Hawkeye continues its brilliant run with episode 5, Ronin, which not only moves this story forward, but also gives some great insights to some of the characters past histories. *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!*
There’s a lot of big reveals this week, especially right at the end of the episode, but before we even get to that part, the episode opens with a nice history lesson about what happened with Yelena (Florence Pugh) during the events of Infinity War and Endgame. In the opening scenes of this episode Yelena is seen trying to deprogram all the Black Widows that she can following the events in the recent Black Widow film. During this example of one of her missions the blip happens and she disappears. She suddenly finds herself in a different version of the same bathroom and a remarkably remodelled version of the same house, which obviously leads to some painful news. This neatly ties up any issue there could have been with Infinity War and why she wasn’t more involved.
In the present day in New York, Clint (Jeremy Renner) is still determined to keep Kate (Hailee Steinfeld) out of the mission and keep her safe, but obviously Kate is more stubborn than that. She will never give up even though initially it seems like she might ‘semi-retire’ back to her home. Convinced by her mother to move back, she returns to her own apartment to gather some things and surprisingly finds Yelena waiting there for her. This gives us some amazing dialogue between Kate and Yelena which is filled with tension and threat, as well as a lot of humour. It continues to prove what a great character Yelena is and what a great job Florence Pugh is doing carrying on the legacy of Black Widow.
In typical Clint Barton fashion, he decides to bring everything to a head and dons the Ronin suit once more, confronting Maya (Alaqua Cox) at the same auto shop where he killed her father. During this he also reveals to her that there was a rat in her organisation who informed him in the first place about her father’s location, and that their boss wanted her father dead. This is obviously how they going to sow the seed that will end up with Maya being more of a sympathetic character and not an outright villain. There will no doubt be a lot more steps in the process, but it is begun and we can see that there will now be a journey from this point to when her own series starts.
In the middle of all this Kate’s mother Eleanor (Vera Farmiga) Is pulling more strings than we ever imagined, and the pantomime villain Jack is arrested, all too conveniently. That was always looking like a bit of an obvious misdirect, so it’s not too surprising and they don’t really follow it up too much in this episode. What this ultimately leads to is the biggest reveal of the episode where Yelena, possibly convinced by her discussion with Kate that Clint isn’t as bad as she thinks, researches who originally hired her. This gives us the great end scene where not only do we see the Eleanor is this series big bad, but above her there is an old face finally revealed, as the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) is seen.
While the mysteries and the reveals are great, where they show really works well is in the interpersonal relationships between all the characters. In previous episodes, like last week, this has mostly been between Kate and Clint. This week though, not only is there Kate and Yelena adding much more personal depth to relationships, but we also get a greater connection between Maya and Clint. This is a much improved situation from Hawkeye and Black Widow in the MCU where their relationship wasn’t focused on too much. This is being redressed and now we’re seeing a lot more detail, getting to see that emotional connection writ large. We also once again get to see how the blip has affected someone on a very personal level which we haven’t really seen for a while. Like most things in this series, even though there are huge spectacular action sequences which worK incredibly well, the real winning ingredient is this chemistry between the actors and the characters and those smaller moments that define them. With episode 6 looming large we look forward to an exhilarating conclusion.
