You can’t tell me this episode doesn’t follow along almost verbatim with the Fraction and Aja run of Hawkeye from 2012. I can give you the issue. It’s Hawkeye issue number 3, published October 17, 2012. The writer was Matt Fraction, the pencils were David Aja, and the pitch on it reads that Clint Barton and Kate Bishop are double the Hawkeye and double the trouble, but what is the Vagabond Code?
Now, obviously that’s part of the plot of the comic series, which isn’t the plot of the TV show. But the entire car chase part of this episode is that book.
I didn’t get a chance to review the first two episodes, because all of this was still getting set up, and I’m about a day late on the third one. That’s okay. Either way, here’s my opinion. Spoilers, by the way. I think that’s a thing I should say.
Maya Lopez Gets Her Origin Story
The episode starts with a brief background on the character we’ll eventually come to know as Echo. Maya. We see her as a little girl, and we see the things she goes through to become the person we’re going to get.
Anybody who’s watched the MCU for any amount of time knows for a fact that you don’t get a brand new, really cool character they absolutely intend to have stick around for a while without getting some form of an origin story. So that’s what the top of the episode is. Her father works for someone, and he’s clearly doing something shady, kind of a criminal. I guess you know that later. You don’t really know it in the moment. What you do learn is that she speaks ASL, which is sign language, with her dad.
Then you see her growing up. She doesn’t go to a special school. She goes to regular school, meaning regular for everyone without any form of disability, and she begins to overcome. She has a teacher who clearly sees that she can learn, and they show her paying attention. She’s very into visual acuity and keeping track of things. Later on you see her at martial arts, and there’s a bigger boy doing his thing, and she’s watching his feet.
It’s very reminiscent of some of the things we saw in Daredevil, and I’m not surprised, considering Echo is actually a Daredevil character.
Play the Ball Where It Lies
A lot of people online were bumping up into, “Oh, well, Daredevil’s supposed to be the one, and Kingpin kills your dad, and this and that.”
Look, again, comics. I said it when I was doing my review of The Wheel of Time, and I’m going to say it again here. You have to take all these things where they lie. Play the ball where it lies. Right now Hawkeye is predominantly being fed by a lot of this Fraction and Aja series, but at the end of the day it’s its own thing, and you have to take it as its own thing.
Either way, I’ve loved the heck out of the show. I think it’s really, really good. I think they’re doing amazing work just keeping everything moving, and I’m genuinely excited for where the MCU’s taking us.
What Were You Expecting the Show to Be?
I had a conversation with a friend of mine, her name is America, and she was one of those people who’s like, “It’s such a boring show. It’s this and that.” I hear those criticisms and I find myself wanting to ask the question: what were you expecting the show to be?
It’s literally a show about a guy who uses a bow and arrow. I’m just saying.
Not to mention the fact that the guy was already the most well-adjusted one of the Avengers to begin with. He has a home life that’s amazing. He retired. He retired before the series was even over, and they brought him back in Captain America: Civil War. He literally was done with all of this. All he wants to do is be a family man.
And him and Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, were always the most grounded people in the room. You have Thor and Captain America and the Hulk and Iron Man, all these superpowered people, and you always had Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff at the core of the team as the human beings looking around going, “Is everything cool? Y’all got to bring it down a notch.”
So I don’t really know what people were expecting from the show.
One of the Most Cinematic Shows So Far
To me, this is one of the most cinematic shows so far. Loki and Hawkeye are the two most cinematic. WandaVision felt like a really, really expensive HBO show. This one feels like it was filmed for a big screen, and Loki did the same thing.
When you film for movies, you film in a wide scope. You’re expecting the visuals are going to be seen roughly 20 feet wide, up in the air, huge and massive, and people are going to be able to look around inside the frame and really take in the vistas.
When you film for television, you get something else. Great example: my family and I watched the new Home Alone movie, Home Sweet Home Alone. That movie was clearly filmed for a television sized screen. You have an awful lot of close-ups. You have an awful lot of scenes where everyone’s filling the whole frame, because we know the most you’re going to see it on is a screen about yay big. Movies are way different. A lot of wides. If you see a close-up, it’s because they want you to get the emotion of what’s going on and they want that face to fill your field of vision.
This show also feels like a Home Alone comedy, a tongue-in-cheek buddy cop show.
Whose Show Is It?
One of the other things I’ve been hearing a lot of is, “This is the Hawkeye show, but it’s like the Kate Bishop show.”
Kate Bishop is Hawkeye. She will be Hawkeye. She’s training to become the character Hawkeye. The nearest equivalent would be that Robin one day wants to become Batman. Kid Flash one day wants to become Flash. Superboy one day wants to become Superman. Kate Bishop one day wants to become Hawkeye. The title is like calling it Batman. It’s about who’s going to be carrying the mantle. Or I guess in this case it’d be who’s going to be carrying the quiver.
Eventually I think that’s going to be Kate Bishop. We are definitely going to get a Young Avengers in the future. We’ve already been introduced to some of the characters: Wanda’s son, Isaiah Bradley’s grandson in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and now Kate Bishop. So you have three people who make up the Young Avengers. Give me Amadeus Cho, the character who becomes the young Hulk, and you’ve pretty much got it all down. I know we’re going to be getting She-Hulk, and that’s going to be awesome.
So what we’re looking at is a handing off of things. They didn’t do Old Man Hawkeye, which was an actual story in the comics, but they’re toeing that line, in that he’s clearly an aged guy. You still get to see some really cool scenes of him doing neat stuff, and then you see her.
His hearing aid is broken at this point in the episode, so they can’t hear one another and they’re kind of talking around each other. She says, “I think we need to walk the dog.” And he’s like, “I think you were right. You really are one of the best archers in the world.” Because she’s basically doing everything he says to do and doing it well. And then later on he’s the one saying, “I think we need to walk the dog.”
You see that they’re very much in sync, just off a step, and I actually like that interpretation of things.
Echoes, and What Echo Does in the Comics
The episode is titled “Echoes.” That’s a nod to Maya Lopez’s secret identity in the comics. She goes by the name Echo in the Daredevil series, a completely deaf character who’s pretty much the counterpoint to him. I think the plan back in the day with Marvel was to make sort of a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil series, so you were probably going to get a character down the way who was mute.
In the comics, Echo is about more than the fact that she’s deaf. Maya Lopez is set up a little bit like Taskmaster from the Black Widow movie, where Taskmaster has to see your moves and can be programmed with them. Echo is able to catch what you’re doing, see your move, and essentially assimilate it. She becomes an echo to your move. I kind of love the fact that they’re keeping a lot of that.
Now, she comes with an awful lot of baggage.
If you look really closely at the scene where she’s talking to her dad, he has a tattoo on his neck. It’s a small circle with a couple of triangles. She has a symbol like that on her costume in the comics. I don’t know if it’s significant. Probably more of a nod to us as fans.
Then when Maya asks her dad if dragons are real, he says they live in a different world. Having just watched Shang-Chi, I feel like that’s kind of a callback. I was all about it.
That’s Kingpin All Day
My favorite is the one everybody’s been talking about.
My wife and I were big fans of the Daredevil series. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin was stupid good. Next-level good. I watched this episode the night it dropped, and then we watched it together yesterday. When we got there I said, “Everybody be quiet,” and I played that part, and you hear him. She looked at me and goes, “Oh yeah, that’s Vincent D’Onofrio. That’s Kingpin all day.”
I want to be on record as saying they have not confirmed 100% yet that he’s going to be in it. But I want him to be in it so badly.
In this series, Maya watches as Ronin kills her father, and in the comic books Kingpin is the one who orders the murder of her father. It’s weird, because I think they’re setting him up to be an uncle. Again, these are events that don’t mirror the comics 100%, but I’m okay with that. Comics.
Later on, Clint tells Maya that Ronin was killed by Black Widow. I think that’s a tiny obfuscation. Because she can peep things, she’s very clear on the fact that he’s lying. I believe he’s referring to how Natasha saved him in Avengers: Endgame. She saves his life and basically pulls him out of it. Thus the death of Ronin.
The Chase, and a 40-Foot Arrow
This whole series is rife with Hawkeye comic book references. The Tracksuit Mafia. The Trust A Bro moving van.
And then the car chase, the one we’ve seen in the trailers. The whole episode is really predicated on that chase, and it’s the comic almost down to every single thing. The only thing that isn’t from the comics is the Pym particle arrow, which by the way is the dopest thing ever. He just created a 40-foot arrow. I’m down, bro. I’m here for it.
Halfway Through, and I’m In
Overall, I’m in for this series. We’re halfway through, with three more episodes to go, and I’m going to do a review every time one drops so we can follow along with this thing.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Disney Plus series are doing the Lord’s work. They’re giving us things we haven’t seen. They’re giving us longer character beats that I appreciate the heck out of. I love the movies, but these series have elevated serialized storytelling to a level that I think is amazing.
If knowing is half the battle, then you’re halfway to becoming the know-it-all that I know you absolutely can be. And remember, I don’t care what they say: everyone loves a know-it-all.
Whose show do you think this is, Clint’s or Kate’s? And if there’s something in here you want me to talk more about, tell me. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
