Hawkeye Episode 5 brings all together, Bro.
Another big episode deftly connects a large troupe of characters.
The Short Take:
Hawkeye starts to cash in its chips with big reveals, emotional gut punches, and thematic cohesion in its penultimate episode. An actress from a recent MCU film steals the show…again.
The Long Take:
[SPOILERS doused in hot sauce ahead.]
In my review of Black Widow, I highlighted Florence Pugh as a scene-stealer — nay, a movie-stealer. While the film was perfectly good as an action flick, it seemed to be less about Natasha Romanoff and more about introducing Florence Pugh as the next Black Widow. And Florence Pugh, who plays Natasha’s little sister Yelena, pushed this imbalance way over the edge with her charismatic performance. In this week’s Hawekeye, in which — unlike last week’s episode — Yelena actually speaks, Pugh continues to glow up any scene she’s in.
The degree of difficulty in what Pugh has to accomplish in order to make Yelena likeable is pretty high. She has to play Yelena as goofy and eccentric (“That Rudolph…he’s so weird!”), with the child-like wonder of someone experiencing the world for the first time. But then she also has to prove that Yelena is a highly-trained, deadly assassin, with a coldness and confidence to match. The writers of this episode and Pugh really made that macaroni and cheese scene work because it plays up this paradox in Yelena’s personality. Yelena NOT addressing the elephant in the room and just gabbing about how this is her first time in New York and how much she loves American Christmas creates crazy amounts of dramatic tension. Like Kate, I was extremely stressed out because I know what Yelena’s capable of and what she’s ultimately in New York to do, and yet we can’t help but fall for her charms, wanting to sit down and share a saucepan full of bright orange mac and cheese with her.
This high-stakes hang, then, aligns our POV with Kate. She too can’t help but let her guard down and have a good time. My favorite line of the whole episode might have been when Kate clenches her jaw and says, “Yea, I know what boxed mac and cheese tastes like. I know it’s…delicious.” This warmly reminded me of my early grad school days when my entire dinner would sometimes be an entire box of Annie’s mac and cheese. I also really liked how Yelena puts Kate on her back heels a little bit; Kate hasn’t responded to Eleanor and Clint telling her she’s not invincible, but Yelena seems to be getting through to her in a way that moves her otherwise perky, overconfident character forward. Hailee Steinfeld plays the mix of terrified and amused really well. I had put this pairing on my wish list early on in the show’s run, and I’m so happy their meeting did not disappoint at all. In fact, this episode made me want an entire spin-off with just Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova.
Hailee Steinfeld posts an on-set photo of Florence Pugh.
But it wasn’t all reindeer games here. The episode, while fun and exciting, still managed to pack a lot of heart-wrenching moments. Clint talking to Natasha at the Battle of New York memorial certainly ranks high, but for me the prologue scene explaining what happened to Yelena after the events of Black Widow and during The Snap added the most to the story and, honestly, gutted me the most in its final line: “I have to find Natasha. I have to tell her I’m okay.” All of the mending and bonding from the Black Widow film floods back in this moment of dramatic irony. Yelena has no idea that Natasha died to undo The Snap and bring Yelena back.
This line in particular sets up Yelena’s monologue to Kate in the mac and cheese scene because it makes the fact that she has a lot of big feelings about Clint and her assigned hit on him more believable. How often do shows do a “previously on” montage after an extended scene like this? I’m having hard time coming up with any examples. (If you can think of any, let me know in the comments.) This felt like a fresh, bold, and very smart move because it contextualizes Yelena’s role in all this, connects Hawkeye to Black Widow, and then very quickly inserts us back into the main narrative of the show without much confusion.
Yelena wasn’t the only character to gain depth in this episode, though. There was an unexpected amount of thematic depth that tied all the characters together; and considering how many characters we’ve gotten in a very short amount of time, this kind of cohesion is crucial to the show’s overall success. In the big scene in which Clint puts the Ronin suit back on and confronts Maya, he says to her, “You and I are the same.” That idea rippled — dare I say echoed — throughout the episode. Or at least for me, something clicked into place. They’re all trying to get to the bottom of mysteries that haunt their pasts and their families. They’re all potential weapons that could misfire with unchecked rage and grief. In an alternate timeline they could all be on the same team and be friends; it’s just that they happen to be crossing hairs and crossing purposes at the same time.
If Kate, Maya, Yelena, and Clint are all weapons, that means that they’re all potential pawns too; Clint even says as much to Maya when he drops the bomb that her father’s murder may have come from within his own organization. Kate doesn’t know about Eleanor’s criminal activities. Maya doesn’t know that her boss, Fisk, through an informant, who appears to be Kazi, tipped Clint/Ronin off about the meeting so he could ambush them. So her lieutenant and best friend has probably betrayed her. His promise to help her kill Ronin, but only if “that’s the end of it” certainly sounds more suspicious now that we know that he may not want her to find out what role he played in her father’s murder. Kate’s heart-to-heart with her mom is DEVASTATING when considered in this context as well. Even though Vera Farmiga gives a stellar performance, playing a caring mom to perfection, I just can’t trust anything she says, especially now that we have confirmation that she is in fact a villain. I think she was just pumping Kate for information. Yelena has a lot to sort through as well. Not only does she need to shed the exploitation of The Red Room and her past life as a Widow, but now she has to figure out if she’s on the right side of the mission that Val sends her on in the Black Widow end-credits scene.
This is partly why I loved the fact that she is the one to tell Kate that Eleanor works for Fisk; it shows that she’s not just going to blindly follow orders and kill Clint. She’s going to assess the situation first. And she cares enough about Kate, or empathizes with her enough to share info with her. (Also, did I mention that I really want Kate and Yelena to be BFFs?) All these character arcs provide connective tissue for the show, and it’s rewarding to watch everyone investigate, learn painful truths, and (hopefully) ultimately reclaim their identities. The title of the episode is “Ronin.” I would argue that they’re all Ronins here.
And yes, I did say Fisk. FISK!!! We have visual confirmation of Vincent D’Onofrio’s arrival in the MCU. While this may have been a letdown for some because it wasn’t “in person,” I’d say the composition of Kingpin’s reveal made it work for me. Clint says “That’s the guy I’ve been worried about this whole time: Kingpin,” and we cut back to a close-up of the grainy cell phone image of Kingpin and Eleanor. Then we cut to the credits as “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” begins to play. The way the music transitions from ominous TV reveal music to the opening of the Grinch song is genius. Give the person who came up with this a raise, please. The music cues — in this episode and on this show more generally — have all been on point, actually. As an additional shoutout, the use of “Christmas Time is Here” from A Charlie Brown Christmas as Clint lonesomely walks down a city street immediately made me think of Clint as Charlie Brown in a way that was both sad, endearing, and funny.
I’m glad my prediction about Eleanor working for Fisk was right. I think it’s exactly the right kind of wrinkle that plays big to the wider MCU-building but at the same time, at a very personal level, obliterates Kate’s world in a single moment. This reveal arrived a whole episode earlier than I would have expected, but, now that I think about, this smartly frees up the show’s energy to be all confrontation and collision in the finale. In typical Marvel TV fashion, all subplots will converge at a central location. From the looks of the trailers, I would guess that will be a Christmas party that Kate and Clint infiltrate and the big fight scene will culminate in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Hopefully D’Onofrio gets some meaty scene too, now that the show has gotten his cliffhanger reveal out of the way. It would be cruel after all this to make us wait to hear D’Onofrio do his Kingpin once again.
If Eleanor and Fisk are the big bads, does that mean that poor Jack is completely innocent? He now seems like a hapless pawn drawn into Eleanor’s web just so he could become the fall guy. If this is true, the show runners have also used him, since he was the perfect red herring to throw viewers and Kate off Eleanor’s scent. Perhaps he’ll be an undercover agent of some kind? It seems weird to invoke The Swordsman’s alias but never actually use him as The Swordsman.
Or maybe he’s the thread that carries over with Kate into the next season? (I really hope we get another season of this show, even if it doesn’t involve Clint Barton.) I can also see how they are planting seeds for the Echo show. To temper everyone’s expectations, I don’t think we will actually get any additional information about Echo’s father’s death, but her obvious suspicion of Kazi because he wasn’t at that fateful meeting means that she’s not going to let this go. Ultimately she has to pivot against Kingpin, and I think it would be better to save that for her own series. Also, how are we going to have time to do all that in one episode?
Hopefully the finale will be as densely-packed with story and character as this one was. I want something more like Loki’s finale and less like WandaVision’s finale, but I’m also okay if we get something in between.