Hawkeye’s finale occasionally hits the mark

Photo: Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios

Six episodes in, Hawkeye has emerged as a show with very specific strengths and weaknesses. It’s good at character and comedy. It’s bad at plot and coherent morality. That makes this action-packed finale a real mix of highs and lows, as Hawkeye ties together its many dangling threads to wildly varying degrees of success. While much of “So This Is Christmas?” is fun to watch in the moment, it doesn’t retroactively elevate the season’s weaker throughlines in the way I was hoping it would. On the other hand, it does deliver a four-minute post-credits musical number as a holiday treat from Marvel Studios, so I can’t be entirely mad at it either.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. While Hawkeye once presented itself as a sort of mystery box to be unraveled, here plot points just kind of roll out with a thud. As we learn in a particularly clunky opening scene, Eleanor first got involved with crime to pay off her dead husband’s debts but found herself addicted to the luxurious lifestyle and protection it gave her family, which is why she was willing to kill Armand and frame Jack to keep it. And while those are slightly weird choices for someone whose next move is to try to quit crime altogether, the bigger misstep is how little emotional weight they carry.

Given how much this series has been anchored around Kate’s desire to be a hero, you’d think the reveal that her mom is a murdering mafia stooge would have slightly more impact on her. But it’s strangely underplayed. My guess is that Hawkeye started life as a show that was meant to be much more focused on Kate and her family before wider MCU additions like Yelena and Wilson Fisk wound up pushing the Bishop family throughline to the margins. Because while there are interesting parallels to be found in the way that Kate and Eleanor dealt with the trauma of the Battle of New York by taking opposite paths to try to protect each other, Hawkeye unfortunately isn’t interested in teasing them out.

There’s a similar problem with Maya, a character who’s gotten a substantial amount of screentime this season but never quite popped the way the show clearly wanted her to. Though Maya was introduced as the character who would hold Clint accountable for the murderous vigilante justice he doled out as the Ronin (remember all those sweet scenes with her dad??), here her story pivots away from Clint entirely. Instead this episode positions her in a moral triangle with Kazi and Kingpin, which could’ve been a satisfying payoff for a season of television that put those three characters front and center, but certainly isn’t one for the season we just watched.

Indeed, Hawkeye’s decision to bring in Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk as a major player in this finale only to (seemingly) kill him off seems tailor-made to leave just about everyone unsatisfied. Those who didn’t watch Daredevil will be wondering why this random heavy is given so much focus yet so little backstory here. Meanwhile, those who were excited to have the character back will almost certainly be unhappy about how unceremoniously he’s taken out by Maya.

Of course, leaving his death offscreen gives Marvel wiggle room to bring him back again if they want to. (A spin-off series for Maya is already in development.) But other than the fun of seeing D’Onofrio give his great physically intimidating yet emotionally stunted take on Kingpin again, pretty much everything about how Fisk is handled here is underbaked. The same goes for the way this episode pivots away from the Ronin throughline almost entirely only to briefly return to it in a final scene where Kate and Clint burn the Ronin suit. So… trauma healed and murders forgiven, I guess?

Admittedly, that’s a lot of complaints about an episode I didn’t actually have a bad time watching. Part of that is because this action-packed hour doesn’t leave much downtime to contemplate its plot weaknesses in between all the explosive fun. While the action here isn’t as good as that incredible escape/chase sequence back in “Echoes” (and while the episode sometimes struggles to blend violence and dark comedy in the way it wants too), it’s mostly a good time. Kate and Yelena’s Princess Bride-style respectful friend fight is particularly charming. Meanwhile, Kate having to literally rescue Clint from a tree is a great, absurdist touch.

And while this finale has a strange amount of hand-to-hand combat for a show about two archers (not to mention an almost comically endless stream of goons), it nicely elevates Kate and Clint’s dynamic into a real, purposeful partnership—one where they are actively, rather than haphazardly, working together. Kate never loses her insane “leap before you look” mentality, just as Clint never loses his “I’m too old for this shit” attitude. But that’s exactly what makes them such a solid fit as partners. Their sweet post-battle conversation by the ambulance offers a perfect mix of wry comedy and earnestness that does feel like fitting season-long payoff for the show’s central relationship.

Which finally brings me to my favorite thing about this finale and probably my favorite thing about this series as a whole: The seriousness with which it treats the death of the last person Clint considered a true crimefighting partner, Natasha Romanoff. It’s something Endgame didn’t do in its rush to center Tony’s sacrifice above all else. And it’s something her own solo film elided with a random midquel side quest that was mostly focused on introducing other characters. Here, however, Nat’s death finally matters. And as someone who’s deeply invested in Black Widow as a character (and particularly invested in her friendship with Clint), I found it genuinely emotional to watch Clint and Yelena (literally) fight through the pain and trauma of losing her.

One thing Marvel has always excelled at is using tiny beats to flesh out the depth of Clint and Nat’s friendship. And that’s exactly what this episode does when Clint deploys the Romanoff/Belova secret sister whistle as a way to let Yelena know just how close he actually was with Nat. “She talked about you all the time,’’ absolutely destroyed me. “You got so much time with her,” somehow topped it. So even though it does sort of feel like halfway through the season the writers realized the Black Widow stuff should swap places with the Ronin stuff as the major emotional throughline of the season, the clumsiness was worth it for the poignancy of the Clint/Yelena scene. Clint bringing home Kate as a “stray” for Christmas fills the hole that was left in her life by her mom’s heel turn. But it also helps fill the hole in his life that was left by Natasha’s death too.

So where does that leave Hawkeye as a whole? Like pretty much all of these Marvel Disney+ shows (even WandaVision, which was probably the best of the bunch), it was a series that never quite lived up to its potential. Still, despite some obvious missteps and plot clunkiness, I had a lot of fun spending time in its comedic, holiday-themed corner of the MCU. It’s a series that was helped along by its lower stakes and hang-out vibes, and one I’d happily return to if we do wind up getting a second season. Of course, I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I was already a Hawkeye fan going in. But I suspect our Hawkguy and his new partner managed to earn some new admirers along the way too.

Stray observations

• It’s funny that there was such a buildup to Kate and Clint getting their new costumes when almost all of the show’s marketing already featured them in those purple suits.
• Given how much the missing Rolex winds up being a “Laura Barton was part of S.H.I.E.L.D.!” Easter egg, I think it was a mistake to position it as such a central mystery back in “Partners, Am I Right?” (Also, what was up with Linda Cardellini’s schedule that she seemingly had to be green screened into all of those scenes at the end?)
• I also think it was a mistake to make the LARPers first responders, which feels like putting a hat on a hat of the “anyone can be a hero!” theme of the season.
• On the other hand, it did give us Jeremy Renner’s incredible half-laughing delivery of “We’re all gonna die.”
• While Jack Duquesne never quite paid off as a character (we barely even saw his reaction to Eleanor being evil!), Tony Dalton’s delightfully off-kilter performance totally won me over by the end. I’d watch his spinoff show in  a heartbeat.
• R.I.P. Kazi. You died as you lived: With a very unclear relationship to Maya.
• Thanks for following along with this season of reviews! I also covered Loki, if you’d like to check out those recaps. Or you can find me over on Twitter for more sporadic Marvel opinions.