Hawkeye 1x06
Jan. 26th, 2022 09:55 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_reviewsSo I apparently already forgot that I had changed the schedule around. Let's just assume I wanted to finish Hawkeye on Wednesday before committing to the changes. That makes sense right?
Hawkeye 1x06
Hmm. This is kind of a weird episode where I like a lot of the pieces here, but I’m not sure I like it as a whole so much. I guess it’s as though, the further I zoom out, the less I like it. Scene-to-scene a lot of it is really good; as an episode it’s disjointed and trying a little too hard to be on brand for Marvel; and as part of the season as a whole, it doesn’t exactly wrap things up in the best way but I probably still like more than I dislike; taking into account the larger MCU, looking back and forward, I’m not feeling great about it. So I really don’t know where to start reviewing this since I have so many levels of thoughts about what happens here.
Since I can kind of pull my thoughts about Kingpin out of the rest of the jumble, let’s start there. This episode doesn’t really establish him as that big a threat; it tells us he is one, but it doesn’t really show us why he is. For that, you’d have to have watched Daredevil which may or may not be in canon at this point. But if you did watch Daredevil (and I only watched the first season), this is probably a really unsatisfying use of him.
I find it unsatisfying for another reason too. The fact that they pan away from him ‘getting shot’ almost certainly means he’s going to continue to be on the board in other stories. But Clint and Kate definitely act like they know he’s dead and not going to come after them again (or make sure Kate’s mom gets killed in prison for example), which I think would only happen if they had found the body. But because I can read context clues on shows, I’m fairly sure they didn’t find the body, so I find them in a weird spot.
This is kind of what I mean by it getting worse the further you zoom out. As a one episode villain, sure I guess Maya could be the one to take him out in the end if the show is going to be too PG to let one of the heroes do it and too cowardly to deal with the consequences of leaving him alive when he owns so many of the forces in this town. But if he is the big bad of the show, he shouldn’t have been a one episode villain. But on the flip side, it would have just been a distraction and a setup for some other story to have brought him in at the last minute here and then not resolved his part in it.
But if you shift the prism again and view this as a continuation of Daredevil, I can’t imagine this is very satisfying either. Because it doesn’t continue the arcs from there, he’s taken down by a semi-trained newbie instead of any of the heroes he had existing dynamics with; plus a small-fry underling I doubt had even been heard of before.
Shifting the prism again, you have people who are fans of Kingpin from the comics, and I’d be curious how they feel about how he’s done here. Granted, most of them probably fall into the fans of Daredevil camp; but if they didn’t and they were excited to see Daredevil and Kingpin in the full MCU (rather than a vestigial semi-canon side story) I’d be curious how they took this. Because I can’t imagine it was satisfying to them either.
See what I mean when I say I have a lot of thoughts that I can’t seem to get into any sort of order?
This episode had a lot of humor injected into it and I even laughed at a fair bit of it. But I also think it came at the expense of the characters in a lot of situations. Plus, what was up with the owl? I was expecting it to be some kind of shape-shifter with how fake it looked and acted. The effects in this show have not needed to be a strong point so it hasn’t mattered too much, but it’s noticeable here. And apparently humor isn’t their strong suit either; it was trying too hard and injecting it at awkward moments that ruined the mood several times. Bad look, guys.
I suppose I’ll talk a little bit about Yelena, because I don’t think I like Yelena. I don’t know how much of the to blame on the character herself; how much is how the writers seem to think she’s super likable when I don’t agree, or her injection into the backstory of this world where we haven’t actually seen her as part of it before. Again, the last is a problem with the Black Widow story on its own, but this show is continuing to try and pretend like we have a long standing connection to Yelena when we don’t.
If I can get past the fact that the way we’re shown Clint knows the backstory makes no sense (most of the time Clint and Nat knew each other she had no contact with Yelena and hadn’t seen her in decades; and the ‘most of’ is assuming Nat did get the chance to tell Clint about the events of BW following CW), some of their interactions do work. Because Clint dealing with Nat’s death was set up as one of the key things he was dealing with in this series, even if it wasn’t always super well integrated. But again, the flip side of it is that if it was supposed to be a big factor for him, I think he’s underreacting here. Because if Clint does blame himself for Nat’s death, then it should hurt like hell to have Yelena throwing it in his face, even if she has the details wrong. His speech to her at the end is somewhat effective, but it should be a lot more for both characters; as both work to accept what’s happened.
This show really does feel a bit like a full season of TV crammed into a slightly long movie, and it makes some of the stuff at the end feel under-earned. Not just by cramming Yelena and Kingpin into a short story where there wasn’t room for them. I think we should probably have known a little more about the SCA gang to really be invested in them at the end, especially why they think they’ll be more effective in costume than they are as trained first responders. I feel like I ought to be pitying Jack at the end, but the show sticks with treating him as a comic character, even though apparently his relationship with Elanor was genuine. There are too many quick twists in Maya and her boyfriend’s story to really keep track of the loyalties and intentions at play here.
Which brings us to Kate. I liked a lot of her scenes this episode, and on the whole I think Kate’s development this season works more than it doesn’t (though, did she ever have to make a statement about what happened at her apartment?). But the last scene with Elanor doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s something that will be explored in another season, but it feels like the show thinks it’s answered her statement when…it hasn’t. It echoed back to Elanor in the first episode talking about how Kate has been rich and secure her whole life and not really had to face that many consequences and…she’s right. Kate got in over her head in this past week of playing superhero, but she really hasn’t taken on the real challenges of the life.
When the line was said, I didn’t know how the Kingpin situation was going to be resolved, and I thought maybe we were being set up for challenges Kate would have to face from this series of events. It would have been awkward for this series to just be prolog to some other events down the road, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it happened. Like Kingpin probably not being convicted because of all the contacts he supposedly has and all the levers he can turn; and probably the fact that Elanor stood a good chance of being killed because she chose to try and protect Kate. But as is, I don’t see anything currently being done with it.
With the way they have established Kate so far, I think she still has a lot of growing to do. I think she’s going to get hit with a lot of real world problems that she’s never had to deal with before. I’m not saying she won’t be able to rise to the challenges, but I feel like the show is trying to say that she’s already proven she can do anything, and I still see her as very much in the potential stage.
And just as a sidenote that really isn’t about Kate as a character but on the writers continuing to disrespect Tony; Tony is every bit the inspirational superhero that Hawkeye is. Tony is every bit as vulnerable and human as Clint. I actually do get Kate’s point about how it affected her, and how she was able to draw strength from his example; but the writers had better not be saying that Tony is the contrast to Clint in the humanity department. Tony made himself a hero; Kate is more like Tony than she is any of the Avengers, being a spoiled rich kid with the skill set of a gifted but spoiled rich kid. For Tony it was his brain and mechanical skill, for Kate it’s her athleticism and physical ability.
And maybe that’s why I think there’s a lot of milage to get out of Elanor’s assessment of her daughter. Kate’s story so far if about using what she has from a position of strength and stability; not her having to build herself up after the rug has been pulled out from under her. She’s managed that first hurdle well, and I do think she has the ability to take the more difficult path, but we haven’t seen her have to do it yet. She hasn’t rebuilt herself in a cave with a box of scraps yet.
Which leaves us with Clint. Clint also got hit with several of the awkward comedy beats in this episode, and I feel that in a lot of places he was there to serve everyone else’s story instead of having one of his own. But I think the most awkward thing about it is that this doesn’t feel like a passing of the torch ending, it feels like Clint’s getting back in the saddle arc. It feels like he’s put together a new team and now we can see what he and the team do next.
With the prospect of bringing in more of SHIELD next season. Now, as I said a couple eps ago, that Chekhov’s Gun was awkwardly set up and seemed like it was going somewhere, but it didn’t. It’s a Chekhov’s Gun with a couple of blanks in it I suppose. Like I said at the time, I more or less expect it to be connected to Fury, and be part of calling the band together for whatever big event brings everyone in, but I kind of prefer the idea that this is a sneaky backdoor to bring AoS into the mainline MCU canon, the way the show kind of did with Kingpin. I have no idea how you accomplish that at this point, as the Blip didn’t seem to happen in AoS, but it they want to rewind and only consider canon through the end of s5 I’ll play along. Much as I like s6 as its own thing, I’m okay if they make it some kind of in-canon AU (I’ve always said it kind of felt like one), and we could get rid of s7 that way.
Hmm, for once I think my focus says more about how unimportant Clint was to this story rather than how much I’d rather be talking about AoS.
Hawkeye 1x06
Hmm. This is kind of a weird episode where I like a lot of the pieces here, but I’m not sure I like it as a whole so much. I guess it’s as though, the further I zoom out, the less I like it. Scene-to-scene a lot of it is really good; as an episode it’s disjointed and trying a little too hard to be on brand for Marvel; and as part of the season as a whole, it doesn’t exactly wrap things up in the best way but I probably still like more than I dislike; taking into account the larger MCU, looking back and forward, I’m not feeling great about it. So I really don’t know where to start reviewing this since I have so many levels of thoughts about what happens here.
Since I can kind of pull my thoughts about Kingpin out of the rest of the jumble, let’s start there. This episode doesn’t really establish him as that big a threat; it tells us he is one, but it doesn’t really show us why he is. For that, you’d have to have watched Daredevil which may or may not be in canon at this point. But if you did watch Daredevil (and I only watched the first season), this is probably a really unsatisfying use of him.
I find it unsatisfying for another reason too. The fact that they pan away from him ‘getting shot’ almost certainly means he’s going to continue to be on the board in other stories. But Clint and Kate definitely act like they know he’s dead and not going to come after them again (or make sure Kate’s mom gets killed in prison for example), which I think would only happen if they had found the body. But because I can read context clues on shows, I’m fairly sure they didn’t find the body, so I find them in a weird spot.
This is kind of what I mean by it getting worse the further you zoom out. As a one episode villain, sure I guess Maya could be the one to take him out in the end if the show is going to be too PG to let one of the heroes do it and too cowardly to deal with the consequences of leaving him alive when he owns so many of the forces in this town. But if he is the big bad of the show, he shouldn’t have been a one episode villain. But on the flip side, it would have just been a distraction and a setup for some other story to have brought him in at the last minute here and then not resolved his part in it.
But if you shift the prism again and view this as a continuation of Daredevil, I can’t imagine this is very satisfying either. Because it doesn’t continue the arcs from there, he’s taken down by a semi-trained newbie instead of any of the heroes he had existing dynamics with; plus a small-fry underling I doubt had even been heard of before.
Shifting the prism again, you have people who are fans of Kingpin from the comics, and I’d be curious how they feel about how he’s done here. Granted, most of them probably fall into the fans of Daredevil camp; but if they didn’t and they were excited to see Daredevil and Kingpin in the full MCU (rather than a vestigial semi-canon side story) I’d be curious how they took this. Because I can’t imagine it was satisfying to them either.
See what I mean when I say I have a lot of thoughts that I can’t seem to get into any sort of order?
This episode had a lot of humor injected into it and I even laughed at a fair bit of it. But I also think it came at the expense of the characters in a lot of situations. Plus, what was up with the owl? I was expecting it to be some kind of shape-shifter with how fake it looked and acted. The effects in this show have not needed to be a strong point so it hasn’t mattered too much, but it’s noticeable here. And apparently humor isn’t their strong suit either; it was trying too hard and injecting it at awkward moments that ruined the mood several times. Bad look, guys.
I suppose I’ll talk a little bit about Yelena, because I don’t think I like Yelena. I don’t know how much of the to blame on the character herself; how much is how the writers seem to think she’s super likable when I don’t agree, or her injection into the backstory of this world where we haven’t actually seen her as part of it before. Again, the last is a problem with the Black Widow story on its own, but this show is continuing to try and pretend like we have a long standing connection to Yelena when we don’t.
If I can get past the fact that the way we’re shown Clint knows the backstory makes no sense (most of the time Clint and Nat knew each other she had no contact with Yelena and hadn’t seen her in decades; and the ‘most of’ is assuming Nat did get the chance to tell Clint about the events of BW following CW), some of their interactions do work. Because Clint dealing with Nat’s death was set up as one of the key things he was dealing with in this series, even if it wasn’t always super well integrated. But again, the flip side of it is that if it was supposed to be a big factor for him, I think he’s underreacting here. Because if Clint does blame himself for Nat’s death, then it should hurt like hell to have Yelena throwing it in his face, even if she has the details wrong. His speech to her at the end is somewhat effective, but it should be a lot more for both characters; as both work to accept what’s happened.
This show really does feel a bit like a full season of TV crammed into a slightly long movie, and it makes some of the stuff at the end feel under-earned. Not just by cramming Yelena and Kingpin into a short story where there wasn’t room for them. I think we should probably have known a little more about the SCA gang to really be invested in them at the end, especially why they think they’ll be more effective in costume than they are as trained first responders. I feel like I ought to be pitying Jack at the end, but the show sticks with treating him as a comic character, even though apparently his relationship with Elanor was genuine. There are too many quick twists in Maya and her boyfriend’s story to really keep track of the loyalties and intentions at play here.
Which brings us to Kate. I liked a lot of her scenes this episode, and on the whole I think Kate’s development this season works more than it doesn’t (though, did she ever have to make a statement about what happened at her apartment?). But the last scene with Elanor doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s something that will be explored in another season, but it feels like the show thinks it’s answered her statement when…it hasn’t. It echoed back to Elanor in the first episode talking about how Kate has been rich and secure her whole life and not really had to face that many consequences and…she’s right. Kate got in over her head in this past week of playing superhero, but she really hasn’t taken on the real challenges of the life.
When the line was said, I didn’t know how the Kingpin situation was going to be resolved, and I thought maybe we were being set up for challenges Kate would have to face from this series of events. It would have been awkward for this series to just be prolog to some other events down the road, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it happened. Like Kingpin probably not being convicted because of all the contacts he supposedly has and all the levers he can turn; and probably the fact that Elanor stood a good chance of being killed because she chose to try and protect Kate. But as is, I don’t see anything currently being done with it.
With the way they have established Kate so far, I think she still has a lot of growing to do. I think she’s going to get hit with a lot of real world problems that she’s never had to deal with before. I’m not saying she won’t be able to rise to the challenges, but I feel like the show is trying to say that she’s already proven she can do anything, and I still see her as very much in the potential stage.
And just as a sidenote that really isn’t about Kate as a character but on the writers continuing to disrespect Tony; Tony is every bit the inspirational superhero that Hawkeye is. Tony is every bit as vulnerable and human as Clint. I actually do get Kate’s point about how it affected her, and how she was able to draw strength from his example; but the writers had better not be saying that Tony is the contrast to Clint in the humanity department. Tony made himself a hero; Kate is more like Tony than she is any of the Avengers, being a spoiled rich kid with the skill set of a gifted but spoiled rich kid. For Tony it was his brain and mechanical skill, for Kate it’s her athleticism and physical ability.
And maybe that’s why I think there’s a lot of milage to get out of Elanor’s assessment of her daughter. Kate’s story so far if about using what she has from a position of strength and stability; not her having to build herself up after the rug has been pulled out from under her. She’s managed that first hurdle well, and I do think she has the ability to take the more difficult path, but we haven’t seen her have to do it yet. She hasn’t rebuilt herself in a cave with a box of scraps yet.
Which leaves us with Clint. Clint also got hit with several of the awkward comedy beats in this episode, and I feel that in a lot of places he was there to serve everyone else’s story instead of having one of his own. But I think the most awkward thing about it is that this doesn’t feel like a passing of the torch ending, it feels like Clint’s getting back in the saddle arc. It feels like he’s put together a new team and now we can see what he and the team do next.
With the prospect of bringing in more of SHIELD next season. Now, as I said a couple eps ago, that Chekhov’s Gun was awkwardly set up and seemed like it was going somewhere, but it didn’t. It’s a Chekhov’s Gun with a couple of blanks in it I suppose. Like I said at the time, I more or less expect it to be connected to Fury, and be part of calling the band together for whatever big event brings everyone in, but I kind of prefer the idea that this is a sneaky backdoor to bring AoS into the mainline MCU canon, the way the show kind of did with Kingpin. I have no idea how you accomplish that at this point, as the Blip didn’t seem to happen in AoS, but it they want to rewind and only consider canon through the end of s5 I’ll play along. Much as I like s6 as its own thing, I’m okay if they make it some kind of in-canon AU (I’ve always said it kind of felt like one), and we could get rid of s7 that way.
Hmm, for once I think my focus says more about how unimportant Clint was to this story rather than how much I’d rather be talking about AoS.
