Hawkeye 1x01
Dec. 22nd, 2021 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsWell, how about I post this first review before the show is quite finished. I'm slightly with the times, right?
Okay, I had in my head that this didn’t start until mid-December, so I was caught a bit on the backfoot when it started earlier. I wasn’t really ready for another Marvel show right away; and that’s partially what I get for dragging my feet on What If; but it’s also on TPTB for not having built up my excitement for new Marvel shows so that I need to watch as soon as they’re out.
I find myself at a bit of a quandary starting this one. On one hand, I haven’t been all that into any of the MCU shows this year, so I’m not real hopeful that I will like this one. On the other hand, I am actually a little optimistic here. Clint is character that I don’t think has enough development to be done wrong at this point; but there is stuff that they can do with him. There’s stuff they need to do with him after where he was at the end of Endgame; and I feel like you can’t continue his story without dealing with those things.
But then I remember that the morals these shows have been espousing have been terrible and I’m not very confident this will break the trend. Well, no way to know but to give it a shot I suppose.
Hawkeye: 1x01
Well, I would say that so far this show’s worst crimes are being slow and decompressed; but then I remember that the real problems in these shows usually do take a while to show up.
That said, I can see where a lot of people are going to be frustrated from the start. I’m not a huge fan of Clint, and I went in expecting this to be a passing of the torch series; but people who want it to be Clint’s story are likely already disappointed with how things are going. I almost wish this episode hadn’t had Clint in it until the end, then we could back up and see his story next episode or something, but I’m not real sure that would have worked either.
I think a lot of people are going to be put off by both how much narrative attention Kate gets, and if people are already feeling frustrated, it could easily push them into Mary Sue claims. Because she near the border of that even for me, I’m just not willing to go there with only one episode to judge from. We are shown and told that she’s been training for much of her life at various combat skills and it is shown that she still has room to improve. But even in that she seems a touch…carefully constructed to try and avoid Mary Sue status without actually making her a fully fleshed out character.
And that’s where I come back to the slow pacing of this episode. Because it would be one thing if the episode was so slow but we were getting a lot of character, but I don’t think we do. We get a passable amount of character as far as I’m concerned, and it has the potential to be expanded into real character work, but the lack of character is part of what makes the episode feel so slow. It's a slow character piece with plot going on in the background, except it didn’t inject enough character to earn that label.
When I say I kind of wish Clint hadn’t been in this episode, it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing with him. I’m not sure why he would have gone to the Rogers musical in the first place, I don’t know how he expected that to go well. But his reaction to it is well done (I do wish there had been a little more acknowledgement that Tony and Steve are also not around anymore; it does make sense that Nat gets the biggest reaction from him, for a variety of reasons, but this could have been weird for Clint is a lot of ways).
(I feel like there’s probably a meta about creating in-universe media based on prior canon events. Unlike real life, the original events were scripted, so it’s easy to create a narrative from the events that follows the beats of hero’s journey for example. When trying to make a biopic in real life, the writer has to reshape events so they happen in a way that follows a narrative, but in-universe those narrative beats were ‘real’ for them. Basically, I’m considering a kind of Maria von Trapp situation, who said of The Sound of Music something to the effect of ‘it’s a wonderful story, but it’s not mine.’ I’m not saying I want the in-universe play to be wrong and presented as some kind of revisionist history, but it’s kind of interesting to think about how much easier it is to tell a story of the in-universe events that on a meta level already were a story. …I know what I’m saying, but I’m not sure I’m saying it well.)
I am a bit confused as to what people know and don’t know about Clint being Ronin. As this episode shows in flashback, he wasn’t exactly hiding his identity terribly well during that time. While I can mostly buy that it wasn’t *well* known, and that Nat and Rhodey were putting pieces together than not everyone was, I’m not entirely sure I can buy that there aren’t other people who have worked it out. Especially with his stuff being found at the Avengers compound apparently; if nothing else there ought to be questions about what the Avengers’ connection to Ronin was.
But I do like that what draws him out seems to be the idea of someone else being Ronin. Either that person is inspired to be the same killer that Clint was and therefore they should be stopped; and/or they’re going to become a target of everyone Clint pissed off while he was being Ronin. I hope that will be further developed as we go forward, but it is there enough to sustain this episode.
What has me the most worried is that the fight scene is the worst part of this episode (which was pretty mediocre at a lot of other points). And that was also a reaction I had to the pilot of FatWS. I really don’t want this show to be another FatWS, where the more I think about it the worse it gets.
Although, on consideration, I may have very little feeling about Clint going into this, but at least he’s not fuck you Steve Rogers.
Okay, I had in my head that this didn’t start until mid-December, so I was caught a bit on the backfoot when it started earlier. I wasn’t really ready for another Marvel show right away; and that’s partially what I get for dragging my feet on What If; but it’s also on TPTB for not having built up my excitement for new Marvel shows so that I need to watch as soon as they’re out.
I find myself at a bit of a quandary starting this one. On one hand, I haven’t been all that into any of the MCU shows this year, so I’m not real hopeful that I will like this one. On the other hand, I am actually a little optimistic here. Clint is character that I don’t think has enough development to be done wrong at this point; but there is stuff that they can do with him. There’s stuff they need to do with him after where he was at the end of Endgame; and I feel like you can’t continue his story without dealing with those things.
But then I remember that the morals these shows have been espousing have been terrible and I’m not very confident this will break the trend. Well, no way to know but to give it a shot I suppose.
Hawkeye: 1x01
Well, I would say that so far this show’s worst crimes are being slow and decompressed; but then I remember that the real problems in these shows usually do take a while to show up.
That said, I can see where a lot of people are going to be frustrated from the start. I’m not a huge fan of Clint, and I went in expecting this to be a passing of the torch series; but people who want it to be Clint’s story are likely already disappointed with how things are going. I almost wish this episode hadn’t had Clint in it until the end, then we could back up and see his story next episode or something, but I’m not real sure that would have worked either.
I think a lot of people are going to be put off by both how much narrative attention Kate gets, and if people are already feeling frustrated, it could easily push them into Mary Sue claims. Because she near the border of that even for me, I’m just not willing to go there with only one episode to judge from. We are shown and told that she’s been training for much of her life at various combat skills and it is shown that she still has room to improve. But even in that she seems a touch…carefully constructed to try and avoid Mary Sue status without actually making her a fully fleshed out character.
And that’s where I come back to the slow pacing of this episode. Because it would be one thing if the episode was so slow but we were getting a lot of character, but I don’t think we do. We get a passable amount of character as far as I’m concerned, and it has the potential to be expanded into real character work, but the lack of character is part of what makes the episode feel so slow. It's a slow character piece with plot going on in the background, except it didn’t inject enough character to earn that label.
When I say I kind of wish Clint hadn’t been in this episode, it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing with him. I’m not sure why he would have gone to the Rogers musical in the first place, I don’t know how he expected that to go well. But his reaction to it is well done (I do wish there had been a little more acknowledgement that Tony and Steve are also not around anymore; it does make sense that Nat gets the biggest reaction from him, for a variety of reasons, but this could have been weird for Clint is a lot of ways).
(I feel like there’s probably a meta about creating in-universe media based on prior canon events. Unlike real life, the original events were scripted, so it’s easy to create a narrative from the events that follows the beats of hero’s journey for example. When trying to make a biopic in real life, the writer has to reshape events so they happen in a way that follows a narrative, but in-universe those narrative beats were ‘real’ for them. Basically, I’m considering a kind of Maria von Trapp situation, who said of The Sound of Music something to the effect of ‘it’s a wonderful story, but it’s not mine.’ I’m not saying I want the in-universe play to be wrong and presented as some kind of revisionist history, but it’s kind of interesting to think about how much easier it is to tell a story of the in-universe events that on a meta level already were a story. …I know what I’m saying, but I’m not sure I’m saying it well.)
I am a bit confused as to what people know and don’t know about Clint being Ronin. As this episode shows in flashback, he wasn’t exactly hiding his identity terribly well during that time. While I can mostly buy that it wasn’t *well* known, and that Nat and Rhodey were putting pieces together than not everyone was, I’m not entirely sure I can buy that there aren’t other people who have worked it out. Especially with his stuff being found at the Avengers compound apparently; if nothing else there ought to be questions about what the Avengers’ connection to Ronin was.
But I do like that what draws him out seems to be the idea of someone else being Ronin. Either that person is inspired to be the same killer that Clint was and therefore they should be stopped; and/or they’re going to become a target of everyone Clint pissed off while he was being Ronin. I hope that will be further developed as we go forward, but it is there enough to sustain this episode.
What has me the most worried is that the fight scene is the worst part of this episode (which was pretty mediocre at a lot of other points). And that was also a reaction I had to the pilot of FatWS. I really don’t want this show to be another FatWS, where the more I think about it the worse it gets.
Although, on consideration, I may have very little feeling about Clint going into this, but at least he’s not fuck you Steve Rogers.
