Bingo. Hawkeye's had hearing problems, on and off, in the comics for decades. (Which means, basically, that some writers remembered it and others chose to ignore it.) And the Hawkeye comics that specifically inspired this TV series made a big deal of it, so no surprise it shows up here. But, yes, I don't believe it's ever been featured onscreen before.
Yeah, they both had a serum that slowed their aging. For Fury it was to explain how he was so physically active 30 years after the Howling Commandos in WWII. Natasha at one point was hinted at being some kind of descendant of the Romanoff royal family and was rescued by Ivan, similarly needing some age slowing. I think it was the same serum, but it was a long time ago I read those issues. I don't remember if it was ever directly connected to Erskine. As far as I remember the serum and personal histories were simply dropped and forgotten. I may have missed a direct re-con back in those years. If Bruce Wayne was bitten by a radioactive bat would he be Batmanbat or Manbatman?
It is a interesting contrast in how they are playing up Hawkeye being a regular human thus having hearing problems and needing to ice his sore body were as in the movie, Black Widow was bouncing off hard objects like a beach ball and at one point basically is flying like Superman.
I think the difference is that the Black Widows have mental conditioning when it comes to pain and discomfort. The old "the trick is to not mind that it hurts" thing.
This is nothing new. What happens at 1 minute 50 seconds should have been the end of the first Iron Man movie. And while the shield certainly would have saved Steve's life, his legs should have been shattered in this fall at 2 minutes 40 seconds.
So Kate’s mother hired Yelena to kill Clint under Fisk’s orders? I thought the Thunderbolts lady did it.
That kind of thing only stops ballistic penetration. Kinetic force is still kinetic force. Unless it's also made of vibranium that energy still has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is invariably the squishy human meat inside. So yeah, it would still really, really hurt. No question the realism of the physics on this kind of thing kinda operates on a sliding scale, in proportion to the magnitude of a given "super-power" and what looks cool in the moment. I think she may have brokered the deal. I mean it's not like Kate's mom, or even Fisk would have had Yelena's number. Contessa is probably the one running all of the free Black Widows now, at least the ones that are still in the life. Whether it's for the US government, or some kind of private entity remains to be see, though my gut feeling says the latter makes more sense if they're setting this up as an "Anti-Avengers" group.
Interesting that Kate has no idea who Kingpin is. Assuming it‘s exactly the same character as in Daredevil, he aquired quite a bit of infamy and is a very well known rich guy, not just known in Hell‘s Kitchen, right? Curious now, how much of Daredevil‘s events will be canonized or not.
None, I'd expect. The Netflix shows are R-rated, Disney is PG-13 at most so they're going to want to keep them separate.
I like how Helena's prologue shows more so than Monica's POV of the event why people took to calling it "the blip", since from the perspective of those that "died", that's exactly what it felt like. They got weirdly dusty and the world just blipped and changed around them. I wonder if the ones that lived through it still think of it as "the snap". I don't see that as a limiting factor. It's only a matter of time before Deadpool shows up in the MCU, and they've already said they're not going to PG-13 him, at least not in his own movies. This show may not be at full on and explicit are Daredevil was, but it's still pretty violent so that version of Fisk is hardly out of place. Hell, he's always been more interesting and an intellectual opponent than a physical one. That he can twist your head off with one hand is just an added bonus. I guess it depends on how much she watched the local news as a young teen between archery tournaments, martial arts classes, and school. Remember the events of the Netflix shows took place more or less between 'Thor: The Dark World' & 'Infinity War', which is about 5-6 years ago at this point, depending on how long it's been since the blip. Although side note: I guess this confirms that Fisk didn't blip out. One can't help but wonder if the same is true for Matt Murdock or not.
Anyone can buy Steve Rogers surviving that fall and being able to tun away from the scene..he is, after all, supposed to be the height of human perfection who recovers from most injuries as the attack or trauma happens. Anyone else in the MCU (e.g., the posted Iron Man clip, or recently, many of the multi-story falls suffered by regular humans seen in Black Widow) should have met their maker.
Steve is by no means indestructible, just really, really tough. And as was pointed out, that fall out of the Triskellion should have snapped his legs clean off. They didn't because it's a movie and it's best not to over think such things. Another aspect of this (and a minor bugbear of mine) is fight consistency. Meaning that for a given character the difficulty of a given fight should be proportional to the abilities of their opponent in relation to their own. This might sound like it's stating the obvious, but it often isn't something that action focused media bothers with. All too often a random mook will take as much putting down as a super-powered alien badarse, regardless of whether the "hero" is super-human, an alien god, in a walking suit of state of the art weaponised technology, or a dude with two sticks and a piece of string. Or conversely, each individual opponent within a horde of supposedly superpowered alien soldiers or killer robots suddenly act like they're made of wet tissue paper, simply because there's so many of them. There's a sweet spot between strict realism where absolutely NONE of this is even remotely possible (I mean super serums, and god level power aliens that look exactly like humans AND wear capes?! Come on!) and just pure fantasy nonsense action where nothing make any sense, there are no real stakes and nothing really matters because everyone is playing with all the cheat codes on. That middle ground is generally where the MCU operates. It may not be realistic, but it *feels* grounded and possible . . . or close enough as to not matter.
Damn, that was perhaps the best episode yet and just because of dialogue and the scenes within it. Yelena was rightfully a breakout character in Black Widow, charmingly played by Florence Pugh and she effortlessly continues in Hawkeye. It was nice to see the Blip and its immediate reaction to someone who blipped.. the utter confusion that happens and possibly the dangers of it all if you reappear at a place that has changed drastically. I think they touched upon that in Falcon - what happens when you blipped in mid air during a flight? You most likely reappear in air, tens of thousands of feet above ground Now she continues and her scene with Kate made the entire episode.. starts off hilarous and ends on a deadly serious note. Pugh and Steinfeld knock it out of the park there. Clint broke my heart when he talked to Natasha in front of that memorial ( with the Endgame music playing as a variation behind it) - Natasha's death still is one of the biggest gut punches in the MCU and this scene reinforces it. You can just feel how important she was to Clint. The fight with Maya was awesome but more so for the resolution - it seems Clint cracked her armor a bit and she starts to question the events that brought her to this point. I think next episode it's Clint's and Yelena's time to set events right - it may outright be the most sad dialogue we'll ever see in Hawkeye, possibly the MCU ( it's shame he can't actually show her what happened). And it's been rumored, expected and predicted - Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin is back and this means so much i barely can't contain my excitement. His Kingpin is the second best villain the MCU ever had, just behind Hiddleston's Loki. This means that some time down the line we may see him and Charlie Cox' Daredevil go at it again ( though not necessarily, 2 times was enough and it was awesome to the max) but even if not i'm happy he is back and become a proper part of the MCU. Now if Marvel only found the right actor and writer for Dr. Doom they may have the best villains on the screen that ever existed in the Marvel universe. P.S. Yelena is full of bullshit.. she is a poser too! Or how can she explain her rapelling down that window backwards when there's a perfectly good and working door in that appartment
Fun episode, despite being kind of a swerve from the story so far. Yelena was loads of fun here, and I'm even more won over now than I was watching the movie -- she's even more entertaining as Black Widow than Natasha was. It was pretty easy to see that we were right in our conjectures that Eleanor was the real villain and Jack was the red herring. I could tell that when Kate told Eleanor about the Sloan business and Eleanor didn't bat an eye; it was pretty clear it wasn't news to her. And then the next thing we see, Jack is getting arrested after Eleanor's offscreen "investigation." Still, isn't there a bit of a discontinuity here? I thought it was Valentina who hired Yelena to kill Clint. Was she just the broker for the deal or something? I thought it was established in Endgame or somewhere that Bruce made sure he snapped everyone back to a safe place. Maybe that was just something the filmmakers clarified in an interview. Yes. This is a big deal. And I don't think it's just a throwaway cameo, considering that they billed D'Onofrio in the main cast despite him only appearing in a blurry photo for a few seconds. Implicitly he will be a significant onscreen presence in the final episode, and that opens a lot of doors going forward, not just for him but potentially for the rest of the Netflix cast.
Spoiler: Spider-Man: No Way Home Spoilers It is cool that for some countries, the reveal of Kingpin in this and Murdock in Spider-Man happened on the same day. Just a nice coincidence I suppose. This episode gave me early seasons of Arrow vibes. It’s also pretty interesting that this Echo storyline is usually a Spider-Man or Daredevil story but it works pretty well here with Hawkeye as Ronin.
Speaking of the new Spidey movie, Yelena alluded to the "new and improved Statue of Liberty," which we've seen in trailers for the movie.