Main cast: Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Hailee Steinfeld (Kate Bishop), Alaqua Cox (Maya Lopez), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova), Vera Farmiga (Eleanor Bishop), Tony Dalton (Jack Duquesne), Fra Fee (Kazi), Aleks Paunovic (Ivan), Linda Cardellini (Laura Barton), and Vincent D’Onofrio (Kingpin)
Directors: Bert and Bertie
Let’s recap the pointlessness of the MCU Disney+ shows so far, shall we? WandaVision ended up being a pointless detour that served only to advertise the upcoming Captain Marvel and the Supremes movie. Loki ended up being a season-long teaser for season two and an introduction for another main villain that will show up in some other upcoming MCU movie. Who knows what Falcon and the Winter Soldier was meant to do, aside from embarrassing everyone involved in it.
As for Hawkeye, well, it’s meant to introduce Kate Bishop and another villain that, coupled to Matt Murdoch’s cameo in the recent Spider-Man movie, means that yay, watch out for the next season of Kate doing Kate stuff and the upcoming Daredevil movie!
Consoom, realize that you’ve consume actually nothing of substance, but keep consooming anyway because Disney wants you to.
So yes, Ronin introduces Kingpin.
I’ve practiced my surprised Pikachu face for a while now so let me try to put on that expression now.
Sure, Disney made a fuss a while back about how Charlie Cox is going to take up the mantle of Daredevil again—no complaints from me, because we can never have too much Cox around here—and that coincided with that cameo in that movie, and since Disney doesn’t do anything without premeditation and generous bribery, I mean, cooperation with the mainstream media to promote their products, color me stunned that Kingpin shows up in this show.
Casting Vincent D’Onofrio in that role is pretty obvious but hey, talented actors are always needed to elevate derivative materials, so I have complaints there too. Well, he’s kind of skinny for someone like Kingpin, though—unless he puts on a lot of weight fast, something tells me he’s going to get canceled by the fat women movement soon.
As for this episode, eh. Mini-Black Widow and Kate have a girl on girl, but who cares because they are both women, and in the new MCU, women can’t be bruised, take defeat, or have even a single strand of hair tousled or make-up smudged even a little despite having gone through an allegedly strenuous fight. We celebrate the strength of women by giving them plot armor so thick and obvious that they come off like infants, but hey, patronizing condescension is the new wave of corporate feminism, you know.
Mini-Black Widow meets her family but eh, who cares. She and Kate are the same archetype, and putting them in the same scene makes that painfully obvious. There is only one kind of spunky strong female lead in MCU these days, apparently, and that’s sad.
She holds a grudge against Clint because… reasons? She seems angry that Clint lives while her sister didn’t, but there aren’t many answers to be had on that one. Well, it doesn’t matter, as Clint is leaving the MCU soon anyway, aside from perhaps some cameo now and then in whatever show Kate may have in the future. Again, who cares.
Hawkeye has family issues. Who cares. We all know he’s going to leave the MCU anyway because he’s an icky straight white man, so there is no place left for him in the new MCU anymore. Plus, Jeremy Renner looks so bored that he’s probably threatened to slash his wrists if those folks somehow decided that his character should remain in the MCU after coming out as a non-binary, genderqueer, lesbian trans woman.
Kate and Hawkeye have the usual “partners have a tiff” thing that every buddy movie needs to have. Again, who cares. We all know Kate Bishop is going to be the new Hawkeye moving forward, so that creature isn’t going anywhere.
Maya Lopez bonds with Hawkeye and Kate. I’ll pretend to have never heard Disney bragging that this character is getting her own spin-off show soon and act surprised… oh never mind, I’m not that great an actor.
Oh, and the twist at the end, ooh! Could Kate’s mother be the whole mastermind behind the whole non-consequential plot? Well, there’s one more episode left so… who cares? I’ll find out soon and then forget about this show.
Disney really should stop spoiling their own shows in advance and give me so little reason to care when the episodes actually air. We’ve gone past poor marketing and are neck-deep in Disney self-sabotaging themselves now by treating their shows as cocaine being sold to junkies.
