Hawkeye: Episode 4

4. Partners, Am I Right?

It turns out Eleanor is also at home, turning the sword ambush into an awkward getting-to-know-you phase. Eleanor has a brief parent-to-parent talk with Clint asking him to spare her daughter from the dangers of his job, which leads him to persuade Kate via different means to go back to living a normal life. However, she is persistent as ever, and he gives her one more chance. On a mission to retrieve Natasha’s tracer Rolex which was stolen from the Avengers compound and auctioned later on, the two archers get into loggerheads as far as field mission techniques are concerned. She finds the watch in an apartment that apparently belongs to Maya, who ambushes her in an ensuing fight. Forced to be on the lookout from a rooftop, Clint is attacked by a masked assailant. The foursome all end up on the same roof and end up in a battle royale, revealing the incognito attacker to be Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). As Kate almost fatally falls off the building resembling Natasha’s demise, Clint wants her out for good.

It felt more like a filler episode at the beginning and considering the relatively shorter runtime at just around 40 minutes. The episode doubles as a mini tribute to Natasha Romanoff, which is why Yelena’s cameo at the end no longer comes as a surprise. You can smell that Black Widow scent coming for the hawk from a mile away. Contrived as it might have been, you have to give it to the writers on how they have neatly entangled that Black Widow web with Barton’s regrets and the repercussions of such in his forced protégée’s current situation. What you get to witness, instead, is a showcase of grief, not quite as crazy and intense as that in Wandavision, but subtle enough to clearly get the point across that Hawkeye is suffering from one hell of a PTSD indeed. Passing the baton to a new-generation Hawkeye aside, his regrets have been a constantly recurring theme of the show. In other news, it’s cool to see the new generation Hawkeye and Black Widow sharing the same screen. What fun this new duo will have together, we can only look forward to.

“What the hell is going on, and why is there an Avenger in my dining room?” –Eleanor Bishop

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