Hawkeye S01E04 Review: Guest-Starring...

Hawkeye, Season 1, Episode 4: Partners, Am I Right?

A bit less action-packed compared to its preceding episode, and one that feels to be mostly setup. In a vacuum, the episode could be handwaved as 'it's the one where the two partners get into a fight, setting up the big emotional reunion in the pre-finale episode'. Which is exactly what this is -- unless episodes 5-6 really try and pull some Loki-level plot twist. Of course, Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld's chemistry and their mentor/mentee dynamic works so well that I'm actually genuinely invested in their pseudo-surrogate-parent relationship. 

The huge cliffhanger from the previous episode with Swordsman fighting against the Hawkeyes surprisingly doesn't pan out too much and ends in a civil discussion... which initially led me to believe that they might just be saving Jack Duquesne for the next season. And I kind of want them to, since we have two very active antagonists by the end of this episode. But while Clint bows out of the Bishop family drama, he gets his wife Laura to look into Jack Duquesne, and she finds out that Kate's actually right, and he is actually shady. Just to rub this point in a bit more, we even have a scene where Kate, Eleanor and Jack actually do begin to bond over them making fun of Jack's inability to say idioms properly. 

The middle part of the episode is admittedly a bit bland, with the comedy bits not all landing quite as well -- though I really, really did enjoy Kate deciding to spend her Christmas trying to get Clint to have fun a little. She sets up a movie marathon and gets them a pair of ugly sweaters because Clint's missing the same activities with his own children... and, hey, Kate's basically, like I said, his pseudo-child at this point. It's adorable as all hell, and Clint even begins to be a bit vulnerable, confiding to Kate how he first met Black Widow; as well as teaching her how to do a little coin flip trick thing. I do like the more serious moment, too, where Kate just asks Clint about whether he is Ronin, which Clint confirms. Again, I can totally see a version of this show where this scene just plain doesn't work. 

The LARP-er scene... eh. I did like the one-off joke in the second episode, and while it's funny to see Kate interact with them in a much more positive manner than Clint did, it's also rather obvious distraction to pad things out before the third act of this episode. I tend to not mind such subplots in these superhero shows, but this one felt particularly egregious considering how tightly-plotted these Disney+ shows have been. 

And then we get the huge action scene. Between Clint and Kate bickering about exit and entrance strategies, they find out that Echo has been researching Clint and making a hit list about his family. We also learn that the watch from the first episode is actually important, Clint and Laura know about it, and Echo has it in her apartment. It's... it's a bit off, admittedly, why the Hawkeyes treat this as a huge revelation, but then we have the huge fight. Kate Bishop fights Echo, while Clint Barton fights against a mysterious assailant with glowing goggles... and it's Yelena Belova!

(The revelation might take people who haven't watched Black Widow off-guards, but as someone who blogs about these things, I really don't care too much about people complaining that a comic-book show has comic-book-style guest stars -- regardless, I'm confident that the show will recap who Yelena is as needed.)

The fight scene is admittedly nowhere as impressive or flashy as any of the fight scenes in episode 3 -- though part of it might be because Maya, Clint and Yelena are all dressed in black on the rooftop. I do really like the flashier tricks that Yelena pulls in the fight, and while the discussion about Natasha earlier in the episode does kind of make her appearance here a bit predictable, it's still a pretty cool sequence. 

The whole Black Widow thing also ends up having Clint flashback to Natasha's death in Vormir, which the show very unsubtly delivers a flashback when Clint has to hold Kate in the same way he did Natasha. And it's a better reason than most to have the whole 'grizzled hero tells plucky young partner to fuck off' storyline to occur. It's definitely well-done, and I really like Clint basically shutting down any notion that he's a hero -- he's a 'weapon aimed by people who aimed [him] at the bad guys'. Again, a pretty cool episode all around -- Hawkeye's more grounded and relatively standalone story does feel like a breath of fresh air I didn't know I need. Definitely looking forward to see how the show concludes it. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• The 'boomerang arrow' discussion is taken from Hawkeye #3 from the 2012 run, the same one that inspired the previous episode, albeit with the roles reversed.. That argument is one of the trick arrow arguments in the car chase in that issue; with the boomerang arrow being the useless arrow that saved the day there. 
• Kate also wears a Laika shirt in the first issue of Hawkeye 2012. 
• Wendy Conrad is the supervillain Bombshell in the comics -- here, she's just a LARP-er, and 'Bombshell' is instead a nickname from her wife. 
• Yelena Belova, a.k.a. Black Widow II, returns hunting Clint Barton after the events of Black Widow's post-credits scene. MCU Black Widow and Hawkeye's first meeting were explored in The Avengers and Black Widow. 
• Yelena's night goggles is a reference to her modern-day costume seen in Thunderbolts, which features five of them.
• Another 'Thanos was right' meme-acknowledgement takes place with a mug.