Finale instates Hawkeye as a holiday classic.
The feels and fights overshadow episode 6's flaws.
The Short Take:
As a finale, Hawkeye episode 6 has some issues. But I barely noticed them, distracted by the emotional highs and fun action. What a holiday treat this show has been!
Image Credit: Vulture
[A full quiver of SPOILERS ahead. For all the Marvel/Disney+ shows to date.]
The Long Take:
A lot of pop culture podcasts I listen to — but most loudly and consistently The Ringer-Verse — say that Marvel’s Disney+ shows have a “finale problem.” With the exception of Loki, whose finale critics universally praised, these shows often have a revelatory penultimate episode followed by an anti-climactic or disappointing finale. Sometimes unrealistic fan expectations play into that, like when everyone thought Mephisto would show up at the end of WandaVision. And sometimes it’s the murky action extravaganzas that seem to prioritize spectacle over character-driven substance. Or, as several members of The Ringer-Verse podcast noted with the Hawkeye finale, sometimes there are too many moving parts, spread too thin for the time frame allotted.
I was way higher on this last episode than the folks at The Ringer-Verse were, but their critiques did make sense once I heard them. Yes, the whole watch mystery was very uneven considering we went from innocuous MacGuffin at the black market auction to a seemingly monumental secret between Clint and Laura Barton to a cute yet (so far) inconsequential, Easter eggy holiday moment between the two. And I whole-heartedly agree that Echo’s betrayal of Kingpin after learning he had a hand in her father’s death, as well as that final confrontation she has with him, would have been better suited for a dedicated series. Crammed in alongside all the Clint/Kate/Yelena fireworks, I can see how Echo’s arc feels rushed here. In fact, I think I noted in my review of episode 5 that I didn’t think they would have time to do much more with Maya/Echo because there was so much else going on and she would get her own series later.
I was wrong, of course. Her scenes with Kazi and Kingpin, Kazi, and Kingpin occupied a lot of screen time, with her final attack on Kingpin serving as the season’s big cliffhanger. But not really because there’s no way Kingpin is actually dead. Disney and Marvel, I’d like to think, are smart enough to milk the Vincent D’Onofrio cash cow for as long as they can now that he has entered the MCU fray. Joanna Robinson’s main point on both Ringer-Verse episodes was that this was too big a moment for Echo and should have had more time and space to build towards a big climactic moment on her own show.
While that may be true, this and other short-handed or condensed plot lines did not detract from my experience of the episode we got. For me, the high moments — of which there were many — shined brighter than any scenes or choices that gave me pause.
The emotional beats, while compact and varied, hit me hard. Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season and schmaltzy sentiment runs high (or becomes more socially acceptable for a period of time?), but I teared up twice during this episode: once when Clint calls Kate his partner, and again when Yelena confronts Clint about Natasha’s death. I would argue these two impactful scenes are well-earned payoffs yielded from careful set-up the show orchestrates from the beginning. All the discussion of whether or not Clint and Kate are partners in earlier episodes, sometimes for comedic effect (like in the KB Toys Tracksuit Mafia scene of episode 3), and sometimes for dramatic tension (like when Clint tells Kate it’s over after the rooftop battle in episode 4), resolves beautifully here with one simple phrase: “…you are my partner.”
Just as efficient a communication is Clint’s whistling the signal that Natasha and Yelena share in Black Widow. And while Yelena’s turnaround afterwards is, as Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson note in the Ringer-Verse’s deep-dive analysis of the episode, quite quick, I would argue that Yelena was ready for, perhaps searching for this kind of breakthrough. I don’t think she would have been investigating Kingpin and Eleanor if she really were blindly hellbent on killing Clint. She has a lot of pent up grief and confusion, and uses the assigned hit on Clint to work through her own healing rather than actually murder Clint. I buy that it wouldn’t take that much for her to change her mind, especially when Clint demonstrates how close he and Natasha really were. I prefer this reading of the situation because it makes Yelena less of a gullible pawn and restores some agency to her. Such a restoration provides a nice progression for multiple characters featured in the “Ronin” episode because Echo, Kate, and Yelena all seemed like they were being unwittingly exploited or fooled in some way. And here, in this final installment, they begin to fight back.
I know I’m always talking about how amazing Florence Pugh is, but she makes this scene work 100%. Jeremy Renner’s doing just fine, but without Pugh’s kaleidoscope of emotions — especially pain and vulnerability — the whole conversation doesn’t work. I also want to remind us all that they’re having this conversation on an ice skating rink. It’s kind of a ridiculous setting for two actors to pour their hearts out, but when I was watching it for the first time I didn’t think about that at all. The ice of Yelena’s grief starts to melt when she connects with Clint because she needs to talk to someone, anyone else who might be able to relate to her own experience. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the cheap metaphor…it was right there.)
Some shorthand, like the whistle, is okay because the MCU has been building up so many interconnected stories over a long period of time. And that’s how reading comic books often feels for me. The stories themselves are fairly short, but because I’ve spent so much time with (sometimes multiple versions of) characters and have experienced so many histories over time, there’s a lot less that needs to be explained. Little references or images do a lot of work.
Does this keep moving us towards a world where those who haven’t seen all the other things miss out? Yes and no. I would argue someone can enjoy the humor and the action at face value here without having seen Black Widow or Netflix’s Daredevil. And, again, that’s how comic books often work. I often drop into a run whenever and wherever I drop in and just roll with it from there. If it feels like I’m missing something, I let it wash over me. And if I like something enough, I seek out the other branches of its narrative tree.
Larger storytelling machinations aside, this individual episode was a plain old good time. The Bishop Security holiday party provided sumptuous spy glamor. I really liked (for very little reason) when Clint asked Kate to scan the room for assets and threats; it reminded me of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt in Spy Game (2001). The office building fight between Kate and Yelena is my second favorite in the whole season, only rivaled by the car chase scene in episode 3. The dolly/tracking shots from the side, intercut with hilarious interludes between Kate and Yelena grounds the fight in the office holiday party milieu and gives the whole sequence a Wes Anderson diorama feel that I loved both aesthetically and narratively. I have not seen this exact kind of playful yet combative energy anywhere else in the MCU, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of it. The “Stop making me like you”…”Sorry, I can’t help it” bit is one of the funniest, most distinctive exchanges I’ve seen on television in a while. Get these two in an Avengers-esque movie yesterday!
I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the delightful gifts this finale gives. There’s a trick arrow-making montage, with a label maker that winks at the Matt Franction/David Aja comics. Clint gets stuck in the Rockefeller Christmas Tree. There’s an OWL in the tree. AN OWL. Kate shrinks a van full of tracksuit bros with a Pym Particle arrow. Then the owl swoops in and carries them away. This all sounds absurd, I know, but I didn’t care if it made sense. I didn’t care if it was cheesy or goofy because I was having so much fun.
While I understand that some may feel that Kingpin was too goofy, undercutting the darker, more sinister, and more elegant version of him in the Netflix Daredevil series, I still found enough of D’Onofrio’s original performance in these scenes to accept his restyling here. And I’m not just talking about the Hawaiian shirt, which is apparently a reference to the Spider-Man: Family Business comics from 2014. The Netflix series was so dark and violent compared to any of the MCU films or Disney+ shows, so to expect a carbon copy of that other Kingpin seems unrealistic to me. Was I expecting him to engage in hand-to-hand combat, to get hit by a car AND shot, all in one episode? Of course not. But I don’t think any of that or the Hawaiian shirt take away from the core of D’Onofrio’s portrayal — the bubbling rage that comes to the surface when Kingpin feels like he’s losing his absolute control. I did miss the strategic genius, the chess-like “10 steps ahead” maneuvering that made the Netflix version of Kingpin stand out in the villain crowd. But, again, would we have had time for that kind of arc here, with everything else going on? No. And that’s okay.
Intellectually I can concede to a lot of the critiques floating around, and I know that this entire review sounds like a tepid defense of the episode. But I keep coming back to how watching this made me feel. And those critiques begin to fade rather quickly. This finale, more than anything else, solidified Hawkeye as a series I will likely rewatch every holiday season, just as I would A Muppet Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown Christmas, or, more comparably, Die Hard. (Why do people want to deny others a beloved Christmas movie? What do we gain from striking this from the holiday movie record? Another discussion for another day, I suppose.)
Happy Holidays, Hawkeye. And, because this show very progressively aligns with the comic in the way it establishes that Clint Barton and Kate Bishop can both be Hawkeye at the same time, I could be talking about either one.
Great review! For me, Marvel movies work when they're charming; you can forgive a host of problems (overstuffed plots, underdeveloped characters, weird tangents, fan service, etc.) if you're smiling the whole way through it, and I enjoyed all of this (and didn't enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). Obviously, Pugh is the MVP, but Steinfeld was great too, and D'Onofrio is a top-tier Marvel villain. Although what I actually want is a whole show about Jack Duquesne (although I'm happy with him chewing scenery in Better Call Saul).