Eleanor Bishop Archives - The Wide Screen

December 15, 2021

“Hawkeye” Episode 5 Finally Opens The Show’s Big Mystery Box

**SPOILERS FOR HAWKEYE EPISODE FIVE AHEAD!**

Today is an exciting day for fans of the short-lived but successful Marvel Netflix shows – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Defenders, and that other one. If you mourned their abrupt cancellations, which happened in quick succession between late 2018 and early 2019, then the reveal that Vincent D’Onofrio’s iconic Kingpin is home for the holidays will come as a welcome Christmas miracle, regardless of how easy it was to predict (thanks in large part to D’Onofrio’s Twitter activity over the past few months). And if you’re hoping to see more Marvel Netflix characters pop up in the MCU, well, Hawkeye just opened the door.

But…there is a caveat. Until we see more of the MCU Kingpin than a grainy photo taken from a considerable distance (frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to say with certainty that it even was D’Onofrio if his name wasn’t listed in the credits), we still have no clue whether any of the events and storylines from the Marvel Netflix shows will make their way into the MCU canon, or if Marvel president Kevin Feige has handpicked a couple of actors he likes and has simply chosen to discard everything else and disregard the Netflix continuity. He would be well within his rights to do so, and it would be in Disney’s best interests not to give any attention to their streaming rival.

With the little we are given to mull on before the Hawkeye season finale next week, we can at least be certain that Kingpin is not in prison, so either he found a way to obtain his freedom after the events of Daredevil season three (which to be fair, would likely have happened anyway if the show ran for another season), or Daredevil is not canon. The answer will speak volumes about how Marvel plans to utilize other characters and actors from MCU-adjacent TV shows including Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., which drifted so far astray from the MCU canon in its last two seasons that a soft reboot approach may be the only viable option.

Oops, I found a way to make this about Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. again. My bad. But I can assure you that the meta mystery of what is and is no longer canon to the MCU is probably more interesting than the actual mystery unfolding throughout Hawkeye, which at this point is actually four or five separate mysteries all frantically jostling for screentime in a six-episode series. Even with a couple of story-threads loosely intertwined in this episode to provide the illusion of cohesion, our eyes are still led to the characters and subplots that keep bouncing in and out of the story like pinballs.

I was thoroughly prepared for Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) to fall into that latter category, right alongside the vintage Rolex watch of indeterminate origin that has already ceased to be relevant and the embarrassingly blatant red-herring wrapped up in the name of Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), a comics character with a long and illustrious history who deserved better. But where Dalton can do little with what he’s given except be charming (and to his credit, he does that so well that it’s been clear from the outset he’s not a criminal mastermind), Pugh is given a supporting role in this episode that she utilizes excellently.

As a temporary comedic foil to Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), Pugh’s Belova fits snugly into the show – providing the same kind of chipper, light-hearted banter that Kate liked to bounce off of Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) before the two parted ways at the end of episode four, and giving Kate a much-needed opportunity to assume a more stoic stance for once. Pugh’s Russian-ish accent still needs work (although the inconsistency of it might be part of what makes this performance so endearing), but whether she’s rambling on about hot sauce or mapping out her first sightseeing trip through NYC, her Belova is an absolute delight.

And although her comedic moments are some of the highlights of this week’s episode, they wouldn’t be nearly as funny or as vaguely uncomfortable if Pugh weren’t simultaneously conveying in quiet undertones that Belova is still very much a threat. She matter-of-factly states that she’s going to kill Clint Barton one way or another, and if I trusted Marvel to actually follow through with that, I’d believe her. They’ve been getting bolder in the past year, but I don’t think they’re at the point of casually killing off original Avengers in a holiday-themed Disney+ series…yet.

If Clint does make it out of this alive, it’s not going to be for lack of trying on the part of his enemies. We learn that Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga), Marvel’s least-surprising surprise villain since WandaVision‘s Agatha Harkness, was behind the hiring of Yelena Belova to kill Clint, and meanwhile Kingpin hasn’t even unleashed the most dangerous weapons in his arsenal. Echo (Alaqua Cox) and the Tracksuit Mafia are also out there, but Echo takes on Clint a third time in this episode and again walks away soundly defeated. I’ve been disappointed in some of the decisions Hawkeye has made with her character, but it’s starting to get really frustrating.

And with the revelation that Echo’s desire for vengeance is being aimed at the wrong person anyway, her storyline feels increasingly pointless except to introduce the character and establish what will presumably be the through-line of her own Disney+ series. It’s accurate to the comics that Kingpin gave the order to have Echo’s father murdered, not Clint Barton as Echo had believed for much of her life – but there’s no emotional weight to that reveal, for the audience who still doesn’t know the MCU versions of these characters all that well (or in Kingpin’s case, at all).

There was one flashback to Echo’s childhood in episode three, focused on her relationship with her father – but no scenes or lines that established the largely one-sided bond of trust and loyalty that formed between Echo and Kingpin after the death of her father, nothing to earn the dramatic reveal in this episode that’s framed as if it’s heart-wrenching and instead comes across as hollow. Hawkeye has been so busy poorly keeping Kingpin a secret, it forgot that this part of Echo’s character arc is dependent on knowing something – anything – about their relationship.

I feel sorry for Cox, because she clearly deserves a story that can actually focus on what she and her character need. Some of Marvel’s mystery boxes have been disappointing or mishandled (the Power Broker reveal in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier comes to mind), but this is the first mystery that’s clashed with the rest of the story to this degree, and it’s not hard to see why. Even leaving aside the fact that it hasn’t exactly been easy to figure out what the main mystery is with so many going on, they’re all thematically estranged from Hawkeye‘s early ruminations on what it means to be a hero, and the dangers of putting people on pedestals.

Hawkeye feels like it ought to have been the story of the Ronin legacy that haunts Clint Barton, and the fact that this episode is actually titled Ronin would seem to reflect that. But instead of building on that foundation, the show has instead tied itself into knots chasing random Rolex watches and Kingpin Easter-eggs. I’d say the finale could sort it all out, but honestly I think there’s a stronger chance that Yelena Belova kills Clint Barton on Christmas Day.

Episode Rating: 7.9/10

December 8, 2021

With Episode 4, “Hawkeye” May Have Bitten Off More Than It Can Chew

**SPOILERS FOR HAWKEYE EPISODE FOUR AHEAD!**

Hawkeye is doing an awful lot of meandering and walking in circles for a show that only has two episodes left in its first season and about a dozen subplots and mysteries currently ongoing, none of which is any closer to a satisfying resolution now than they were last week. And rather than checking items off the list in preparation for the finale, Hawkeye just keeps adding more, clarity and coherency be damned. One-upping last week’s Kingpin tease, this week it’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) who enters and exits again just as quickly, apparently realizing that she’s so far removed from the actual plot that there’s no reason for her to be here.

Of course, I’m sure Hawkeye will find some role for her to fill in the finale, because you don’t hire Academy Award-nominee Florence Pugh for a single action sequence in which she’s only unmasked for roughly twenty seconds (well, you shouldn’t; I wouldn’t put it past Marvel to do so, though). But unless it’s revealed that she’s somehow connected to Kingpin or is also going after the mysterious Rolex wrist-watch that everybody and their mother suddenly wants, I feel pretty confident that her only purpose is to continue the storyline set up in the Black Widow post-credits scene.

And that’s great and all, and I am interested to see where that story goes, but…can it wait until after we’ve finished the story that’s actually going on right now? Leaving aside the fact that Yelena will mean nothing to people who haven’t watched Black Widow or its post-credits scene, in-universe she still has no personal significance to Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) or Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) either, so she’s just another mystery for them to add to their steadily growing pile.

Perhaps the even greater issue is that with all these story threads hopelessly tangled up together like Christmas lights, the writers and directors can’t seem to decide on just one that takes priority over any of the others, even for a single episode. The aforementioned Rolex wrist-watch that is so crucial to this episode’s final action sequence, and which Kate recovers from Echo (Alaqua Cox)’s apartment after a harrowing home intrusion? This is our first time even seeing the damn thing again since episode one, and we still have no clue how it connects back to the plot.

Just for fun, let’s play along with the mystery being built around this wrist-watch, which actually does seem to have personal significance for Clint at least. He claims it belongs to an old colleague of his who’s been off-the-grid for a while, and that it could blow their cover if it fell into the wrong hands. Whoever sent Echo and the Tracksuit Mafia to specifically locate this watch in episode one (probably Kingpin) is presumably also aware of this, and there’s a strong chance that Echo now knows the wrist-watch’s secrets, having been in possession of it for a while.

But does the wrist-watch’s original owner have any relevance to the narrative of Hawkeye, or is this another tease for future MCU storylines? My immediate assumption was that the watch belonged to Steve Rogers, because the question of where he went in the aftermath of Endgame is not only hotly debated among fans but apparently in-universe as well, something that we saw in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. I’ve also seen it theorized that the watch belonged to Bobbi Morse, better known by her alias Mockingbird in both the comics and in Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., or to Laura Barton (Linda Cardellini).

The latter theory is intriguing, because from a storytelling and thematic standpoint it makes more sense for the wrist-watch’s owner to be Clint’s wife, running from her own past as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, than for it to be a completely new character to the MCU like, say, Mockingbird (much as I want to see the latter character return, played by Adrianne Palicki of course), or a character we likely wouldn’t ever see on Disney+ to begin with, like Chris Evans as the elder Steve Rogers.

But I also have a hard time believing that Clint wouldn’t have returned speedily to be by his wife’s side if he suspected she was in that much danger, or that Hawkeye will turn out to be centered around a character who has only appeared in the show on the other end of phone conversations, or that someone of Kingpin’s high status would go to such great lengths to try and find one retired S.H.I.E.L.D. agent – unless Laura is in possession of some highly-classified information. And if that’s the case, then what is the point of everything else going on in this show?

While Clint has an obscure connection to this wrist-watch, a personal connection with Echo and through her a tangential connection to Kingpin, it’s Kate Bishop whose sprawling subplot feels like the heaviest baggage that this slim series has to carry. Even though the murder of Armand Duquesne has been completely forgotten, and Kate has yet to do any real sleuthing into her soon-to-be stepfather Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), we’re constantly being reminded in casual tones that Jack is possibly a murderer, probably the Swordsman, and definitely a corrupt and shady businessman regardless.

Meanwhile, Vera Farmiga’s Eleanor Bishop is taking a long time to properly materialize into the criminal mastermind that we all know she is behind her warm and friendly façade, and it’s starting to get a little embarrassing for both Farmiga (she’s doing the best she can with this role, I’ll give her that) and especially for Hawkeye‘s writers, who seem to think they’re being very clever by using Jack as an obvious red herring and an ineffective distraction from Eleanor’s evil antics, when in fact the only real question at this point is whether Eleanor murdered Armand herself or got Jack to do it for her.

The link between these tales of two cities is Kingpin, who stands in Colossus fashion with one foot in the dark and treacherous underworld in which Clint operates, and with the other in the glittery high society and intrigue into which Kate was born. But my fear that he would overshadow the entire series as more and more of him was gradually revealed each week proved to be unfounded, as he’s entirely absent from this episode. Now I find myself longing for any character who could bridge the gap between Hawkeye‘s split narratives.

At the very least, we still have Clint and Kate themselves…well, at least until the end of this episode, when Clint decides to send Kate away and reject her help because now and only now, after being beaten half to death by the Tracksuit Mafia and stealing a car and jumping off a bridge together, he’s finally decided that it’s too dangerous for Kate to continue playing at being a superhero. There’s a touching moment where Clint nearly loses Kate in similar fashion to Natasha Romanoff that helps sell the big dramatic break-up, but we all know they’ll reunite in the finale to take down Echo, or Eleanor, or Jack, or Yelena, or all of the above.

In the meantime, I fear that without the light-hearted banter between Clint and Kate, Hawkeye might not work as well as it has up until this point. Kate on her own has proven to still be every bit as entertaining as she is when paired up with Clint (she’s the one with the Pizza Dog, after all), but Renner’s Clint sucks the joy and energy out of even comedic moments, and without Kate to keep him on his toes, I fear he’ll be back to the same old routine.

And I mean that in more ways than one. Clint’s got the precious wrist-watch now, and the Ronin suit and sword that he came for in the first place. But after this episode, his objective has changed from evading Echo and the Tracksuit Mafia to stopping them once and for all. And although theoretically it’s to save Echo herself from straying down the same path that Clint took after Infinity War, I can’t help but wonder if this mission will dredge up any of the bloodlust and reckless desire for justice that powered Clint while he hid behind the Ronin mask for five years. Maybe what Echo needs is to see firsthand what she could easily become.

Yelena is the wild-card in the middle of all of this, because she’s on her own totally separate misguided mission for vengeance against Clint, and she seems a lot more ruthless than Echo – based on what we’ve seen from her character in Black Widow, and on how she handles herself in battle here, during the epic four-way fight that caps off the episode. Hilariously, she and Echo land a few blows on each other, neither realizing that they share a common goal. Echo is soundly defeated, which is a little unfortunate. So far she hasn’t had that awesome action beat I think we all want from her, and that I know Alaqua Cox can deliver.

But after her incredible introductory scene, Yelena spends a few seconds onscreen out of her spider-eye mask (which I’m extremely happy to see in live-action, although it doesn’t look quite as good as it does in the comics) before vanishing into the night. And even though I love Yelena, I don’t feel satisfied by this random tease that could just as easily have been inserted into any other episode or cut completely for all the difference it makes. It’s merely a reminder that Yelena is going to appear later, probably in a post-credits scene where this sort of story development ought to have happened anyway because it has nothing to do with this story.

Hawkeye is an advent calendar of character reveals and plot twists, but all the boxes have been opened at once, without rhyme or reason. Hopefully the show remembers that it has just as many boxes to close now, and that it’s running out of time to do so.

Episode Rating: 6.5/10

December 3, 2021

“Hawkeye” Episode 3 Tells Echo’s Side Of The Story

**SPOILERS FOR HAWKEYE EPISODE THREE AHEAD!**

Of the few people who are actually talking about Hawkeye and making their opinions known on what is potentially the least-watched live-action Marvel Disney+ show yet, it seems from social media that most are just sticking around to witness the return of Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, better known by his supervillain alias, Kingpin. And after Hawkeye‘s third episode debuted yesterday, the series may have just ensured that Kingpin will continue to overshadow the rest of the story, much like how the character looms over everyone thanks to his impressive 6’7″ stature.

And mind you, all we see of Kingpin in episode three, in the roughly five seconds that he’s onscreen, is one of his hands, and a little bit of his suit. We hear him chuckle, but he doesn’t actually say a word to confirm that Vincent D’Onofrio is back in the iconic role. I’m excited to see Kingpin, don’t get me wrong, but it’s slightly frustrating that in five seconds he managed to pull focus away from everything else that happened in this episode, including our official introduction to Hawkeye‘s primary villain for the moment – Echo (Alaqua Cox).

To some degree, that’s on head writer Jonathan Igla and directors Bert & Bertie for not giving Cox’s adult version of Echo a standout action sequence or emotional beat, even though there were plenty of opportunities to blow audiences away on both counts. Her child version, played by Darnell Besaw, has one brief fight at a karate class that translates her photographic reflexes from page to screen, but while promising, we have yet to see Cox’s Echo utilize those abilities again. And her final scene with her father, who famously dies in the comics leaving a bloody handprint on Echo’s face, is significantly less impactful when Disney shies away from showing much blood.

But at the same time, it’s worth noting that MCU stans will find a way to overshadow Echo no matter what. Even when it was revealed that she would become the first Marvel character introduced on Disney+ to receive their own spinoff, all that anyone could talk about was how Kingpin and Daredevil could use Echo’s show as an arena in which to continue their conflict from the Netflix Daredevil series, as if Echo doesn’t have any stories worth telling from her own viewpoint.

And that’s a shame, because Echo happens to be a fascinating character, and Alaqua Cox in her debut performance brings a commanding presence to the role. A deaf Native American woman (and in the MCU, an amputee like Cox), left in the care of Kingpin after her father’s murder, Echo in the comics has a reputation as one of the most formidable street-level antiheroes in the global criminal underworld. There’s already so much going on with her in this episode that Hawkeye doesn’t even have time to reference the fact that in the comics, Echo was the original Ronin before Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) took on the mantle.

Nonetheless, the two characters still have a very intriguing dynamic in the MCU. There’s a somewhat generic revenge storyline going on, with Echo under the (most likely false) impression that Clint as Ronin murdered her father, but what’s most compelling about their relationship to each other is how they interact as two characters with hearing disabilities. Hawkeye depicts a range of experiences through Echo, the MCU’s second deaf character after Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari in Eternals, and Clint, who has partial hearing loss.

This includes depicting the stark differences between the two, as well as the similarities. Echo uses sign language and as a child had to rely on lipreading because she wasn’t able to attend a deaf school, while Clint is still in the process of learning sign language and can’t hold a full conversation with Echo without the help of a translator using simultaneous communication (or SimCom), a controversial method where one signs and speaks at the same time, sometimes to the detriment of both languages but particularly to the signed language because the speaker is often a hearing person who mentally prioritizes their spoken language even while using SimCom.

I have not been able to find any articles specifically regarding the use of SimCom in Hawkeye, and thus it would be impossible for me to say as a hearing person who doesn’t speak any sign languages whether the SimCom in the show is accurate and intelligible. But something that I have seen others address, and that I noted myself while watching this episode of Hawkeye, is that the way shots are framed, the characters’ hands are often out of frame while they’re signing. It might seem like a small thing to some, but it also demonstrates why representation can’t stop at onscreen visibility. It takes a diverse team behind the camera to make sure that visibility is…well, visible.

I do appreciate, however, that Hawkeye actually utilizes its diversity for more than just surface-level visibility; Clint and Echo’s disabilities are an integral part of both their characters, and in this episode at least both deal with unique situations and challenges that arise because of their disabilities. At one point, Clint’s hearing-aid gets smashed under Echo’s boot during a fight, which in turn requires him and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) to work together more closely, culminating in a scene where she helps him through an abrupt phone call from his son. It’s strongly reminiscent of a scene in The Umbrella Academy‘s season one finale, but still poignant and powerful.

In the superhero genre especially, it’s also important that diverse characters get the chance to be cool, which is why Makkari’s magnificent power display in Eternals was such a joy to behold. And here, it’s great to see that Clint at least is finally being given that chance thanks to his collection of trick arrows, each more dangerous than the last. Even though it’s pretty obvious that the show’s CGI budget got diverted elsewhere (let me guess, it’s all going into making Kingpin look taller), several of the arrows are very well-used, and the Pym Tech size-alteration arrow is particularly clever in theory.

In next week’s episode, we’ll also presumably see Clint take up a sword as he deals with the Swordsman himself, Jack Duquesne (Tony Dalton), who pops up right at the end of episode three (wielding Ronin’s blade) to remind us that, oh yeah, there’s a whole separate plot revolving around that unsolved murder mystery in episode one that has yet to tie into everything going on with Echo and Kingpin. At this point, with my theory that Echo would be connected to the MCU’s Red Room officially very unlikely to materialize into anything substantial (a shame, I thought it was a good theory), I have no idea when or why Yelena Belova will show up.

Perhaps, in trying to wrap up all these storylines with a neat little bow (and arrow), Hawkeye will bite off more than it can chew, but for the time being I’m just enjoying the ride. As long as Renner and Steinfeld continue to have great banter and chemistry, and Echo continues to develop into a more well-rounded antagonist to the duo, that shouldn’t be hard. I just have to hope that they don’t let Kingpin steal the show from them without putting up a fight.

Episode Rating: 7.5/10

November 24, 2021

Hawkeye’s First 2 Episodes Kick Off A Street-Level Story

**SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO EPISODES OF HAWKEYE AHEAD!**

Even with the first two episodes released simultaneously this morning, Hawkeye is taking just a little bit longer to pick up speed than Marvel Studios’ last four Disney+ shows. It’s getting there, but the ending of episode two left me still waiting for that big “wow!” moment when the show would kick into gear – and disappointed that such a moment won’t arrive until next week at the earliest. If the series had more than six episodes to its first season, I wouldn’t be concerned, but now I wonder if Hawkeye will even have the time it needs to find its groove, much less stay in that groove long enough to make an impact.

In the meantime, Hawkeye takes us on a pleasing, if somewhat safe and slow-moving, joy-ride around the outskirts of the MCU’s criminal underworld. The series gets progressively more exciting as it ventures deeper into that dark and largely uncharted territory, although the trappings of Christmas in New York City are never far from sight, providing a visual contrast to all the violence and crime (in just the first episode, we have a murder and a musical number), and a pop of color that keeps the series from ever looking as blandly gritty as some of the Marvel Netflix shows that shared similar plots and street-level characters.

Hawkeye, a.k.a. Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), is kind of a quintessential street-level character, as his enhanced accuracy and precision are superpowers grounded heavily in realism, that give him a slight advantage over your average criminal but don’t offer much if any protection from, say, Loki or Ultron or Thanos – the villains whom the Avengers took on, and whose low-level minions Hawkeye and Black Widow usually got saddled with killing. The Avengers movies were simply too epic in scale for Hawkeye’s bow and Black Widow’s batons to make much of a difference, so the writing emphasized their relatable qualities and made them out to be the team’s heart and soul, with Black Widow even sacrificing herself for the Soul Stone; taking the metaphor a step too far.

But sometimes all you need to do is reel it back a little for these characters to work. Not every hero needs to save the world every day – sometimes the most vividly-realized villains are those who threaten the hero on a more personal level, endangering them and their loved ones, challenging their worldview, or both. Because that gives us a reason to care, and it makes every injury sting a little fiercer. It’s not impossible to write a supervillain who checks those boxes, either, but the threat usually rings truer when it’s coming from someone grounded – like Echo (Alaqua Cox) who at least for now seems to be Clint’s primary antagonist in Hawkeye.

And we’re not even introduced to Echo until the end of episode two. Until then, Hawkeye is slowly working his way through her henchmen, a bunch of burly Eastern European men who call themselves the Tracksuit Mafia, and despite their ridiculous name (although, as Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop would be the first to admit, their branding is on-point), they’re more than a match for Hawkeye when he’s dispossessed of his bow and forced to rely on his limited mixed martial arts skills. We see him and Kate get hurt, repeatedly, and the show doesn’t gloss over those injuries like Black Widow did every time Natasha fell from some great height and miraculously walked off without so much as a scratch.

When Kate gets a nasty cut on the forehead, there’s an entire sequence devoted to properly cleaning her injury, in which Clint demonstrates those effortless mentoring skills that make him so popular with aspiring young superheroes. Clint knows the reality of what happens to average people who get entangled in Avengers business. By the time Hawkeye opens, two years after Avengers: Endgame, he’s already wearing his hearing-aid from the comics and using sign-language occasionally (the second MCU character to do so after Eternals‘ Makkari), which is explained as being the result of all those battles and loud explosions.

It’s easy to see why, in-universe more than in the real-world, regular folks look up to Hawkeye. He’s theoretically more accessible than any of the other main Avengers, whose ranks originally included a literal god, an ageless superhuman, a billionaire encased in high-tech armor, an enigmatic double-agent, and a man who did most of his work with the Avengers while trapped inside an uncontrollable green monster. Conversely, Clint is just a guy; but ironically, while that might seem to make him a better role model, Hawkeye plays with the idea that maybe…just maybe…we shouldn’t put any of these people on pedestals.

Clint is just a guy, but that means he’s also fallible. In his relatable mission to get back to his family, he’s always walked that thin line between doing what’s right and what’s best for him, demonstrating even less remorse about it than Black Widow. Sure, MCU fans love to defend him by saying that the victims of his serial killer spree in Endgame were all criminals, and maybe that’s true, but we still don’t know by what devious methods Clint acquired the Ronin mantle he used to commit those killings, and I’m inclined to believe that Echo might expose truths about him that nobody – least of all Hawkeye’s protégé Kate Bishop – wants to hear.

If Hawkeye continues down this path of deromanticizing the myth of the superhero, it could be revolutionary for the MCU. Kate Bishop in particular would come out the other side having learned some important lessons about the responsibility of heroes to wield their influence wisely, that would serve her well as she steps into a leadership role over the Young Avengers. I don’t know if the show will commit to this idea, because Disney absolutely still wants people to put the Avengers on pedestals and buy all their merchandise, but it’s nice to think about.

And even Kate is more morally gray than I expected. Not quite on the level of Hawkeye murdering people and leaving their bodies in the street, but the show doesn’t pretend that she hasn’t been spoiled all her life by her extraordinarily wealthy mother Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga), who’s secured her a spot in a high-end college and a permanent job at Eleanor’s own security company. Tony Stark also benefited from mind-boggling wealth and nepotism, which the MCU simply never saw as a problem until after his death when The Falcon And The Winter Soldier raised the question of why he never paid the Avengers, but with Kate they could right those wrongs by actually addressing her privilege, and the ways it can be weaponized for good or evil.

We’ll see if the show chooses to double down on any of these themes, or if my reading is completely wrong in the end. What’s more certain is that, as was the case with WandaVision and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier and Loki, these first two episodes are seeded with clues regarding the season’s overarching mystery. There’s always more going on beneath the surface of these shows than what meets the eye at a first glance, and because these mysteries often lead circuitously back to characters that will be significant going forward, we’ve learned to pick up on these clues more quickly and to connect the dots.

Sometimes we’re still completely wrong, and the Mephisto debacle is a testament to what can happen when fans get so wrapped up in theories that they forget to focus on the show itself. But Hawkeye definitely wants us to know that someone relevant was behind the murder of Armand Duquesne (Simon Callow). While it might not have been his suave nephew Jack (Tony Dalton), their family history in the comics is shady nonetheless. Jack is better known as the Swordsman, an identity alluded to when Kate challenges him to a fencing duel in which he only pretends to be unskilled.

But if Jacques didn’t murder Armand, who did? Kate’s mother is a likely candidate. She had motive, surely, although we still don’t know exactly why Armand was threatening to call up his “powerful friends” to deal with her. Echo is another option, and Yelena Belova is supposed to appear in Hawkeye, although I have no idea why she’d want to kill Armand. The name that’s come up among fans is that of the Kingpin, the crime-lord who is Echo’s father figure in the comics and arguably the most prominent street-level villain. He has yet to appear in the MCU, although Vincent D’Onofrio memorably portrayed the role in Netflix’s Daredevil and there is some speculation that he may return to the role.

Thus far, we haven’t been given enough clues to build a compelling argument for or against any of these potential killers, and the murder mystery takes a backseat in episode two while Clint is off investigating the Tracksuit Mafia at a medieval-themed LARP (live-action roleplay) event that is a completely random and boring setting for a scene that drags on pointlessly. The slow pace of both these episodes is a problem, but Renner and Steinfeld have an easy chemistry that helps keep the momentum going, and Steinfeld at least sells all of her solo scenes (the same can’t be said of Renner, who is giving a strangely distant performance when we first reunite with him).

But with some assistance from an adorable dog that loves pizza, Renner and Steinfeld carry the first two episodes of Hawkeye through most of its rougher patches and hopefully won’t have to wait too long before the show finds its footing and rises to the level of Marvel Studios’ other Disney+ shows.

Episodes Rating: 7/10