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The season finale of Marvel’s Hawkeye series is called ‘So This is Christmas?’ and it ends exactly in the most ‘easy’ ways possible — the positives are how it is mostly executed. First the major problems I had — the LARPing thing had its finale moment as something that made little sense, as these first responders (including police officers) delighted in dressing in their outfits and using their fake weapons against real armed mafia goons. Some of the jokes on that, like Clint’s comment, were funny, but ultimately I don’t really feel like the LARP subplot ever got more than a silly joke.
Connected to that is another weird problem, in that there were somehow over a hundred of the tracksuit mafia shooting up a pretty well known New York City landmark — so … there was no security there? Also the endless gunmen showing up felt pretty repetitive, even if there were still some fun action moments as Kate and Clint used their new trick arrows (although the only really ‘fun’ moment was the shrinking truck). Their inherent Stormtrooper-like incompetence ultimately felt like a waste.
In the ‘this seemed a waste’ was everything with the Kingpin, who I guess was killed by Maya? If he was, then it feels more like a publicity stunt and less an interesting story beat, and if he wasn’t, that feels like a cheat. While in the ‘this is clearly setup for later’ (which is a classic MCU problem) both Jack and Eleanor clearly had character moments meant for something later, whatever that is — at least Jack was a consistently entertaining scamp as a character.
Similar to this is the cute little reveal that Laura was actually Agent of SHIELD Mockingbird (they show a watch with ’19’ which is her character’s official number) — sad for Adrianne Palicki who played the same character in the Agents of SHIELD show and is now officially overwritten entirely.
So moving to the ‘it’s not great but I can deal with it’ pieces, I wasn’t pleased that they never really resolved Clint’s past of bloody vengeance except by simply burning the Ronin outfit. That doesn’t really resolve the moral quandary, even if it’s a nice moment. Similarly, the ‘Clint using the secret whistle’ to stop Yelena is a bit of an emotional cheat, relying on knowing that we’ll be affected by it and then the show doesn’t have to get too deep on it.
In the parts that worked though was the acting of the leads, and even Kingpin was still acted in that impeccable way by Vincent D’Onofrio. Florence Pugh gave a lot of great moments in her more interesting characterization than Black Widow, where she was funny, menacing, and in those final moments, highly emotionally affecting.
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Of course Hailee Steinfeld is always great, and I was simply happy that this show gave her so many opportunities to build such a fun, complex character. And old original Hawkeye himself, Jeremy Renner, was giving some of his best work in the MCU movies to date, showing why he was hired in the first place. And yes, it was fun to watch the post-credits song from ‘Rogers: The Musical’.
Overall I’m unfortunately in the ‘expected the finale to be a letdown’ perspective — the show was really very strong until this episode, and I think part of that was how it felt the need to wrap up everything very neatly. In a way, that’s not necessarily a problem for the often uncontained MCU shows, but since we know it isn’t contained, a lot of those wrap ups felt easy or confusing (I still am surprised they killed off or teased killing off Fisk).
This year has shown the release of quite a few Disney Plus Marvel shows, and at this point it’s pretty easy to rank them. Loki goes at the top as something I felt was almost entirely strong, Wandavision was great until the finale, and Hawkeye is just behind that with the same problem. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was pretty messy and What If…? ultimately a bit too inconsistent to rate as high up.
Naturally I’ll always watch anything Hailee Steinfeld is in (I suffered through Pitch Perfect 3) so I’m happy to see her establish a character that’s already well considered in the crowded Marvel universe. Still, I enjoyed the show, even if I think it probably would’ve worked better if it had a bit more time to expand those storylines.
All episodes of Hawkeye are available to stream on Disney Plus.
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