Hawkeye Spoiler Recap: Partners, Am I Right?
by Arezou
This week Hawkeye’s fourth episode “Partners, Am I Right?” shocked viewers with a stunning, blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
That’s right. The 1980 Star Wars Christmas album Christmas In The Stars is canon in the MCU. And it was brought to us courtesy of our friends the LARPers.
Now that you’ve recovered from that stunning revelation, let’s take it back just a little, and pick up where we left off last week: with Jack Dusquene holding the Ronin sword right to Clint’s throat. Despite this being the cliffhanger on which they chose to end the episode last week, the situation is actually diffused fairly quickly when both Kate and Eleanor arrive to see what’s going on.
Though on the surface, Eleanor doesn’t appear to mind her daughter is working with an Avenger, it’s another story once she gets Clint alone. She tells him that she’s already lost loved ones before, and appeals to Clint’s parental sensibilities. Eleanor might be willfully obtuse when it comes to her fiancé, but it’s obvious she loves her daughter very much.
Rather than helping her mother plan the company Christmas party after Clint leaves - Ronin sword now firmly in hand after sneaking it out - Kate instead heads back to her and Clint’s safe house, pizza and Christmas decorations in hand to help him make the best of the holidays since he can’t be with his family just yet.
Clint tells Kate that the Tracksuit Mafia answers ultimately to Jack, which he figured out with help from his wife Laura (the woefully underutilized Linda Cardellini), and together they strategize to come up with their next steps. Before they can proceed, Clint tells Kate he needs his arrows back from where they’re being held by the NYPD. Fortunately, he has a friend on the police force: one of the LARPers from the second episode.
I was honestly glad to see the LARPers make a return, and actually be instrumental to the plot. It didn’t sit well with me that a Marvel property, something that inherently relied on in-depth nerdiness to fuel its popularity over the last 22 years, would poke fun at such a well-known expression of geekdom. For what it’s worth, I find the LARPers endearing, and of everyone in the MCU they’re the ones I would probably like to hang out with the most, realistically. Yeah, the other characters are cool, but I have a much higher chance of walking away from a party with the LARPers with my life and all my bones intact, so there’s that.
The first step in Kate and Clint’s mission is to track down the Rolex watch taken from the black market auction. According to Clint, it belonged to a friend of his, and contains very important data pertaining to their location. The way he says “friend” makes me think it’s someone we already know, and the way he is still worried about compromising their cover makes me think it definitely isn’t Natasha. Which begs the question: other than her, who are Hawkeye’s friends? He isn’t exactly Mr. Personality.
Kate breaks into the apartment where the watch is transmitting from and finds it with little problem, save for some strange strobe lights that go off as soon as she walks in. The lights, Clint informs her, are an alarm for those who can’t hear. The apartment is Maya’s and she is less than pleased to find Kate there. The two of them fight, eventually joining Clint and his mysterious, masked assailant on a rooftop.
Maya flees after Kate injures her, and the masked fighter reveals herself to be none other than Natasha’s sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who leaps off the rooftop without a word, bringing the episode to a close.
There were two reoccurring motifs throughout the episode. The first was the question of whether or not Kate and Clint are partners. She believes they are, while he becomes increasingly adamant that they aren’t. Of the two revisited concepts in this episode, this one was the least interesting to me. The trope of grumpy old curmudgeon resisting the help of the young person who idolizes them is overdone. The worst thing about it is it doesn’t have to be this way. We know why he’s hesitant to bring Kate more into the fold. He is a father who knows what it’s like to lose his children, and he promised Kate’s mother he would keep her safe. But Kate is not a child. She is 22 years old, and more than capable of understanding his hesitation. Clint has demonstrably seen that the more he pushes Kate away, the more she pushes back. This is all going to come to a completely avoidable head.
The other reoccurring motif, and the far more interesting one, is that of loss. For the first time, Eleanor mentions, albeit indirectly, the way she lost her husband. Clint’s grief over Natasha’s death is revisited in this episode, and he even opens up a little to Kate about how they originally met. He also tells her he lost everyone in the Blip. While Kate is very sympathetic to his plight, this is the part that fell a little flat, perhaps because I’ve never really liked Hawkeye as a character. I’ve also never really liked that his first inclination on losing his family - but not, I should point out, his best friend - was to go on a massive killing spree in foreign countries. He makes a halfhearted attempt to acknowledge how bad this is, saying he was trained to “hurt people” but that barely scratches the surface. I’m all for a living atonement, but you first need to fully acknowledge what it is you’re atoning for.
Objectively, I know the series is called Hawkeye, and is in fact, about Hawkeye. But now with this episode, we have three young women - Kate, Maya and Yelena - all dealing with sudden, unexpected loss of someone they cared about, and who have all channelled that loss into unhealthy outlets. It’s my hope that the two remaining episodes will focus more on them processing their grief, and tying up their loose ends so they can go forward and develop as characters unburdened by the sadness of their pasts.
Hawkeye airs Wednesdays on Disney+. Check back here every week for our spoiler recap.
