Hawkeye Episode 5 (Spoiler Review)

 As expected, episode 5 was a game-changer. Hawkeye is not only paving way for the character, Clint Barton, and the moniker itself as well as Barton's past as Ronin but also widening the MCU canon. With the picture above, you can clearly see that I am revealing a returning character from a previous film, Yelena Belova, from the Black Widow movie. I might be tackling a number of SPOILERS in this review. SO THIS IS YOUR WARNING. 

ONCE AGAIN...  FINAL SPOILER WARNING AHEAD.  

In this episode, we learn Yelena was dusted and fills the gap between the events of Black Widow film and the credit scene where she is hired to assassinate Clint Barton. At present time, it is clear that they are setting up Kate Bishop and Yelena to eventually have a friendship that Natasha and Clint had. The episode features a conversation between the leading women and it can be easily considered as the most refreshing and most tense moment so far. With that said, the chemistry between the two also makes this episode the best one thus far since the show seems to focus more on character development instead of the hard hitting action other Marvel movies seem to have. It is similar with the other Disney plus shows which is considerably a nice new pace to handle but... not everyone is a fan of this. 

Clint is barely featured in this episode since the main focus is Yelena this time around, but his involvement in this episode brings us one step forward to the answers. In case audiences have forgotten, this show's particular mysteries includes a murder and a shiny Rolex watch recovered from the wrecked Avengers campus. Some details have been revealed as to where this all ends up but we will only tie up the big loose ends in next week's finale. They might leave some revelations for a potential second season or in the spin-off series starring Alacqua Cox's Echo. Time will tell. 

As opposed to the big reveal that was teased at the end, the future of the MCU is uncertain. Another big mystery of the show is Maya's boss who also runs the Tracksuit Mafia, secretly runs Sloan Ltd with Jack as the forefront and is working alongisde Eleanor Bishop. The final seconds of this episode finally lets the cat out of the bag as we learn that the boss is none other than Wilson Fisk, Kingpin. 

Not only is it this iconic character playing the game, Vincent D'nofrio reprises his role from Daredevil that was apart of the Marvel/Netflix roster of shows. Daredevil is officially canon to the franchise but in what form, is hard to say as of yet. However, including D'nofrio's iconic portrayal of the character to Hawkeye brings about the posssibility of other Marvel/Netflix to return to the wider MCU with the possible return of characters like Jessica Jones, Elektra and most importantly, The Punisher. This will finally allow fans to venture into street level action through the lens of the MCU. 

With each episode, Hawkeye just seems to be getting better and better especially with its slow pacing. This episode, like the last two, only had 40 minutes of content. These runtimes are too short which causes alot of character development or certain storylines to get faded into the background. There's so much left to unpack and yet there is only one episode left. 4 Disney Plus features in, Marvel Studios should start considering more episodes with longer runtimes. WandaVision and What If's struggle was not that obvious in that case since they had a lot of hit and miss moments (or more accurately, episodes) but with FATW and Hawkeye, a fixed time frame seem to make these shows feel alot more shaky and hard to ignore open-ended plot points. Whether it is intentional or not, we won't find out yet. 

Until that gets rectified, it was still great to have a year filled with Marvel content and sad to have it all end next week with the Hawkeye finale. I cannot wait to see Kingpin again and I am excited to see how the finale affects future TV shows and movies.