch – although then why is it just sitting on the side in Maya’s apartment, and not delivered to Kingpin (or whomever). In fact, whoever wanted it – and was willing to use the mafia to attack an underworld auction at a shady rich person’s house to get it – why on earth is the damn thing just sitting around on a shelf in Maya’s apartment and not IN THE DAMN SAFE!? This also confuses the question of what it is and why someone would want it, since clearly they’re not aware that there’s a tracker on it?
The other problem with Laura being a superhero is just the logistical one: it’s one thing to have Clint running around saving the world while Laura looks after the house in the country (farm?) and the three kids, but if they’re BOTH on highly unpredictable time-consuming missions overseas all the time,I don’t think anyone is saying she’s currently an active spy, she’s clearly retired, just that she was one in the past. There’s a rather obscure character from the 60s named Laura Brown, daughter of a Hydra leader, who eventually turns on him, rescues Nick Fury, and later joins SHIELD. It fits pretty well.
My guess is that it is Clint’s watch, but it was given to him by Laura. Perhaps with an engraving or something pointing to the existence of his secret family.
That’s just sacrilege. There’s already a Mockingbird in the MCU and she‘s played by Adrienne Palicki and I will cut the thumbs off any fucker who tries to claim otherwise.
The lack of respect Aos gets is heartbreaking. Easily the best marvel show other than Daredevil and Jessica Jones season 1. On a quarter of the budget and with no access to big characters while maintaining 22 episode seasons.
They had Samuel L Motherfucking Jackson, as well as Sif, Peggy Carter, and other characters that appeared in the movies.
Which I appreciated. Like i said its a shame its not as widely acknowledged or even considered canon by most anymore, as you can see in the comment above. Just this episode there are hints (completely unconfirmed) that Clint’s wife might have been Bobbi Morse.
But it all took place inside Tommy Westphall’s head.
That’s not MCU. That’s Clark Gregg and Ming-Na and Henry Simmons and a bunch of overrated bimbos and himbosBobbi Morse is like the Dollar Store Mockingbird. Laura is the Target version
Someones going to find it a lot harder to hitch-hike
I’m conflicted, because I like Adrienne Palicki as Mockingbird, but I also like Mockingbird and Hawkeye as a couple, and I like Linda Cardellinni as Clint’s spouse, so I don’t know what I want anymore.
Obviously what we need is all three characters in a poly relationship.
Thank you. I know exactly what I want now.
They already did it to the darkhold, get over it.
Coulson is still dead in the MCU *ducks for cover*.
Even the Netflix shows were considered closer to canon than AoS was and Feige only recently confirmed that Charlie Cox would make the jump the the MCU films. Agents 0f Shield has such a differing quality to it that I just can’t accept it as MCU.
In the same way that you would never see an Arrowverse person in a DC film. The production budgets are so widely and noticeably different it just doesn’t work. Arrowverse looks like cosplayers compared to the WB films.
I wouldn’t mind seeing that, except that Adrianne Palicki is already Bobbi Morse, and she’s great, too. I know there’s still a lot of debate about whether AoS is even in the sacred timeline (so to speak) of the MCU, but it would be a shame not to at least give her right of first refusal (or whatever).
Pretty simple fix is to make it a Mockingbird program and Laura and Bobbi are members.
Agents of Shield was relatively detached from the MCU, but it starred a character established in the original Avengers movie, it had guest spots from others in the early seasons, and the Hydra plotline was synced in time with the movies. So I think you have to say it is canonically part of the MCU, in a way that the Netflix series never were. Whether they’d break that continuity, simply because it’s convenient (not unheard of), or whether they’d recast a character like Mocking Bird and simply ignore that it was a new actor (again, not unheard of, Terrance Howard –> Don Cheadle), I don’t think you can rule it out. But AoS is canon.
Generally it’s thought that AoS was canon until Season 5. The last few episodes of that season are synced up with Infinity War, but the Blip doesn’t seem to happen at the end. Logistically this is because they weren’t told what was going on in the movies, and could only do vague “Crazy stuff going on New York, huh” stuff. So whatever time shenanigans they got up to somehow dislodged them from the main continuity there. And that’s not even counting the further timeline shifts in season 7. None of that really affects Bobbi though.
I think Feige completely disavowed the previous TV stuff, but of course he would, and he’s already made one exception to that rule, with more possible by the end of the year.
The last few episodes of that season are synced up with Infinity War, but the Blip doesn’t seem to happen at the end. Official line is that season 5 ends before Infinity War ends. Logistically this is because they weren’t told what was going on in the movies, and could only do vague “Crazy stuff going on New York, huh” stuff. Per Feige’s own words, the AoS crew cleared things with Marvel Studios to make sure they wouldn’t contradict anything. As mentioned above, S5 ends before the snap anyway; the bigger logistical issue was season 6, which was a last-second renewal: ABC wouldn’t commit to a premiere date until the season had wrapped filming, so the AoS writers couldn’t risk spoiling the 5-year skip in Endgame just in case S6 ended up airing before the movie opened. AoS accommodated the awkward situation by picking up a full year post-snap & just keeping the cast busy with their current mission. Cap set up that “some people move on”, so SHIELD having tunnel-vision on what they were doing in the moment has justification. So whatever time shenanigans they got up to somehow dislodged them from the main continuity there. And that’s not even counting the further timeline shifts in season 7.It’s possible that season 5 dislodged them from the main continuity with the time-travel shenanigans, but season 7 did not, since they complied with the rules of Endgame & used a quantum tunnel anchored by somebody who didn’t travel with them (Fitz) to go back to whatever timeline seasons 5-6 are in. I think Feige completely disavowed the previous TV stuffNot on the record, he hasn’t. Everything saying that is either from alleged “leakers”, or twisted interpretations of the sales pitch for the D+ shows, or straight-up fantheories.
Perfectly summarized.
There could be other options too. What other superladies has Clint been with in the comics?
I would’ve preferred seeing Laura do some sleuthing of her own to Kate’s banter with the LARPers, myself.
I think what the LARPer scenes are supposed to demonstrate is that Kate’s “superpower” is charm; people instantly trust, like, and want to help her, and she knows how to use that to her advantage. It contrasts her with Clint, whose temperament and history both incline him to fade into the background and view people outside his immediate circle as potential threats or potential casualties, either of whom should be interacted with reluctantly and as briefly as possible.(Black Widow had the same skillset as Kate, of course, because she was a spy and not just an assassin.)
Kate also displays the “Charm” superpower with the guy at the door of Maya’s apartment building
Cutting out both LARPing subplots would have given us an entire extra episode by now of character development for people who actually have characters (beyond the personality trait of “sure I’ll violate my oath and tamper with evidence but only if you bribe me, because I’m a good guy!”).
It’s a relatively small worry, but I am worried that the LARPer bits could lead up to a “YAY NYPD!” scene which, ugh.
I think she is more capable than we think since she knows a lot of what is going on and can speak other languages
“It wasn’t until Clint refused to answer Eleanor’s question about whether or not he has kids that I remembered his family is supposed to be a massive secret he hid from even his close colleagues.”Given the kind of metadata and other traces we leave everywhere, in real life, someone would have been able to deduce their existence and where they are long ago just from what Clint has been doing over the years.Most unrealistic – Ultron not working this out literally instantly.Most realistic – Tony Stark tracing back video of Spider-Man to Peter Parker and Aunt May’s apartment.
I’m hand-waving this stuff away. The entire Barton family was Snapped. They came back. Presumably, the kids have friends their age. Maybe they attend school.
I feel like Clint is a bit like an athlete or an actor. Some hardcore fans might know all of the names of Matt Damon or Kevin Durant’s kids. But the average person – including a woman with a business to run – might be like, “OK, is this the one with kids?”
And then Clint, old habits being what they are, isn’t keen to reveal them just because someone asks.
But it has been noticed on the Internets that Laura has only been seen at the farm. So, the protection may not just be because of Clint’s job.
It’s not that unrealistic that a top-secret government agent may be leaving less of a metadata trail that the average citizen, though. Eg I assume he’s not taking an off-the-shelf iPhone on his missions…
Sticking Cardellini in the thankless mom roleThey did it to Amy Acker, too (and in a much stinkier show like The Gifted). It’s 2021, but it’s still Hollywood: once you’re 40 and female, you’re either a sidelined mom or you can go star in Hallmark originals.
I’ve come to think of such characters as the “Thankless Michelle Monaghan Role” since she seems to get stuck with them so often.
Hey, sometimes you get to help defuse a massive bomb in the 6th movie.
Sticking Cardellini in the thankless mom role is probably the MCU’s highest crime.If anything, this series has been reversing that. Every time she talks to Clint her obvious experience with spycraft gets more apparent. In this episode she did the intelligence work, and she’s dropping foreign languages and familiarity with the criminal organizations involved. It’s clear she was also an operative and more than capable if the shit hits the fan. I wouldn’t be surprised if she kicks some ass before this series is over. That relationship, two super spies/assassins, makes more sense as to how they met and how they have confidence in one or the other keeping their family safe.
I theorize she’s a former Widow and that is who Clint was talking about the shot he didn’t take.
Obviously far more to Laura’s character. Even without those hints whats so bad about being a great mom and wife.
Honestly, it might be nicer if they didn’t make Laura just another superhero. I think it’s quite a positive message that she’s, so far, “just” a stay-at-home housewife, and yet is also highly intelligent, empathetic, capable, level-headed and a wonderful emotional and logistical support not only for her husband but seemingly in the past also for Natasha. It feels a bit demeaning to her, and to a lot of women in the world (and an increasing number of men) to insist that she doesn’t really matter as a character, isn’t worth a good actor, unless she’s personally punching people in the face. [whether she doesn’t merit a good actor because it’s a minor role in terms of screentime is a different issue, but also not likely to change just because she puts on a supersuit in the final scene].[this is an unusual case because she’s literally a wife, but it’s a broader problem superhero stories often have with “support role” characters. They always insist that the supporting person is really important… and yet there’s almost always this undercurrent of disdain toward them, and an insatiable tendency to have them ‘level up’ and become ‘important’ by making them into action superheroes themselves, as though only the punching part of the job really lets them matter. Eg the CW shows – Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman – have all (excluding Legends where there was never really an equivalent character to begin with*) “upgraded” their support staff to become “real” heroes, at least temporarily. Just for once, I’d like to have a show** in which it was clear that the ‘support’ guy was actually just as smart and just as important as the punching guy.]*oh, except Gideon I guess, hence this season…
**oh, wait, Person of Interest! Yay! (and also arguably… Continuum?)
Legends is as guilty as anyone. Gary, Mona and Nate were all introduced as normal people who gained powers by being exposed as an alien, scratched by a mythical monster and taking a serum* respectively.*I think. It’s been a long time since Nate was just a human historian so I can’t remember for certain.
Was Nate ever… oh, yeah. OK, but I don’t count that because it was in his second/third episode. That’s just an origin story. Mona and Gary do count, admittedly. I hadn’t thought of them in that light because they were never that supportive in the first place – they’re more “random background characters who got promoted” – and maybe because they didn’t have as much “this is the only way I can matter!” motivation, and haven’t done that much heroic with their superpowers. Although I guess Gary uses his as much as anyone now, and iirc there was some degree of needing-to-be-a-field-agent there too……ok, I didn’t think of those two because I’ve just mentally erased almost their entire presence in Season 4 because they were so incredibly annoying.
One of the things I’ve really liked about this show is that Clint and Laura are really a team. It would’ve been so easy for them to go down the well-trodden path of the disapproving spouse hectoring our hero with a lot of, “You promised you’d be here” and “what am I supposed to tell the kids” and so on.
Instead, Laura knows that what he’s doing is important and that he’s not just fucking around. They don’t have any secrets, she knows about Ronin, she knows his missions, she’s a full partner in all of this even if she’s not running around punching people and blowing shit up.
Absolutely. If she were more central, it might get annoying – she is so much “the perfect wife” that she’s maybe too perfect to be credible – but it’s what makes her character appealing as a supporting character: it’s just nice to finally see a mature and successful relationship on screen for once![particularly because Kate is played as though she’s in a romcom – the sort of “cute” that is dangerously close to “abusive and insane” – so it’s particularly good to have someone healthy around…]
And considering Laura got snapped, it means Clint caught her up on all of his Ronin murder-spree after she un-snapped. That’s a lot to unload on a spouse on top of having to explain to her why time just jumped ahead 5 years for her and their kids.
My thoughts exactly. And all those Cw shows suffered for it when they made the choice to do that. Especially Arrow and The Flash.
Yes, it hardly ever works, for a range of reasons:- you designed this character to be a tech wizard/doctor/surveillance expect/scientist/supportive spouse/whatever, you wrote the whole backstory for that purpose, you chose the actor with that in mind, you let that inform all their acting choices… and now you want the audience to accept them in a totally different role. That’s not impossible, but it’s going to be a stretch.- personality aside, what even makes this character capable of doing this job? Either you’re going to have to go “oh, look at that, I just happened to get bitten by a werewolf, just when I wanted to get out in the field how interesting!”, or you’re going to have to go “I have no training whatsoever but through the power of justice I am now a world-beating ninja MMA master!”, or you’re going to go “because I have no training at all, I will have to wear some unconvinging body armour to beat up random muggers, and get equal screentime while my colleague continues to save the world from alien armageddons”. None of these answers really works well.
– you’ve spent the whole show telling us how important that supporting role was, and now you’re telling us the character will jump at the chance to do something else. So were you lying to us about how important that supporting role was all along? Or were you hiding how miserable the character was doing it? Not to mention the whole really objectionable moral overtones of “if you’re not a superhero, you don’t count”. Which is always a problem for superhero literature at the best of times, and gets really obvious once you start “promoting” normal people into heroes.
– great, you’ve created another hero character for your show. Now the fuck what? You don’t suddenly have twice as many villains to face! So does one hero just stand around? Do they both turn up to every fight, making your real hero seem less important? Is every villain suddenly much more powerful than before, that it takes two heroes to defeat them? Do you create pointless subplots as excuses to not have your new hero get involved? Do you have a lot of villains who by some weird coincidence can only be defeated by two people with exactly the right powers doing two things in different places simultaneously? And what about your main hero’s previous angst about how they’d love to give up the heroing but goshdamnit someone’s got to do it – why don’t they retire now they have a replacement? And you can maybe deal with these problems with one extra hero, but if you make this a habit you can end up with a whole bunch of them and it just gets ridiculous.
– great, your support guy is now a hero. So who’s doing the support? Do you introduce a new support guy to restart the cycle? Or do you leave that job unfilled and admit that you were lying about how vital it was up to now?…I’m not saying this CAN’T be done well. Buffy had two slayers for a season and that worked well. POI upgraded from having one hero to having two, with a third who popped in for special episodes, and even had the tech guy get out in the field occasionally (largely for comic effect). [POI had an easier time of it by focusing on the investigation (where you can often require more people) as much as on the confrontation (where you generally don’t), and by taking on groups as much as individuals; the CW approach of immediately identifying the single villain and someone just has to go and put handcuffs on them is directly antithetical to the idea of ensemble heroism!]. But it has to be thought about carefully because there are a lot of pitfalls!
Batman’s Alfred, I suppose…
What’s wrong with it, purely in entertainment, is that they get amazing actors to play the mom/wife and then give them barely anything to do besides worry about the husband/kids, while everyone else is off doing the cool movie stuff. Like, she’s helped out, mostly off screen via text, but it’s all just been standing in the kitchen not…doing anything.
Well, that’s true, if “doing anything” has to involve action scenes. But I’m not sure it does. She’s given emotional support, she’s given practical advice, and she’s performed vital off-screen work that’s allowed her to give information. For a supporting-character-of-a-supporting-character, that’s quite a bit. I’d say she’s done just as much as Eleanor, for instance, despite I’m guessing a little less screentime. Simon Fucking Callow was only in two scenes before being murdered! You can’t have every character be the main character, or even a lead supporting character. And if supporting, advising, researching and informing and similar dramatic-but-non-action activities don’t count as “doing anything”, then a huge proportion of all of cinema can be written off as “nobody does anything”. Orson Welles didn’t do anything in The Third Man, and arguably not even in Citizen Kane!
Every female character nowadays has to be ‘’badass’’ now to be ‘’badass’’ if that makes sense. Anything less and its sexist or overlooking her. If that’s Laura’s choice i don’t see why her choosing to look after her Husband and kids should be looked down on as not badass in its own right.
However, General speaking there is a point to this as female characters historically have been and still do get stereotyped into these types of roles and i agree it can be annoying and i myself have been annoyed on occasion by these types of characters. Laura to me does not embody this and she is not the main character but is part of Hawkeyes world . Hawkeye himself in the grand scheme of things isn’t that big of character so i don’t understand what role your expecting from a side characters side character. When i see her i don’t think anything but wow shes cool as hell and badass and it has nothing to do with her being a housewife or being a fighter like Nat, she is simply where she is at now and this is the function she provides. We are also slowly learning more about her character, which seems to be pointing to her being a retired agent.I haven’t seen Laura Cardenelli in anything else except as Velma in Scooby Doo way back and she was pretty cool in that also.
As a spy Clint’s reticence about personal details would be a reflex. The only reason he started opening up to Kate about Natasha was that he’d known her for a few days and she’d earned his trust.
Halfway through the episode I was thinking that they are really running out of time to bring out Yelena and there she was. Just seeing her face at the end made my heart swoon as she is all that is good in this world.Having written that, that ending fight was the first time I really felt the show fail both in execution and narratively. So in execution it was kind of a mess, especially because turns out that having a fight scene involving three similar sized woman wearing dark clothing at night does not make the fight easy to follow. Additionally the choreography was kind of bland and the story of the actual fight was all over the place.That brings us to the narrative because I could not understand why they felt the need to shove Maya into that fight. Yeah, she’s getting her own show, but here she actively hurt the scene and really diminished Yelena’s entrance as now the latter did not feel special at all. Yelena was just another body there in a cluttered scene who felt so secondary to the show runners that they didn’t even bother giving her to focus there. Like I could not understand why the show couldn’t keep it simple here and just have Yelena ambush Clint and Kate, with the combination of the two being barely able to force a draw. At least in that situation she would have felt like a legitimate threat and justified Clint’s reaction at the end. Now it was bizarre.
As a larger story sidenote, there were two aspects of Clint’s reaction to Yelena and declaring that she was a Widow assassin that made absolutely no sense to me. First in the Black Widow movie, didn’t they establish that Natasha thought that she and Clint had destroyed the Red Room? So wouldn’t Clint have then also been under the belief that there were no more Widows?Second, and this is the bigger issue, apparently Natasha did not tell Clint at all about her little adventure while he was out there being Ronin. You know, about taking care of the Red Room, freeing the Widows and regaining her own family. Which was of course turned out to be secondary to Clint’s suffering, but that’s another issue. That does, however, make me a bit worried as I assumed they could salvage the Clint/Natasha scene and how it is impacted by the Black Widow movie revelations by having Clint tell Yelena how much she meant to Natasha. But apparently never came up.
The red “stingers” are used solely by the Widows, so Clint assumed… is what I assume.
Oh, it’s a completely logical assumption. It just the scene played where it didn’t come across that Clint was at all surprised was what made it so weird.What made it bad was that despite them going all in on how close Clint and Natasha were, apparently she hadn’t told him anything about the events of the movie. Which I can’t maek sense of.
It just the scene played where it didn’t come across that Clint was at all surprised was what made it so weird. He didn’t have time to be surprised. He knew he was fighting a Widow and that’s all that mattered.
The old avengers are pretty much an afterthough at this point which is why Black Widows movie was more an Yelena origin story (which was good) than an actual real in depth Black Widow Natasha story.
I think it works fine as shorthand, and in the moment the what of Yelena’s appearance matters more than the why/how. I’m guessing they’ll stitch that up whenever Yelena and Clint reconcile, because Clint pretty much has to know who Yelena is to be able to talk her down.
Personally, I loved the artificial dramatic tension of Kate going over the ledge held by a cord attached to her belt which only becomes visible against the white (presumably) concrete ledge after Clint thinks she’s dead. And then to save her, he drops her off the side of a building!Shoutout to Maya going to all that trouble to get the watch and then leaving it on her dresser with the auction tag still attached. Shoutout to Clint for presumably forgetting to get it from Kate before telling her off. Shoutout to Eleanor for reactivating Kate’s credit cards so she could buy that christmas swag.
And FWIW, I half expect the Clint/Yelena scene to start the next episode (possibly staged before he gets back to Kate’s aunts’ place), because we’re running out of time, and because between Eleanor leaving an urgent voicemail for somebody as soon as Clint gets on the elevator, and Clint musing to Laura that Jack’s laundering money for the big man right after, they sure are hinting at somebody not currently in the picture.
Someone not in the picture:
IS THAT JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS’ MUSIC???
FWIW, I doubt it. There’s no clue given about who it was that Eleanor called, and given the way Eleanor talks about Kate to Jack I don’t think it works to have Yelena make her attack while Hawkeye isn’t alone.Clint referring ‘to the big man’ feels so obviously hinting at Kingpin that I almost think it’s a misdirect, but while you could imagine that Eleanor helped Mr. Bishop fake his death and he’s the person she called… that’s a little soapy for my taste. There’s a lot to do in just two episodes and I don’t expect elegance.
Actually, in a universe where you can acquire superhero relics at a black market auction held as a side event of some random party, everybody could have the Widow’s Bite bracelets. Considering Clint was just on a mission to retrieve one such stolen artifact, his go-to assumption should have been that somebody has put their hands on Natasha’s spare equipment. Unless he already knew about Yelena and the surviving Widows program.
They also need to come up with some pretty convicing argument as to why Yelena could seriously believe Clint is responsible for Natasha’s death (with all that she’ll clearly going to change her mind midway next episode, as a rough estimate). More convincing that the post-credits scene from Black Widow, that’s for sure. That movie characterized Yelena as a smart person. And it seems like the events of Endgame are public knowledge in this world. Pretty sure “Black Widow gave her life to save the world” is a song in act four of the Avengers musical.
But all the world knows about the events on Vormir is what Clint has told them. A person like Valentina could easily twist the happenstance of Natasha’s death as “convenient.”
The world also knows Clint had no reason whatsoever to want Natasha dead, since she was his best friend and longtime teammate. It just wouldn’t make any sense to anyone. It would be easier to believe Tony Stark has secretly murdered Steve Rogers and then fabricated the time travel story as a cover. At least it would be public knowledge that they didn’t always see eye to eye.
So wouldn’t Clint have then also been under the belief that there were no more Widows?
There are no more Widows. But that doesn’t mean Yelena isn’t still a trained agent of the Red Room and thus just as deadly as her sister.Just like Nat kept her title even after leaving the Red Room.
Maybe she did tell Clint about ending the Red Room and he has since learned that a lot of them went freelance. I’m just spitballing here.
My read on it is that having a Black Widow show up there, Clint very much went into business mode. He’s not having his feelings right now. Considering how he tries to get rid of Kate immediately and how much he emphasizes that this just got real, I think he actually is surprised.I don’t know what Clint knows, obviously, but I wouldn’t rule out either that he thought Red Room was taken down in 2008, or that Natasha told him what happened as a possibility. Neither of those preclude the fact there could be Black Widows out there in the world still using their assassin skills, even if it’s not for Dreykov.
I don’t see any plot issue with Clint realizing Yelena was a widow assassin. She was using the widow tech. Assuming Natasha told Clint about the events of the BW movie he would know there’s a ton of them still out there. The widows being freed from the direct control of the Red Room doesn’t mean they all suddenly become good guys. Being an assassin is all they know. If Natasha, inexplicably, didn’t tell Clint (and the rest of the Avengers for that matter) about the events of the BW movie, he would still recognize a BW assassin, even if he thought they were gone. Frankly, the events in Black Widow (which I thoroughly enjoyed) make an utter mess of the continuity and logic of what happens next in the MCU. It makes no sense that Natasha wouldn’t have informed the team of what happened, particularly Clint and Steve, so I have to assume she did. Not to mention, even though the Avengers were broken up at that time, a giant floating base crashing into the ground would’ve been international news and got on everyone’s radar anyway. They would’ve been better served not making Black Widow soooo bombastic. I wish it were more that the Red Room was trying to start up again on a small scale, and Natasha rescues Yelena from it, rather than the Red Room has still existed this whole time, is a massive world power with a fucking floating base, and nobody has noticed any of this until now.
Which leads into the question of why Yelena would believe Valentina in the first place? How could she possibly believe that Clint murdered Natasha?
100% agree. There was no reason to introduce yet another “powerful secret organization that has been secretly manipulating world events with a secret army of assassins for decades” into the MCU. It just raises too many queationsz and the flying base especially was so unnnecessary. It’s not as great a hiding place as they seemed to think. Your suggestion would have worked so much better. Black Widow should have stuck to being the low key spy film it teased on its first act.
It makes no sense that Natasha wouldn’t have informed the team of what happened, particularly Clint and Steve, so I have to assume she did. Are you sure about that? This is Natasha we’re talking about, she was never exactly forthcoming with information. Sure, she’d probably tell Clint if the opportunity arose, but likely not Steve. As for telling Clint, it’s also an open question as to how much contact she had with him prior to Endgame. Between Civil War and Infinity War she’s a fugitive and he’s under house arrest. Which, if the rules for him and Scott were the same, means he’s prohibited from any contact with her, and she’d probably avoid contact to keep Clint from breaking his deal with the government unless something super important and Avenger-y came up. She’s not going to drop by and risk his deal so they can have a chat and catch up. It’s also not likely they were in contact during The Blip, since he was busy murdering people and she was running the Avengers. As for knowing Yelena was a Black Widow, it’s not just the gear that would have keyed him into it, her fighting style would also give it away. He spent years with Natasha, he’d recognize Red Room training even without the gizmos. He said that someone hired a Black Widow, so he’s likely under the impression that she’s a former Red Room assassin who is now freelancing, rather than being a personal vendetta.
Are you sure about that? This is Natasha we’re talking about, she was never exactly forthcoming with information. Sure, she’d probably tell Clint if the opportunity arose, but likely not Steve.Natasha & Steve broke Clint (and everyone else) out of the Raft and they were all on the run together for an unspecified amount of time until Clint and Scott decided it was too tough on their families and turned themselves in. Also, second only to Clint, Steve is the person she trusts most. It’s pretty inconceivable neither would have asked her what she had been doing or that she didn’t mention it. Part of Natasha’s arc in BW is learning to trust in her friends again, who are basically her surrogate family, instead of trying to be on the run alone.Not to mention, the Red Room academy crashing out of the sky would be something that Steve, and pretty much all the team that weren’t currently in jail, would’ve heard about. He said that someone hired a Black Widow, so he’s likely under the impression that she’s a former Red Room assassin who is now freelancing, rather than being a personal vendetta.Yeah, he definetely isn’t assuming this is a personal vendetta. No matter how much Natasha did or didn’t tell him about the new Red Room, he would have no reason to think the attack was personal. It only became personal after Natasha died.
I don’t think this is unreasonable to believe but I think there’s a reasonable explanation for this. We know that the Red Room was finally destroyed in ‘16ish, but that the remaining Black Widows survived. There’s an 8 year gap period for Clint to figure out this information and deduce that some Black Widows were alive and assassinating independently (I mean Natasha might have told him for all we know).As for why Maya is in the fight…. the Rolex/macguffin apparently has Ronin’s personal information on it (why?) and considering Maya is out for blood against Ronin for “killing” her father (I’m taking a guess here that Jack/ Kingpin set up his death, not Ronin) so yeah it makes sense she wants to kill the people who broke into her apartment/ the guy who she possibly deduced was Ronin.
Second, and this is the bigger issue, apparently Natasha did not tell Clint at all about her little adventure while he was out there being Ronin. I think you have the timeline messed up. Black Widow takes place between CW and IW. Hawkeye is Ronin in the five years between IW and EG’s main events.So by the time Natasha recruits Clint for the EG mission, it’s been a really long time since she took down the Red Room.
Sure, but it’s a little weird to think it wouldn’t have come up either on their flight home from Tokyo or after.That said, I think Clint identifying Yelena as a Widow works just fine as shorthand (at least on the rooftop, the what matters more than the why/how) and they’ll stitch up the narrative whenever they reconcile.
My guess is the immediate flight home from Tokyo was Clint being like, “OK, what is this plan again?”
But they did have the entire flight to Vormir. I have no doubt Clint knows Natasha found her family and it would be ridiculous if she didn’t tell him Dreykov’s daughter was alive. But unless he saw pictures, he might not recognize Yelena.
I’d posit they actually had very little time to talk about it. At the time Natasha would have been dealing with the events of Black Widow, Clint would have been ass-deep in lawyers and government agents, hammering out the deal he took to be on house arrest for the events of Civil War.
Laura is understanding and supportive, but I don’t think she could be blamed for kind of insisting the Clint’s full attention was on that immediate problem and not whatever Nat was up to.And then Natasha was on the run with the Secret Avengers and Clint was on house arrest and presumably monitored just the same way Lang was. I’m sure two spies of their caliber could have figured out ways to be in contact from time to time, but there probably wasn’t a huge amount of time.
It’s fair to assume Natasha mentioned catching up with Yelena and Alexei and Melina and it’s very fair to say she told Clint about Dreykov’s daughter. But unless he saw pictures, he wouldn’t know what Yelena looked like.Honestly, the most time they probably had to catch up was on the ride to Vormir.
Actually it’s not 100% clear but Black Widow seems to take place before Steve went to break the others out of the Raft, probably starting right after her last conversation with Tony when he tells her that he told Ross how she turned on them. And in the breakout scene Clint and Scott were still in the Raft, so hadn’t taken the deals yet. So assuming she was there for the breakout (which the end of Black Widow hints was her next stop), she would have seen Clint at least. That said, it’s not clear whether Clint and Scott went with them, and then turned themselves in later on with conditions, or whether they just stayed put. The former makes more sense to me though, so they may have had a decent amount of time to talk even before going their separate ways.
I can see how it would work that way, but to me it hinges on Clint taking a chance and leaving. I don’t think he risks a deal that keeps him at home with his kids. So, I think he stays at the Raft, which leaves little time for him and Nat to talk.
Well, we don’t know if Natasha had a photo of Yelena to show Clint. So she may have told him the story, but he didn’t know this person fighting him is her sister. At least not until they have a nice sit down to discuss. And I don’t think the Red Room being taken down necessarily means no Widows does it? We know a group of them went together at the end of the movie, and those were just the ones on-site. There could be many factions or mercenaries now
nm
For your first point, that could be part of why he was so shook. He thinks the Red Room is shut down, but that doesn’t mean he won’t immediately recognize the tactics and equipment of a Black Widow assassin. So now he’s spinning and wondering how one can still be around, on top of having to actually fight her. Alternatively, and to your second point, maybe he does know who she is and just doesn’t want to tell Kate.Thinking about it, Natasha would have had plenty of chances to tell him, so if she didn’t it was a conscious decision on her part. Might just have been her way of protecting both them and him, or maybe she just wanted to keep something for herself. It’s also likely that Yelena was blipped, which might have made her even more reluctant to talk about it, if she hadn’t had a chance to tell him before then. I don’t think it’s unfathomable that she didn’t tell him, even though they were close. But we don’t know for sure that she didn’t. Also, even if she did tell him the whole story, thay just means he knows she has a sister named Yelena, but he may not know what she looks like. And don’t forget there were a bunch of other Widow operatives she freed from the Red Room, so this assailant could have been any one of them. It’s not even close to unlikely that one or more of them would have decided to capitalize on the skills they have and become an assassin for hire or something of that nature. So all he may assume right now is that one of the former Black Widows has been hired to come after him.We’ll just have to wait till next week to see how much he does know.
The time to tell Clint would have been during the rescue from the Raft… which occurred off-screen.
Not to say that it couldn’t have been done entirely differently, but they were breaking into Maya’s apartment, so it make sense that she should show up. In fact, I think the basic premise of the fight is perfectly good, that both are attacked separately and there’s confusion about the New Challenger. It was just a poorly constructed fight.
Unless your argument is that the only way the show could introduce Yelena was by having the two protagonists break into Maya’s apartment, I don’t understand your defense here. Yes, it made sense to involve Maya once that breakin happened. At the same time, that decision took away from Yelena’s introduction.At least we agree on that that fight was really poorly done.
Well I think this is exactly the right episode to bring Yelena in, but they certainly could have written something else entirely. I’m saying that Maya wasn’t shoved into the fight, but perfectly reasonable given the plot they went with. I just disagree that it’s cluttered because there’s four people and three sides. I’m sure this has happened a few times in the MCU, notably several times in Civil War. The car chase scene is almost an exact match with heroes Sam and Steve vs known antagonist Bucky vs seemingly out of nowhere wild card T’Challa. That scene especially was a great introduction to Black Panther, and not diminished by him entering a fight that nobody else involved in expected him to join.
The reason I thought was cluttered because that was what the execution was.By the way, that T’Challa example is a really good one, I just don’t know why you brought it up as it just highlights how badly this episode did the Yelena introduction. The whole thing about that car scene in Civil War is to sell you how formidable a foe T’Challa is and how he is on the same level as the previously introduced characters.Here they focused the fight that introduces us to Yelena to putting over Maya. Which is insanely stupid for several reasons, one of them being that it is hard to feel that Maya comes up looking tough here by being as good as Yelena as the show does not establish a baseline for Yelena while we had already been shown that for Maya.
I assumed that the idea was to establish Yelena (whom we’ve never seen before) by showing that she was even more dangeous than Maya (whom we’ve seen fight already).
I’m with you. Why did Maya feel the need to attack the unknown masked person who was attacking her own enemies? I was so confused.
Let alone then at some point Maya starts with the masked woman before again starting fighting with her. There was no reason in the way the fight progressed.But the most infuriating moment for me was the way Maya arrives to the fight. So Yelena is fighting against Clint when Kate tries to get a drop on her from behind, but Yelena avoids the hit in this really awesome move that made her seem so dangerous. Only to then have instantly Maya knock her down from exactly the direction. It just instantly undercut Yelena in this utterly unnecessary manner.
Yelena also at some point just goes and shakes the zipline so that Kate can stop being stuck. Like, why? If you look at that part, Yelena has no reason at all to do that.
At the end of the fight when Yelena knocks Kate off the roof she makes sure to connect a line to her so she doesn’t fall all the way down to the pavement and die. She quite clearly does not want to harm Kate. In this vein she likely shook the cable because she want Kate to fall and eat street.
She was hired by Kate’s mom so doesn’t want Kate to fall to her death?
This seems very likely.
Please do not construe this as an endorsement of the fight
scene, but Yelena grabs the zipline to kick Clint in the face and then
hits Kate when she comes in. Why Kate does not simply pull out her
phone, turn on her flashlight, and drag Yelena for being a millennial
wearing night vision goggles in an urban environment? That I cannot answer.
Like I could not understand why the show couldn’t keep it simple here
and just have Yelena ambush Clint and Kate, with the combination of the
two being barely able to force a draw.
Because the two aren’t related. Maya is working for her uncle and Yelena is working for Val.Yelena has no beef with Kate, and only really engaged with her and Maya once they got involved in the fight between her and Clint.This show is all about Clint’s past catching up to him. But Maya is tied to Kate’s story as well.
I agree. I thought the fight was clunky. But after the reveal, I said out loud “There’s the future”. It could’ve been a bigger moment, but I was still excited after it happened
Yeah, adding Echo to the fight at the end felt like an unnecessary aspect to an otherwise good episode.
Is Echo supposed to be an enhanced human? She seems to be carrying out a lot of feats that are beyond the norm.
I cannot comprehend Echo. Like at all. While I initially was intrigued by her coming show, now I’m annoyed because there doesn’t be a set of rules that apply to what she can and cannot do.
Budget cut price Taskmaster.Though since Taskmaster is already a budget cut price Taskmaster in the MCU, I don’t know where that leaves us.
It would’ve been way better if those Widow stun thingies had hit her in her fake leg. As it stands, I agree that we’re starting to see some stupid Plot Armor on her.
It feels like she has a bit of Daredevil’s shtick where her other four senses are maxed out, and somehow that informs her natural ability to copy moves she’s seen. I’m not sure if she’s doing anything extremely out of the ordinary, but if since she can replicate fighting style and has presumably spent a lot of time studying them, she can use perfect technique to emulate super strength.
since she can replicate fighting styleDid we even see her do it on the show, though?I guess it doesn’t help that there wasn’t any distinctive fighting style to copy so far. Everyone keeps using the same “generic mixed martial art stunt people know how to stage” every time there’s some kind of hand to hand combat scene. The result is that Echo just comes off as “she’s good at choreographed fighting”.
Yeah, we see her do it in the Judo(I think) match when she was child. It also seemed like she did it once or twice during the warehouse fight, but that could have been my imagination. It definitely hasn’t been explained very well, and basically only makes sense if you already know going in who she is. I don’t even think they’ve called her Echo yet for that matter. I wonder if it’s going to be more explicit in the last two episodes in a way that will clarify her earlier behavior, but in any case I’m not sure that’s a great move. They’ve done a great job so far of creating Maya as a character, but not nearly enough with Echo.
I don’t even think they’ve called her EchoIt’s possible they’ll never do (aside from the title of the show). It’s a thing in the MCU, they don’t feel like battle names are realistic (maybe they’re right to some degree). For years, Scarlet Witch was not a thing. Or Mockingbird in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. They never called her with that name, it was just meta-knowledge.
When Echo kicks Kate on the rooftop she catapults her clear across it. That’s way beyond what a normal human is capable of. Then she takes an arrow to the chest without even flinching.
This isn’t all that out of line with normal MCU theatrics though. She kicks Kate further than a normal person could, but like I said, perfect technique can sometimes emulate super strength. Batroc was able to kick Cap pretty far in TWS, and really none of the Widows should be able to hit as hard as they do. Whatever Yelena did to Maya earlier in the fight threw her way further, and that was with the stingers that usually don’t propel forward. I don’t think it looked all that unusual in context. And I don’t think shrugging off the arrow in her shoulder is strange either. But that’s just me. Maybe we’ll find out she has some enhancements in her prosthetic and maybe even some other add-.ons
We do see supposedly normal people do feats like that in the MCU constantly, but the kick felt off to me because there was no prep or wind up to it, that would have sold it as particularly forceful or requiring effort. One second she’s on the ground and the next she kind of just flicks her foot out and Kate goes flying.The other examples work better because they’re choreographed in a way that sells the force behind them.
Echo kicked Kate using her prosthetic leg.
That doesn’t confer superhuman strength.
Not in real life, no. But this is a TV show.
Vibranium!
I thought it hit her in the shoulder.
It did
Well, neither of the Hawkeyes are enhanced either.
Tossing someone around a room doesn’t take superhuman strength if you know what you’re doing. The one superhuman looking kick (by superhero standards) came from her prosthetic leg. Which maybe there’s some tech there. Or they just wanted to highlight the actors prosthesis as a strength. I don’t mind that. Maya then takes a well-aimed arrow to the shoulder and takes off, knowing Kate could kill her at that distance if she chose to.I don’t get why they aren’t highlighting Maya’s basically superhuman ability to mimic and beat any fighting style she can see. It was suggested in her flashback origin but hasn’t been shown since.
“Or they just wanted to highlight the actors prosthesis as a strength.”They did a much better job of that in episode three, in a way that wasn’t as jarringly over the top
Yea the way she effortlessly kicked Kate across the roof was jarring. I get that it was with her prosthetic leg, but it seems to be just a regular prosthetic, not a Winter Soldier style robotic limb.
She’s a deaf Taskmaster. Which is confusing as they just introduced a female Taskmaster- though they did a botched job of introducing her IMO.
Yelena is not a Black Widow anymore. Clint doesn’t know that, and all he sees is trademark weapons and fighting style, but we know that. Maybe she’s playing Dark Black Widow or whatever, but whatever her character is right now, it certainly makes some sense for her to try to hide her identity in universe, because whatever Valentina is doing hasn’t come to a head yet, and Yelena is out on a personal mission right now.Also, I’m not sure how the reveal is dampened here by knowing ahead of time it’s going to happen. I suppose it’s possible that someone saw the post credit scene on Black Widow where Yelena was aimed directly at Clint, and didn’t put together that she would be appearing in the upcoming television series about Clint. That person probably has other problems in their life to outweigh the extra surprise they felt when she pulled off her mask. For the rest of us, even though we were expecting her to show up, we were waiting to see just how it would play out. The only reason the scene disappointed was because I thought it was actually a pretty bad fight, not because I wasn’t shocked enough.
Clint doesn’t know that, and all he sees is trademark weapons and fighting style, but we know that.
Even if Clint knows the Red Room is gone, that doesn’t change the fact the person he’s fighting is clearly a trained Widow assassin. Which is the point he’s getting across to the fangirl he’s trying to protect.It’s easier for him to tell her “That woman is a Black Widow, the kind of killer I just told you was the best.” He doesn’t need to go in to details if he knows them because it doesn’t matter to her and her safety.
Especially since he worked for years with Nat, who was a trained Widow assassin and still went by Black Widow even after she was out.
All Hail Tarkin, it’s Siede.
The most obvious answer for the watch is Laura and the she is a former Mockingbird who is retired. One theory going around is that she hasn’t left the farm in years, because of how badly evildoers want to get her. How she crossed paths with Maya/Kingpin/whoever is above Maya, is another story.
What we know about the watch:
* To my untrained eye, it looks like a man’s watch, but obviously, a person of another gender could have still worn it or had it as a keepsake/tool/weapon.
* It’s got a tracker on it, so it was either designed as a tool/weapon or a keepsake was retrofitted for one.
* It was at Avengers HQ, and Clint didn’t spend a lot of time there – he retired fairly shortly after they moved there from Stark Tower.
* The German could just be the language both Laura and Clint are most fluent in together, or it could be a clue. Civil War took place in Germany. Or, Sokovia is probably close enough to where many Sokovians can get by in German.
* There’s someone Clint is very close to that is on the run and may have a man’s watch as a keepsake, from her father or twin brother…
* Both Clint and Laura would feel guilt over this person being alone on the run, perhaps guilt over not reaching out to this person right after everyone came back from the Blip.
Laura/Mockingbird is the obvious answer. Fury would be another guess.
But what if it’s Wanda?
The watch is Mephisto!
…and the two watch hands become Wanda’s kids!
I don’t think Wanda would have any relatives who would be able to afford a Rolex…
If it was real!
I believe she’s going to end up being Laura Brown, and obscure character from the 60s that was in a Nick Fury arc in Strange Tales which introduces SHIELD. Her father was the leader of Hydra at the time (hence her speaking German) who captures Fury. She ends up turning on her father and helps Fury escape, after which Fury asks her to join SHIELD.
I legit thought you were fucking with me, but then I just looked at the Wiki. Holy shit! Substitute Fury for Clint in that Wiki and it works.
It even can explain why JLD/Val wants Clint offed. If Val is really a former Madame Hydra who managed to stay alive and out of prison, then Laura might have the goods on her.
Seems a lot to get to in what is probably no more than 80-90 minutes of screen time and a lot of balls in the air, though.
As I am not a comics reader, I don’t know any of the stories that get woven into the MCU (or that are hanging out in the world waiting to be tapped or referenced) but this seems supremely believable to me. AoS was a contemporary MCU property to the main films so having Laura be Mockingbird makes zero sense since that character already exists. This, however, feels like a beautiful little nugget someone would mine for expanding the universe. It has nice little nods/strings to the shared history of characters without running afoul of current canon.
The only folks I can see owning that Rolex would be Stark,Happy,Fury or Pym.
Yeah, I’ve moved off this theory and gone to the “Clint used it as part of his Ronin gear and it was given to him by someone else, who he is protecting”
Laura is the most obvious answer, which is probably the safest bet with these shows.
HS is having a great year and I will miss her take on Dickinson; it will be weird watching her on Hawkeye and not having anymore classic Emily-Lavinia mess-arounds.
that could’ve used a little more oomphI thought Kate and Clint’s exchange about “the shot he didn’t take” on top of her realization he’s Ronin were “oomph” enough for a character episode.Not to mention Clint telling Kate to go home once Yelena showed up. Especially after seeing her and the LARPers gushing about working with him. It’s still just a game to them, but he knows what’s at stake. Especially now that Maya is on to him and Yelena is in play.
There’s still a ton to like about this supremely watchable hourI feel like it was only like 30 minutes of actual screen time…
I agree. I’ve enjoyed these episodes, but holy crap are they short. Once you exclude the opening flashbacks/super-long Marvel logo and credits, we’re barely past half an hour. It’s not quite Mandalorian-level short, but it’s getting close.
Cardellini knows German and trade tradecraft terms, so they are suggesting she’s ex-something… Widow… Mockingbird… something.The rooftop fight was ok. Not trash. At least Kate got the drop on both Echo first by putting an arrow in her shoulder (! which is small “h” hardcore) and then Yelena with a threatened back-of-the head shot.I’m starting to think all this will smooth out in a 1 through 6 binge watch. The end credits are long (like all these shows are) so if you lop 6 minutes off all the run times, eps 1&2 = 90min … eps 3&4 = 70min … so, 2hrs 40min so far. Presuming the last two are of the bigger variety, we’ll get a 4 hour & 30 min Avengers movie that probably could have been trimmed down to 3hrs 45min. Would people have gone for a theatrical release of a Hawkeye pt1 and a Hawkeye pt2? I think the snark on Renner would have been more intense with a theatrical release – the TV route, instead, is better for these “hangout” scenes. It plays to Renner’s grumpy-yet-soldiering-on strengths. (And idk, color me mushy, but I think Renner doing bar-band truck commercials is fine. Cute, even. I have a soft spot for actors who earn a comfortable-enough living that they decide to form a rock band. You go you delusional doofuses! You Duchovny and you Feet of Grunt. Rock on.)Renner’s vocal delivery is a spot on match to Bill Murray. Listen with your eyes closed.Season 2? Is this getting another one?
Rock Band Jeremy Renner is only a little shameful, but the Jeremy Renner App available on iPhone and Android is a real downer. I had him on a level with Fred Armisen, who does things that I like, but I hear is a real jerk. But I’m enjoying the hell out of him in this series and it’s not like I have to download his App, so I’m moving him up above RDJ on my original avengers list.
I legit don’t know what the problem is with Renner. I know like, decades ago, he and Evans made an ill-timed joke about Natasha being a slut. Evans threw himself on the mercy of the Internets, but Renner declined. What else is there besides what seems to be a general not giving a fuck vibe, which I kind of like, actually?
There were some fairly disturbing allegations about him a couple years ago by his ex-wife which granted was during their custody battle and I suppose he could be innocent. But up until the show started, I’d kind of gotten the impression Disney figured they couldn’t rid of him based just on that, and would use it to write him out. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/jeremy-renner-sonni-pacheco-ex-wife-cocaine-gun-custody-kids-ava-daughter-a9155731.html
I do not believe a single fucking thing in any custody hearing.
Uh, you obviously haven’t been following his court cases over the last decade, public due to his ongoing custody battles. There’s a lot of bad in there. It’s easy to look up though.
Custody? Yeah, I assume those are lies.
Uh, it seems that his ex made wild ass complaints about him leaving cocaine around. Uh, it seems she alleged he threatened to kill her and himself. Uh, it seems a judge was like, “The fuck outta here” and he got joint custody.Uh, this seems full of shit
He has vibes of probably being a prick in real life, but he has such a great line delivery and world-weariness as Hawkeye that he’s one of my favorite Avengers, despite the jokes about him being a useless guy with a bow and arrow and no powers. And his “you’re an Avenger” speech is the top moment in Age of Ultron. I thought he did some great acting in this episode as he deals with the guilt of all the damage he’s left behind him. I really want to see Kate help him get a new lease on life, not as a low-key guy who does this job by killing the people he has to kill, but a superhero and a role model.
I got massive Bill Murray vibes when Kate and Clint sat down on the train together exhausted, and he started talking about (repeating about?) walking the dog.
That really reminded me of the parts in Ghost Dog when Ghost Dog, who doesn’t understand French, and his best friend, the ice cream vendor who speaks only French, would be talking with no way of understanding each other, but one would repeat what the other just said in his own language, because they were just so in tune with each other.
It could just be that Laura knows a second language because she’s a reasonably intelligent normal person (who has good reasons to want to be able to speak a language with her husband that her kids don’t know), and knows tradecraft terms because her husband and her dead friend were both government assassins who trust her and tell her everything.
Come to think of it, she may even BE German. Do we know she isn’t?Anyway, not to pick on you, but that “she speaks a second language – she must be a spy!” thing is kind of the most American thing anyone has ever said…
Agree whole heartedly.She’s an android.
…OK, see, I could actually go with that! I mean, she IS too perfect to be real. And we first met her in the film about artificial intelligence… coincidence!?
For me the idea came about more because Clint actually had her dig up information on the company, and some of what she learned doesn’t seem to be things you could find with a simple Google search (it being a shell for the tracksuits).
That certainly means she has access to something, or knows how to get it, but that might still just be a result of Clint/Natasha/their Avengers/Shield friends…
True
There’s an obscure character, Laura Brown, from a 1965 Strange Tales run which introduces SHIELD. Her father was the leader of Hydra at the time (hence her speaking German) who captures Nick Fury. She ends up turning on her father and helps Fury escape, after which Fury asks her to join SHIELD. She could be some version of that Laura and the watch might have been her father’s watch.
I like it. Although that’s a lot of backstory to go through with everything else they have to deal with in the next 2 episodes.
Thus, a season two would be nice.
I agree with the “binge it like a movie” thing, and keep having that thought. In fact, all four* of the Marvel live-action shows this year are effectively really long movies that are actually hurt, not helped, by having a week-long break between each episode.*WandaVision maybe to a slightly lesser degree than the others, but… no, I think it would still benefit from it.
I enjoyed how quickly last week’s dramatic cliffhanger became this week’s awkward family hang out.
One of the real strength of this series is not the action scenes, although they are really cool and make archery seem almost like a superpower, but how it shows character relationships. Of course, Clint and Kate are the main exibit with their friendship/mentorship/grumpy sidekick followed by overenthusiastic puppy relationship but it also made the Burton marriage awesome. And in this episode it has made us believe in how much Eleanor loves Kate and why she and Jack work together. It even made Kate believe Eleanor and Jack work together. For that little moment before she learned about him and Sloan Ltd.
So what do you want to bet that the person whose secret identity is tied to that vintage Rolex is Clint’s wife Laura? Make Linda Cardellini a superhero, you cowards!! I really loved how Laura is clearly someone deep into the whole spycraft thing – she has the knowledge, contacts and language skills. I want to know more about her past life. But I think the watch will turn out to be more Avengers related. From the way Clint talks it also seems it belonged to one of the dead ones and Tony was the one who was most into expensive watches with secret second uses.
And somehow the “trade” she offers involves them making her two new costumes?
They will be making costumes for Avenger and his sidekick. Once Clint is spotted in it in public they could live of the stories in the cons forever. Not to mention possible future commissions. It’s like putting supplier to the queen in UK or something in your resume.
I believe Laura’s going to end up being a version of Laura Brown, and obscure character from the 60s that was in a Nick Fury arc in Strange Tales which introduces SHIELD. Her father was the leader of Hydra at the time (hence her speaking German) who captures Fury. She ends up turning on her father and helps Fury escape, after which Fury asks her to join SHIELD and she eventually does. The watch was mentioned being an antique, perhaps it was her father’s.
That would be perfect. I hope you are right.
I’ll be spending the rest of the day living off the thrill of seeing Emily Dickinson square off against Amy March in a rooftop brawl.
I’ve got to be frank: Amy is going to take Emily in a fight every time. She is most graceful and pragmatic of the March sisters, meaning she moves well and does what takes to win, whether its a brawl or the search for a good husband. Emily is smart, but too reclusive, gentle and introverted for hand to hand combat. * Some people have already speculated that Laura is not only a former SHIELD agent, but actually the MCU’s version of Bobbie Morse — the superhero Mocking Bird— who was married to Clint in the comics. That’s slightly sad if true, in that Adrienne Palicki was a terrific Mocking Bird in AoS imo. But on the other hand Linda Cardenelli is more like what a secret agent would be like irl — she doesn’t draw attention to herself and always seems composed in stressful situations. Fits well with the MCU’s low key version of Clint.* I thought that the person in the Ronin suit who killed Maya’s dad might be somebody other than Clint (which still may be true imo) but this lent some credence to the possibility that he might have done the deed. Clint has yet to deny that specific act and his scenes with Kate and Kazi came very close to acknowledging his guilt. If that’s the case, kudos to Marvel for having the courage to go there — it makes Ronin acts even more inexcusable because we now directly know people impacted by his rampage. But can he really go back to his family without paying a price? I mean, its not like Maya is going to press charges, but is feeling guilty about it for the rest of happy life with his family doesn’t seem like much of a punishment. Since Clint wants to walk away from the superhero life, perhaps he’ll be obliged to reenlist by someone like De la Fontaine in a Thunderbolts or Dark Avengers to avoid trial and imprisonment. That doesn’t seem like justice for Maya though.* We’ve seen how quickly Yelena can kill in the Black Widow movie, so I think she was trying to take Clint alive. Maybe because she wanted him to know who she was before she killed him, or perhaps she didn’t completely buy the story De LaFontaine told her.*Just walking up and announcing she’s friends with Hawkeye is enough to get them totally onboard with evidence tampering?A) There is 30 Rock/ Brooklyn 99 level of absurdity to these larpers that makes this acceptable imo.B) Clint did save the world. That gets him some latitude with these cops. Remember that real NYC cops were t-shirts with the Punisher logo unironically — I’ll take these nice, geeky, star struck cops over that. And I’m just going to pretend that Kate — who has Clint’s phone number— provided them proof off camera.C) Isn’t there a comic book character named Bombshell?Which is going to have a bigger payoff: Clint’s quarter trick, or the fact that Jack “CEO of Tracksuit Mafia” Duquesne regularly mixes up aphorisms?If Jack did indeed don the Ronin suit, hearing him make a verbal blunder while masked might be a give away. But who was around to record it?The coin trick will definitely come up because at some penultimate point, the Hawkeyes will be bow-less and/or run out of arrows (something else that seems presaged).What I really want to see paid off however, is that room full of swords in Kate’s mom’s apartment. It’s Chekhov’s room full of swords.
You make good points in your Amy vs. Emily match-up assessment, but I think Emily has a chance to even the score if she’s able to figure out that Amy’s one big weakness is falling through ice.
Of course Emily would know that frozen bodies of water are Amy’s kryptonite. Like Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor, Emily reads. She just better hope that rooftop has a pool.
$5 says Laura is a former Widow, and Clint wasn’t talking about Natasha being the shot he didn’t take.Sure, any SHIELD agent could learn Russian, but for BW’s it was their first language. Also, it would explain why they were so close. I mean, is anyone’s co-worker that close with their spouse usually?
Then she would have gotten out before the removal of the baby-making stuff. I think you’re close though. I think it’s possible there was a similar program in SHIELD, called the Mockingbird Project. Similar training, except without the forced sterilization.
It would even explain a little bit of Nat and Laura’s fast friendship. They at least have somewhat of a shared background.
Sure, any SHIELD agent could learn Russian, FWIW, they were speaking on the phone in German.
Which is, of course, the Russian of Germany.
They tend to sterilize girls who train through the Black Widow program though, right? Seems weird that she’d have 3 kids.
$5 says Laura is a former Widow, and Clint wasn’t talking about Natasha being the shot he didn’t take.In Age of Ultron, which is where we first meet a pregnant Laura, we learn that Widows are given forced hysterectomies as part of their training. Way more money on Laura being former SHIELD.
I think you’d lose that bet, for the reasons other commenters have indicated, but it is a fun theory.
I want to see Chekov’s Room Full Of Swords subverted by Indiana Jones’s Anti-Chekov Gun. It’s very unlikely to happen given the arcs we’re seeing for both Clint and Kate, but a guy can dream.I’m picturing a followed by something like “I’m sorry, Jack (or Kate’s Mom,) but there’s just… too much of this (motions towards corpus and swords) right now.”And there is, really. That would be such a Clint thing to realize and act upon, but for the aforementioned arcs. If you’re getting outnumbered by low-tier supes 5:1 and they’re coming at you from every goddamn direction (both literally and conceptually,) it’s time to make the hard choice and start blasting a few. Get it back down to a manageable number.You know, I’m actually starting to talk myself into this for real – but instead, let’s make it Kate. That would be one hell of a moment. The fresh-faced rookie makes the hard choice to stop fucking around with arrows. For the sake of her partner and the mission, she realizes she needs to quickly and “unfairly” take out a gimmicky opponent who, if they kept respecting the gimmicks, would actually stop them or slow them down enough to screw them over.
My bet is still on the coin trick, but I’ve always felt its dumb that archer heroes never use guns (caveat: Stephen Ameil did once in a while on Arrow).
Maybe archer heroes don’t but Archer heroes do.
I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t include this image with your comment.
RAMPAAAAAAAAAGE
Disney+ is in danger of setting up a “bullets: my one weakness!” paradigm in these lower-power shows.Even setting aside how petty and stupid the “oh noes more super soldiers” hand-wringing was on Falcon/Winter before the climax, they then decided to re-emphasize to the audience that one of these super-dangerous super-soldiers can be taken out with a handgun. And then four more can be taken out with a car bomb.So while we’re grappling with high sorcery, time travel, the quantum realm, genetic experiments by ancient aliens that have S-tier superpowers (note from Disney: we may ask you to forget about those for the third time,) and entire alien civilizations that can both punch and laser-blast us into nothing just on the strength of their natural forms and current technological progress, we’re going to hand-wring about steroids and then remind everyone that primitive explosive-projectile weaponry is more than enough to negate them. Okay. Cool.At least in Hawkeye, it would feel like an important escalation and rules-violation due to Kate’s youth, inexperience, Hawkeye-worship, and murder-virginity (though, as discussed elsewhere, the show’s already gotten sloppy with the latter too.)
I normally hate this retort because fictional narratives should stick to their own rules but…it’s a superhero comic book movie… By necessity, superhero comics made shit up as they went along. Yeah they could have avoided that cardinal sin with the MCU by establishing and following more logical rules than the comics but given that these are superhero comics movies I, personally, don’t care. It doesn’t detract one bit. It’s almost a positive.
If
Jack did indeed don the Ronin suit, hearing him make a verbal blunder
while masked might be a give away. But who was around to record it?If that’s something they’re going for, it’s got big monogrammed butterscotch energy. Surely his accent alone would be sufficient?Though if what you mean to sell me on is Tony Dalton as a Ronin-suited malapropist Zorro, I want to go to there.
Maya signs furiously
Kazi: “Ronin killed my dad. The last thing dad heard was the assassin saying, ‘And now, you have punched the bucket!’”
I was thinking more Inigo Montoya, but Zorro works too.
I assumed the malapropisms were intentional. Being disarming is Jack’s whole thing, as specifically is feigning limitated mastery of something (c.f. pretending to only be an OK fencer). This sort of charming occasional failure to have properly learnt English idioms completely fits into his persona. Whereas actually failing to have mastered English… doesn’t. Given that he has no other language flaws beyond a slight and charming accent, and given that he’s clearly a high-achiever (master swordsman who also runs a mafia)…
Definitely a possibility, but I don’t think him messing up saying unintentionally is that huge a stretch, and I wouldn’t call it a failure to master the language either.
I want to believe ‘limitated’ is a deliberate nod to Jack. Please don’t disillusion me.
Interesting, plausible theory. I also note Jack’s description of the psychological dynamic between him and Kate, picked up from a book, which showed him to be an autodidact with fairly good recall.But the indications that he is up to something sinister could be a misdirect. First of all Marvel loves these kind of fake outs. Also, Jack may be clever, but his conversation with his father suggested that he was a bit of a — well—- a wastrel. One would assume a father knows his son and if Jack is running a mafia, why is he apparently out of money? A smart criminal overlord would want to look financially stable and have a reasonable cover for their wealth. Jack doesn’t seem to have that cover, while Eleanor runs a very successful business and has an expensive apartment in the middle of Manhattan.There are other indicators that it is Eleanor, not Jack, who is in charge. Given her situation with Kate’s Dad, does it seem like Eleanor would let a man run her life? Based on her photos and her carrot trick, Eleanor seems pretty physically capable herself. The way Jack constantly flirts with Eleanor (he’s not called “swordsman” for nothing) and the way she strokes his neck suggest that he is more of a plaything or pet than a boss. Those malapropisms may be genuine, a way of suggesting Jack is a bit of a himbo. It makes sense that Eleanor would lead the interrogation of Clint — it’s her daughter after all — but it might also be because its her organization that Clint is investigating.That said, all those could be misdirects as well. I lean towards Eleanor being in charge, but the shows done a pretty good job of making both she and Jack suspect.
We’ve seen how quickly Yelena can kill in the Black Widow movie, so I think she was trying to take Clint alive. Maybe because she wanted him to know who she was before she killed him, or perhaps she didn’t completely buy the story De LaFontaine told her.Clint is not a pushover, and was shown giving Nat a fight plenty of times in the past, who gave Yelena a fight in her movie. I don’t think you can make assumptions just because she didn’t instantly take him out.
Clint’s not a pushover but Yelena had the element of surprise and she would know what his capabilities. She also used weapons meant to stun rather than kill. I’m not saying Yelena is a better fighter than Clint, I’m suggesting her objective wasn’t to try to kill him.
I did check out the episode on the MCU wiki and yes, the police officer who retrieved the arrows is credited as “Wendy Conrad / Bombshelll”. In the comics, she’s a mercenary who tried to kill Hawkeye.
Turning evil because someone borrowed and lost a bag that was a present from your wife would be the weirdest super-villain origin story ever.
Why are we worried about justice for Maya? She’s a criminal. Her dad was a criminal, despite being a good dad. Her “uncle”, whoever it turns out to be, is a super-criminal.
Why are we worried about justice for Maya?
We aren’t worried, we just understand the type of stories Marvel likes to showcase, particularly on Disney+. Maya is going to have her own show on Disney+. Based on how every other MCU show has handled their protagonist (in contrast to comic book shows on other platforms), we know that Maya is going to be presented in a sympathetic, somewhat positive light. A sympathetic portrayal imo suggests that there has to be some satisfactory resolution to her fathers murder.So that leaves open a question: how will Maya’s quest for vengeance be addressed? If Hawkeye did kill her father, will Marvel allow her to kill Hawkeye? That seems unlikely. Will she decide to forgo vengeance? It’s possible, especially if it was her father’s wish or perhaps because of a direct order from her uncle. But she seems pretty determined, regardless of what her uncle would want, and there has been no indication thus far that her father wanted her to go down a different path.If Hawkeye didn’t kill William Lopez (perhaps it was her uncle the Kingpin who ordered the death, as happened in the comic) then the scenario becomes simpler: Maya redirects her vengeance quest towards her father’s real killer. But right now, we don’t know concretely whether Hawkeye or someone else was the murderer. Which takes us back to my original question: how is Marvel going to resolve this if Hawkeye is the killer?
The discussion about how trick arrowheads don’t just fit on any generic arrow shaft feels like a callback to the original Hawkeye mini (the same one in which he met and married Mockingbird and damaged his hearing), in which he reveals that his trick arrowheads DO in fact snap on to any store-bought arrow… (and there again, a sonic arrowhead proves crucial at the end…)The boomerang arrow discussion is straight from the Fraction/Aja series, of course.
I’m sad that they reversed the argument of the boomerang arrow from the comics. It was such a great panel and a bit of experience passed on between Kate and Clint. Now they are surely going to use it to show that, somehow Clint: master assassin and best archer in the world, didn’t realize it’s utility.
Now Boxing Glove Arrow, that’s where Clint draws the line.
Wild theory I just came up with like five seconds ago: * We know that Clint and Laura seem to refer to the watch and the suit in the same breath and they were close together in the auction lots. So let’s go with the idea that the watch is part of the Ronin story and not necessarily the Laura/Fury/Cap/etc… story * Clint is protecting someone * It is logical to think someone may have been helping him when he was Ronin. Logistical support, choosing targets, etc. * Maybe it was someone who believed in what Clint was doing, or maybe it was someone who wanted to help Clint for his own sake — or for the sake of someone who loved Clint.* That person got out of the game as well, or is still working undercover. (It’s a little fuzzy) So, this person would have had to be alive and active during the Five Year Snap. That rules out Laura, Fury and Hill. Rules out Wanda and Bucky. Getting back to the idea that the watch was given to Clint by someone who wanted to help, let’s break down some candidates: * Yelena has no idea who Clint was when Val showed her the picture and he doesn’t recognize her. They could have been working on a shadow basis and never saw each other’s face, but probably not Yelena. Plus, I have kind of been thinking Yelena was dusted, because it’s really hard to imagine her not with Nat during Endgame. * BUT… where there’s a Yelena, there’s a Melina and an Alexei. For that matter, there’s a Dreykov’s Daughter Taskmaster. Either of those women could have been the one who stabbed William Lopez, too. * Sharon the Power Broker is around too. * There could have been a few Dora Milaje who agreed with Clint’s rampage, especially since they lost their King.
* If we’re crossing streams, we have to think about candidates like Coulson, Melinda May, Fitz/Simmons.
Ultimately, this could be the most obvious choice. Laura had a past history as an agent and Fury gave her the watch to help her stay in contact when Clint was off Avenging. Clint carried that watch around for sentimental reasons while he was Ronin and it just happened to be with his Ronin stuff when Avengers HQ got blowed up by Thanos.
I can’t help but laugh about these LARPers. Apparently if you’re a first responder, and a LARPer, you completely disregard any of the ethics your real life job entails. Is it the LARPing?
Disregarding professional ethics is no LARPing matter.
+1
I have never, ever introduced a fellow LARPer by their real name and had them then insert their character’s name unless I was introducing them to someone who was about to join the LARP.
I could put in all of the inaccuracies (no thrusting tips, how do they make those costumes so good and so quickly, etc etc) but honestly I just really enjoyed the first outing because it was really funny. And I own that barrel armor Clint was using, but for SCA and not LARPing. It’s cheap and works really well against wooden weapons. But I didn’t need to see these guys return and talk like they’re in a LARP while they’re not at a LARP. People can barely stay in character DURING the game.
But TV-LARPers ALWAYS stay in character the whole time even when not LARPing.Come to think of it, even TV-D&D players often do that…
I found it supremely believable. Cops often slip into the mindset that sometimes the people on the ground floor just gotta go out there and break some rules and crack some skulls, because the higher-ups don’t get what it’s really like out there. Cue Alan Moore: superhero comics are all about rigging the entire world up so that that mindset gets validated over and over again on the biggest stages possible.That’s exactly what Clint is offering them. It’s fucking catnip.
“Make Linda Cardellini a superhero, you cowards!!”I’m not opposed to it but I’m not sure if it would be good. She makes Clint look like a regular guy and she behave in a way you would want the wife of a superhero to behave.And Cardellini is awesome but considering how other, bigger names have been wasted or misused (Amy Adams, Emma Stone, Kristen Dunst…), I’m quite happy about how she’s being used.
I am now convinced we are getting a scene at the end of ep. 6 (possibly during the credits) of Kate’s aunt returning home to he mess.
The song they are listening to at Kate’s aunt’s apartment when Clint returns is Bells, Bells, Bells, from Christmas in the Stars, The Star Wars Christmas Album. Less well-known than the Holiday Special, but equally as bad. Worth listening to if only to hear the teenaged recording debut of John Bongiovi, who went on to lead a band with a slightly altered name. I was so happy to hear it in the show because it confirms that someone else has heard of it, I am not crazy, and did not make all that up in my head
I assumed Clint called the LARPers and told them Kate was coming.
Yelena’s mask made perfect sense. It’s winter, and she was wearing night vision goggles.
and it saves $$$
Yes, but it didn’t have pockets. Someone must have picked it out for her.
Agree with the review, everything that happened was necessary fun and cool, but the execution to it all felt off. Some of the directing was poor as well which was weird considering how well directed last weeks was and it was the same people. Even the end fight felt like it was meant to be epic but it came off a little underwhelming and everyone involved came off a little incompetent to what we have seen them capable of.Overall liked it though.Jack is still my fav character. Such a greaseball with faux charm.
Jack made up for any of the several minor lapses in this episode…would have been nice if they could have crossed swords for just a moment
I’m sure there’s fanfic…
I sure there’s already JackHuey fanfic out there.
ohhh myyyy
I’m rapidly approaching, “Fuck it, put Tony Dalton in everything” status.
If Linda Cardellini somehow turns out to be a “player” in the Mcu, she will instantly jump into my top 5 favorite current Mcu characters. Thor, Loki, Yelena Bulova, Contessa Julia Louis Dreyfuss, and whoever Linda Cardellini turns out to be will be my top 5.Please, please, please let her be a secret badass.
But she IS a badass. She’s raised three nice children (despite a husband who, while loving, has been away from home a lot on work business), she maintains a very nice house, she clearly has a great relationship with her husband (who trusts her with top-secret information), she keeps a very level head in a crisis, she’s been at least a little bit involved in saving the world, and she can also track down information on organised crime on her spare time that would take the FBI months or years to accumulate, and operated high-tech tracking devices while also cooking what I’m sure is an excellent dinner. She speaks a second language, and was apparently a close friend for years to a former Soviet assassin. She’s a badass already. I don’t get why she has to have a codename or a spandex bodysuit to ‘really’ be a badass…
One other thing that hardly gets mentioned. For all of the whinging and pissing and moaning about Nat being sad because she can’t have kids (GASP! THE HORROR!) Age of Ultron very easily created a friendship between Laura and Nat.
It would have been very easy to fall into the “My husband’s best friend/partner is a woman. I hate it” routine. They didn’t.
I actually wondered at first in AoU whether we were meant to think the three of them were more than friends – and given that it was Whedon, it’s quite possible we were. But fun as that would have been, I think it’s better they didn’t go that way – cinema/TV is badly in need of mature, healthy platonic relationships.
Stop it. My nipples can only get so hard.
I do think Laura having some experience in the spy game would help her become pretty fast friends with Nat and also help her accept Nat and Clint as partners/friends maybe faster than a woman whose husband works in office supply sales, for instance.
D’oh… thank you for reminding us of it — Laura can’t be a former Black Widow if she had three kids, right? So that theory is off the table… although I do still think there might be something to the idea she *is* who Clint ‘didn’t take the shot’ with, in that conversation with Kate. Possibly saving her, and then falling in love, helped him make the decision to bring Natasha over to SHIELD’s side, later on?
Didn’t Kate flat out ask him as a follow-up if it was Nat and Clint nodded? I think you guys are overthinking this. He was talking about Nat.
Couldn’t have said it better. Whether she picked up those skills over the years from being around/trained by Clint and Natasha, or she is a former SHIELD operative, there is nothing about not being a secret superhero that would make her any less badass.That said, it would be cool and make sense for her to have worked for SHIELD at some point though, maybe as an analyst or tech, as opposed to someone going out on combat missions. But I also like the idea of her picking up these skills as part of being with Clint.
Hehehe. Fair enough. I just want to see more of her. Watch her punch some Chitauri, ya know.
This is an excellent point. Agreed on all counts!
Who in the hell thinks that Thanos was right? This guy murder millions (probably billions or even trillions) of people to gather up 6 magic stones to wipe out half the universe because he thought that would save the universe from a intergalactic famine. And, it never occurred to him that he could use those stones to make food. He could have made an infinite supply of food for every planet because THE INFINITY STONES CAN DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING!!!! I can see people agreeing with Killmonger and Zemo, but Thanos!? Anyone agreeing with Thanos is a sociopath who needs to be locked up.
You must have missed Falcon and the Winter Soldier explaining why.
I would say that Falcon and the Winter Soldier did NOT do a good job of explaining why at all. You can’t just throw around some anarchist notions about mutual aid and expect it to immediately make sense.
Falcon and Winter Soldier never argued he was right.
I must have, and I watched all of Falcon And Winter Soldier.
I don’t think the Flag Smashers thought Thanos was right. They just thought that once it had happened, and the status quo had changed, automatically going back to it after the unsnap was unjust. That’s not the same as agreeing with Thanos.
I also think there is a bit of “Hey, da fuck?” tension with the Snapped and Unsnapped.
The world went from half of all life disappearing in a second. Just the fact that the nukes didn’t go off within the first two days from lack of people guarding or maintaining is a miracle.
But they went, in five years, from that to high school basketball games (Far From Home’s “blipping back” scene.) They had electricity, wi-fi, gas for cars and planes, medical facilities (Pepper gives birth in the first year post Snap; there is still a working hospital for Monica to come back to; etc…) and there’s bread for Nat’s sandwich and beer for Thor’s belly.
Maybe they are like, “Um, we made it work. You don’t get to come back and instantly assume things go back the way they were”
If anything, I would say that Thanos was half-right.
It doesn’t matter if people actually think Thanos was right, don’t you think people would buy those mugs anyway? Because people will buy really, really dumb shit.
I present exhibits A, B, and C, all available for purchase this Christmas:
This. There were probably in-universe versions of people saying, “Loki Was Right” or “Kilgrave For President.” I also can easily see a T-Shirt that says, “Hey, Wakanda, where you in…” and then a list of dates starting with “1619, 1783, 1857, 1896, 1921, 1963, 1968, 1991, etc…”
Who in the hell thinks that Thanos was right?MCU: The Flag-Smashers.
IRL: Edgelord douchebags.
Not to mention the biggest flaw in his plan: population growth. Great, you’ve killed half the population of the universe. Everybody now wants kids to make up for their missing family members, and 30 years later you’re right back at the same population level. The answer to “our population doubles every 30 years” is not “half the population”, because then 30 years later you’re in exactly the same situation!And not to mention of course also that killing people is a terrible way to prevent famine and economic depression and misery, because a stable food supply and economic growth (or even stasis) is dependent upon people: the limiting factor in getting people resources is almost never a lack of resources, but a lack of institutional infrastructure to distribute resources as needed, and just killing half of the infrastructure would automatically trigger a universal depression and mass famine. [leaving aside the whole conceptual ‘murdering people to prevent them from being killed’… issue]And also not to mention that there is no shortage of resources, at least in a SF world like the MCU. Thanos can just build some fusion reactors and invest in some hydroponics, bingo, no famine….it’s just a catastrophically stupid excuse for nihilism. While it’s not ridiculous that Thanos would have such a plan, it’s a bit ridiculous that more people didn’t laugh at him.That said, unfortunately I’ve encountered ‘Thanos was right’ people both on the internet and in real life. It’s usually either an expression of that fashionable “the world is terrible and we’d all be better if someone murdered us” poseur nihilism, or it’s an expression of environmentalism-without-any-deep-thought.
“While it’s not ridiculous that Thanos would have such a plan, it’s a bit ridiculous that more people didn’t laugh at him.”Well, according to his backstory the people of planet Titan did laugh at him. We see where that got them.
Yeah, the “Thanos Plan” was extremely dumb. But Thanos coming up with that plan makes sense. He is the “Mad Titan”, after all. He’s a warlord and a murderer. Killing people and inflicting pain is what he does. It’s the “if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail” line of reasoning. Of course Thanos would sincerely believe that the solution to the universe’s problems was more killing. Killing people is all he knows how to do.
The Flag-smashers also make a certain amount of sense. In the face of The Snap, the world went into crisis mode. All the old lines and divisions and systems were eradicated due to this unimaginable tragedy. The whole species had to pull together. Then everyone is brought back and people immediately worked to put everything back the way things were, ignoring that for an enormous number of people that the way things were was fucking terrible. That doesn’t mean that Thanos was right any more than saying the fire that burned down your house was awesome because now you don’t have to worry about repainting the spare bedroom. Just because good things can come from tragedy doesn’t make the tragic thing a good idea.
Damn it, should have read further. Everything I said, credit to Skipskatte here first.
Well, he’s clearly not just the mad titan, but also the really fucking stupid titan, because elementary arithmetic would tell him he needs to kill at least 99% of the universe if he wants to have any meaningful effect on ‘overpopulation’ (which shouldn’t even be a thing in this universe).
“Yeah, the ‘Thanos Plan’ was extremely dumb.”You have to admit – it’s better than his motivation in the comics. Can you imagine trying to sell the audience on a female personification of Death, and Thanos is so hot for her that he kills half of the universe just to impress her?
I am an unapologetic MCU head, but the one thing I think they’ve screwed up is really trying to tell the post-Snap story.
We’ve gotten nibbles. I don’t think Thanos was right, but I sure as fuck think Hayward was right to point out that Monica and Jimmy weren’t there, so maybe stop with the judging judgeyness.
The undercurrent for me with John Walker and Sam and Bucky was that John was a soldier trying to help put the world back together and Sam and Bucky were dusted and maybe they should ease up on the guy. I’d say at least one of John’s CMHs was for dealing with post-Snap shit (Say, for instance, 80 percent of South Korean troops vanish while only 20 percent of North Korean troops do)
Anyway, who thinks Thanos was right? There are people that legitimately believe JFK (the Dad!) is coming back to crown Trump king.
Even aside from the silliness of people saying Thanos was right in real life – the idea that anyone in-universe would feel comfortable buying or selling a mug saying that Thanos was right strains belief more than the actual super powers. Everyone on Earth was either displaced for five years or had to suffer the aftermath of their loved ones dying (temporarily) and the utter chaos that would have affected the world after. Imagine walking around Jerusalem with a shirt that says “Hitler was right”, even 75 years after WWII ended, let alone a year later.
It’d be like sporting “Bin Laden Was Right” merch after 9-11, or in-universe, “Loki Was Right” swag after the Battle of New York.
“He could have made an infinite supply of food for every planet because THE INFINITY STONES CAN DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING!!!!”This has never been said or shown to be the case in the MCU. Even if the stones themselves are capable of that feat, that doesn’t mean it’s possible for the person wielding them to channel that level of power. For example, we see clear limitations on the way Thanos uses them, and it’s clear that he is not able to utilize all of their power effortlessly. Also, the snap almost killed Thanos, and dusting half the population of the universe is a far less demanding feat than what you’re suggesting. There is no evidence to suggest that it would have even been possible for Thanos to create an infinite supply of food and somehow also expand the size of the universe enough to contain this infinite supply.And that’s not even getting into the character reasons why such a solution wouldn’t have occurred to him in the first place.
Your last line is the kicker. This is a guy who was conquering villages and killing half at random before he had a single Stone. He is the classic case of having a hammer and seeing nails.
If Thanos had used the stones to create more food/resources then it wouldn’t have solved the problem. He’d have just postponed it a few decades, and then the universe would be back at the same spot they were.His idea was that once he eliminated half of the universe, the remaining people would have years to see how the new status quo was better on resources, the environment, etc. And they would make sure that things never got that bad again.Also, the stones can’t create “infinite” food/resources/etc. They can create actual things but it’s not a universal assembly line.
He could have kept making more food and resources over and over again. Or used the stones to help each planet to become a utopia. There a lots of positive solutions he could have done if he wasn’t so gung ho on murdering people.
I loved the sequence of Clint and Kate just bumming around the apartment doing Christmas-y stuff.
I keep seeing people say “the watch is a secret about Laura’s past!” or “Clint is trying to protect a friend by getting the watch back!” & it makes me wonder if any of them have ever seen anyone tell the “I have a friend who…” lie before.It’s Clint’s watch. It can be used to prove that he’s Ronin. He was being ambiguous about the watch’s owner before because he was still trying to hide his Ronin-ness from Kate.Bloody hell.
Thank you!
You seem very exasperated about people missing this “obvious” point, even though you seem to have missed the fact that he explained the watch as belonging to a friend of his *after* he had already admitted to Kate that he was Ronin. Seems like a weird time to try and “hide his Ronin-ness from Kate.”Also, the TSM were looking for the watch from the first episode, before they even thought Ronin was back (which is also an issue with the “the watch is Laura’s” theory, because why would it be so important to them then?)
It just seems so odd that criminals would think “We want to know who this Ronin guy is! Didn’t he have a watch on? Lets find it maybe it’s engraved.”Doesn’t make sense to me but it could just be bad writing.
It’s odd that they know about any particular item from the wreckage of the Avengers Compound.
Yeah, the whole thing seems pretty convoluted. Kate’s would be step dad is involved with the tracksuit mafia, who coincidentally are after Ronin whose suit she ends up putting on so they go after her. Like it would have actually been neater in my opinion if the tracksuits were just robbing the auction because they are criminals and not as part of looking for revenge on Ronin.
My thinking if you have the assets to take a large mafia crew to heist a black-market auction then it has to be a big score. Ronin was dark for years and people moved on. But what else could come out of the Avengers compound that is really serious? An Iron Man suit. Tony Stark would wear a Rolex. That is technology that people would want to get their hands on. Not for the off-chance it’s engraved and has the ability to track an assassin that has long been thought to have died or retired. Maya didn’t lock the watch up because she’s too low on the ladder to be told what the watch is really capable of.
They’re really making me hot and cold on Kate Bishop. First, she seemingly warms up to seeing her mother happy with Jack, a welcome change to her trying to seem like the good guy while attempting to stab him in the face, and a minute later she’s all about taking him down. I’m not even sure what the Tracksuit Mafia is supposed to be at this point, if they’re even malevolent, just a vague “criminal empire” vibe, whose only current goal seems to be vengeance against the Ronin, and that they’re very bad. Also aggravating was how Kate simultaneously worships Hawkeye while ignoring him and acting like she knows better. She’s not shaking the Scrappy Doo vibes anytime soon.
Also puzzling was how they were caught mid-investigation mode while there was still daylight, then chose to take the entire rest of the day off. Kate tries to comfort his inability to get to his family with Xmas vibes, but even Barton doesn’t treat anything with the urgency they’ve established. Renner has a nice moment that strangely makes it my favorite part of the episode.Kate Bishop’s choice of Xmas movies is all over the place. It’s a stack of seven: The Santa Clause, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Polar Express, It’s A Wonderful Life, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Die Hard 30th anniversary blu ray, and Elf on blu ray. What, no Gremlins? I checked for some meta connections and only Elf seems to have some, which has Peter Dinklage and Jon Favreau (who also directed) in its cast.Watching the rooftop fight again, it wasn’t terrible, but the way it ends is baffling. Kate has no qualms with plugging Maya with an arrow, but Yelena only needs to slowly shake her head for Kate to just let her go? What? Why? And if Yelena really intended to kill Barton, it seems like she would snipe him from a distance instead of trying to sneak up on him and beat him up. Even when she had her pistol trained on him, she hesitated. If it turns out she was actually trying to kill him, they just made her look really bad at her job.
I thought Yelena was saying “you don’t want to try that because it won’t end well for you”, and Kate was responding with “well if you come any closer I’m not going to have any other choice”, to which Yelena decided “well let’s call this a draw for now but this isn’t over”. But I admit they could have made that a bit clearer if that was their intention…
And if Yelena really intended to kill Barton, it seems like she would snipe him from a distance instead of trying to sneak up on him and beat him up. Even when she had her pistol trained on him, she hesitated. If it turns out she was actually trying to kill him, they just made her look really bad at her job. Yelena’s employers want a Barton corpse; she wants answers, and then maybe a corpse.We know enough about Val at this point to question whether she’s on the side of the angels….so a professionally-trained spy should, at minimum, be taking a “trust, but verify” -approach to the intel dropped in the Black Widow post-credits scene.
The movie thing was baffling to me. I thought it was established that he wants to watch Christmas movies with his KIDS. He’s not sad that he’s missing The Santa Clause, he’s sad that he’s missing quality time with his family. Taking a break to get drunk and watch movies is the exact opposite of what Kate should do to fix this problem. I get that Kate might be dumb enough to try this but I don’t get why Clint doesn’t say “Thanks, but let’s keep working on this so I can get home.” It would have been a good moment to show that she doesn’t fully understand a lot of what is going on around her and that her read on things is superficial at best meaning her proposed solutions are all wrong. Instead, it felt like maybe he doesn’t really want to get back to his family as much as he says he does.
You’re confused as to why Kate wants to take out the guy who runs the company that’s a shell for the criminal organization she’s currently on the run from?Yea he had started to grow on her, then she found out new information. There was a moment of conflict, but then she is back on board. This is part of what I like about Kate, there are so many moments I expect her to do one thing and she does the opposite. She handles a lot of the bigger stuff surprisingly maturely, and is mostly bratty or goofy with more minor things.And the reason you’re not sure what the tracksuit mafia is supposed to be is because the show has deliberately not revealed what it is they’re actually into. Not sure why you’re questioning whether they’re malevolent though.
I don’t see anything wrong with her Christmas selections. Over the last two Christmases I’m pretty sure I’ve watched all of those. I watched Elf and Die Hard in the same night this year. They’re both great!
I checked for some meta connections and only Elf seems to have some, which has Peter Dinklage and Jon Favreau (who also directed) in its cast.The Santa Clause is Disney, and Die Hard is Fox, now owned by Disney.
The whole arrows/larpers thing seems so arbitrary and unnecessary, and, to be frank, confusing. There’s enough plot-threads in this show already, and I really don’t get the point of this one.
I fully expect the LARPers will be important in the Hawkeye finale, much like the trekkie kids in Galaxy-Quest.
My roommate and I have been theorizing on what Laura’s deal is. While I doubt they’ll get into it on the show with two episodes left in the season, the casual ease with which she handles looking into front companies on Clint’s behalf and having light, breezy conversations about him being a vigilante serial killer for five years makes me think she was probably a SHIELD agent herself and they met through work. (Also possible that she’s got some past ties to crime and/or espionage herself, which is why she didn’t come along to New York in the first place.)
Some version of Laura brown fits nicely: marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Laura_Brown_(Earth-616)
Ooooh, that’s a good catch.
I’ve watched every episode so far. Is this show any good?
I’d made the mental note that Laura was likely an ex-SHIELD agent but for some reason never considered the watch might be hers. And then I saw the fan rumour that she might be revealed to be the MCU’s Mockingbird, retired (and yeah I know there was a Mockingbird in Agents of Shield played by Adrianne Palicki but whether or not that’s canon is hotly contended). I really wasn’t on board with the whole “Hawkeye is a secret dad!” reveal in Age of Ultron and found Laura to be almost a cipher, but this show is doing a great job of retroactively making it all work for me and if that in particular comes true, icing on the cake.
She may be this Laura: marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Laura_Brown_(Earth-616)
Also a great shout
“Which is going to have a bigger payoff: Clint’s quarter trick, or the fact that Jack “CEO of Tracksuit Mafia” Duquesne regularly mixes up aphorisms?”
One can only hope it’s the boomerang arrows.
For a second there I thought Armand VII was going to be more important…
“Elsewhere, the whole subplot with Kate befriending the LARPers in order to find a cop willing to retrieve the rest of Clint’s trick arrows from an NYPD evidence locker is a needlessly complicated detour that I’m not sure even makes much sense.”Yea this was the only thing that didn’t really work for me. The LARPer/law enforcement stuff has been a bit iffy from the start, where a fireman stealing from the home of a fire victim, which also happens to be a crime scene, is just laughed off as innocent fun. Then a cop just casually agrees to stealing evidence (maybe not that much of a stretch, but it seems off when they aren’t being portrayed as corrupt). It would have maybe even worked better if Kate didn’t specifically call it evidence tampering, because the arrows might not have been stored as “evidence” but maybe just found property. I mean, when I think about it it becomes a bit more believable considering that Clint literally helped save the world, so the cops would be willing to do whatever to help out an Avenger. But that’s more of an after the fact explanation for something that just seemed a bit off in the moment. But still, a minor detail in what was still a very enjoyable episode, if not quite as good as last week’s. Also, I though the rooftop fight was up there with the warehouse fight from last week, apart from one or two awkwardly choreographed moments (Maya effortlessly kicking Kate across the roof comes to mind).
All blondes look the same to me but: wasn’t the blonde revealed at the end, the same as the blonde LARPer who was so giddily enthusiastic about costume making? In fact the gesturing there reminded me a lot of the blonde assassin’s enthusiasm in Agent Carter.
I love the fact that ordinary citizens of the MCU use phrases like “Avengers-level threat”. I prefer those little lived-in details over any slavish devotion to comics-accurate continuity.
So what do you want to bet that the person whose secret identity is tied to that vintage Rolex is Clint’s wife Laura? Make Linda Cardellini a superhero, you cowards!!Oh, it wasn’t already obvious? If the Disney MCU shows have shown us anything, it’s that the McGuffin is going to be linked to someone that’s already been introduced and is already part of the story. There is no doubt it’s Laura’s watch and that she is a retired SHIELD agent who was Clint’s partner before Nat.The only other possibility is that it’s Willie Lopez’s and it has some connection to why he was tied up in organized crime. You’re not hiring Zahn McClarnon to just make two brief cameos.
So at this point, it’s pretty obvious (to me at least) that Jack Duquesne is not only not *the* bad guy; he’s not even *a* bad guy. He’s a good guy. Eleanor is quite clearly the bad guy and Jack is her patsy. She is laundering the money through his company. That explains the scene in episode 1 with Uncle Armand. Jack’s just a charming doofus who likes swords. I think Derek Bishop is also still in the picture.
The way Clint described his turn as Ronin as just doing what he had been trained to do, and what exactly that was, just emphasizes how morally grey his role as a SHIELD assassin would have been prior to The Avengers, and how brutal he may have been. That little bit of detail makes his stint as Ronin feel less like the “grieving man loses control and becomes killer” trope. It’s pretty chilling to think that the stuff he was doing as Ronin is basically what he did for SHIELD back in the day, especially since everyone seemed so horrified by it.For me, nothing before this really sold what exactly it meant for him to have been a “master assassin” as described by Tony in the first film. But looking back, In Thor 1 he was called in to kill the intruder quickly and efficiently. In Avengers he is brainwashed but quickly and efficiently kills a bunch of people. And of course he met Natasha because he was sent to kill her quickly and efficiently. I love how well it all fits together.Now I’m thinking he was basically a mini-Winter Soldier, but for SHIELD not Hydra (or so he thought).
Wild stuff. this episode was enjoyable. I liked the quieter parts more than the action climax. I still mentally stumble as to whether Kate is supposed to be under 21 or 21-22-ish right now? I’m thinking about the dacquiri mixes. I’m sure she’d be drinking them even if she wasn’t 21, but I was thinking if she was 19, then Clint would have at least some nominal objection.I’m glad that Clint didn’t verbally confirm his family. But I wonder what is super special about the watch? Does it have a secret microchip in it? dossier files?I’m puzzled at the end, when Maya seemingly gives up at some point (literally- after being shot by Kate). I thought she was all in for taking out Clint and Kate. Yelena was a completely third party, right? Just what was her objective? Capture Clint? Kill him?With all these police knowing where Kate and Clint’s hideout is, I don’t see this ending well. It also doesn’t speak well to the NYPD about some of their folks being casually okay with breaking protocol over evidence access. I know that this is the MCU NYPD and not the real life department that has all the various real internal/external problems, but still..The Big Guy. Who knows, still? I think the producers want there to be an upswell of theories that it is Kingpin— Fisk. the obvious connection to Echo. But There are other folks, who I think could be the reveal.I’ve always wanted more of Marvel’s “Maggia” (I really hope they don’t use that word in the films/shows— or have they already?). Folks like Frederick Foswell (“The Big Man”, remember?) Silvermane (pre-robot), Hammerhead, the Rose, Tombstone. (The latter, I hope Sony doesn’t have exclusive claim over him. I’d like to see him as a Luke Cage villain onscreen.)
I’m surprised that I got this far into this episode’s comments and you were the first one to mention that “the big guy” comment. Even if I didn’t already know that Kingpin shows up in this show, I would still have noticed that line, especially after seeing a mysterious man pinching child-Echo’s face and giving a Vincent d’Onofrio chuckle.
Question – Clint is hard of hearing in just the one ear, right? Which is why he has only the one hearing aid?So why didn’t he just switch the phone to his good ear when his son called?The man’s not completely deaf, right?
Kate’s inherit, maybe even unconscious beliefNot to be that commenter, but I’m guessing the intended word is “inherent”?
Anyone else think Clint missed an opportunity on the rooftop to indicate to Maya that Yelena is Ronin? It’s a cheap shot, and Kate would’ve looked on in disgust. But that’s a sure way to get both of them off your back.
Although Clint was to keep his past as Ronin a secret, he would not be ok with trying to pin that identity on someone else, considering Ronin is considered a mass-murderer.This series seems to be a lot about Clint coming to terms with the consequences of his past actions. Trying to pin Ronin’s identity on someone else seems like a betrayal of that.(of course I’ll look foolish if this series ends with Clint doing just that)
Clint is the man