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The latest episode of Hawkeye is called ‘Ronin’ and reinforces the dangerous consequences of Clint’s time as the hooded vigilante during the Blip. We get clarification and confirmation related to that and the Yelena timeline finally, as we sit through with her as she is snapped and then suddenly returned. It’s the first time we have a first person POV on the snap and it’s appropriately bewildering and off-putting.
Thus all is explained in terms of Ronin and Yelena — Natasha lost her sister as well as everyone else previously seen lost, so she may not have explained everything to Clint about their backstory, or at least not enough to show a photo as Clint didn’t seem to recognize her. Clint recognized the name when Kate mentioned ‘Natasha’s sister’ so he certainly was aware of who she is — but it also tracks that he had no reason to think about catching up with Yelena since he was out of the game by that point.
And on her end, Yelena likely didn’t really know the truth about Natasha’s sacrifice as it’s almost certainly highly protected information. We find out at the end of the episode about the truth behind Yelena’s targeting of Clint — after Kate put a thought in Yelena’s head about who cared enough to hire her — and it indeed was (shocker) Kate’s secretly (or not) evil mother Eleanor.
Exactly how Eleanor connected to the big (a pun) reveal at the end of the episode that she’s working with ‘Kingpin’ (Vincent D’Onofrio reprising the character in some way, if likely different from the one he did on the Netflix Marvel show Daredevil) or how either is connected to the mysterious Val that misled Yelena about Clint at the end of Black Widow is one of the still lingering unknowns of the show. Yelena’s note about continuing her work like she was trained is an interesting mirroring of the ‘weapon’ back and forth between Clint and Maya.
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Clint makes an attempt to keep Maya from forcing them to actually fight to the death with that bon mot, but perhaps a better dent is made that he only found her father due to an informant. And naturally, Maya immediately suspects Kazi, who certainly acts shady about it so he’s probably the snitch. If not, it does seem like a pointless misdirect.
The fight between them is a pretty well choreographed affair, one of the highlights of the episode along with the entire scene between Yelena and Kate. Hailee Steinfeld and Florence Pugh already have great chemistry between them, and the scene was so well handled, so you know the Internet is demanding team-ups of every salient variety from the two of them. Florence Pugh did a great job of demonstrating her menacing danger despite her diminutive height (Hailee has at least four inches on her) but of course I always think Hailee is one of the best in any room.
In general the episode felt one of the stronger ones, balancing comedy, drama, action and dialogue well, and even throwing us some answers to the mysteries (we still don’t know what’s up with Laura, for example). It’s actually a potentially problematic situation, because it’s putting a lot of pressure on the finale episode to pay everything off. When I compare all of the finales of these Disney Plus shows this year, Loki was by far the best, WandaVision was super muddled (good and bad), What If…? mostly satisfying, and Falcon and Winter Soldier was even more mixed than WandaVision.
All that aside, I think this show has really done a great job so far of (a) introducing Kate as a compelling character, (b) rounding up and following up on Clint’s backstory, (c) expanding on Natasha’s connection to everyone, and (d) paying off mysteries that aren’t that painful to deal with. So I’m hopeful they pull it off.
New episodes of Hawkeye stream Wednesdays on Disney Plus.
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