Right, I remembered all this. I had just forgotten he used a gun and not just the shield.
So, just like every other bit character in a movie?
Yeah, it looks like they are exclusively predators and swoop on small mammals - presumably Rocky mistook the miniaturized van for a rodent. If they had nut-cracking behaviors, the TSM goons could be in trouble, but it doesn’t look like they do. So, presumably Rocky realizes at some point the van isn’t a tasty rodent but an inedible object, and drops it somewhere. Now, assuming they weren’t killed by the compression, if the TSM goons can just avoid rats and urban raccoons, they’re going to be just fine. 
That seems to me like a pretty unfair comment.
A substantial element of the show is Clint’s remorse for all the killing he did as Ronin. A major plotline is that one random gang member he killed was actually a loving father, and that by thoughtlessly killing him, Clint traumatized his daughter. Then somehow it’s ok in later scenes when Clint and even moreso Kate appear to off-handedly kill more members of the same gang. It’s pretty jarring to me for a show to focus attention on the costs of violence to the perpetrator, the victim, and the victim’s loved ones, and treat the death of a gang member as an operatic tragedy in one scene, and then treat the death of another gang member in another scene as a gag. Just how many more Echo’s did Clint and Kate create in their fights with the Track Suit Mafia? (Apparently, we’re supposed to think about that in one scene but not in others, which is inconsistent, to say the least).
Also, it’s not like they were fighting Nazis. The members of the Track Suit Mafia are very explicitly portrayed as low-threat, comic relief opponents. Clint is so unconcerned by them, he intentionally sets himself up to be captured and “held prisoner” by them. We see them ineffectually trying to kill Clint and Kate. They’re literally comically bad at being violent thugs. “Realistically”, they’re using lethal force, so Clint and Kate are justified in using lethal force in response. But there’s such a mismatch, and the TSM are so deliberately comically inept, it just seems really jarring to me for Kate and Clint to use lethal force, and for that lethal force to be a gag.
That wasn’t a random gang member, he was the leader and Ronin went there just to kill him. That’s the big difference. As Ronin, Clint was basically going around purposefully attacking gangs and killing as many as he could.
Fair enough. I still personally find it tonally inconsistent and jarring that the series treats the death the death of a gang member as a tragedy that inflicts costs on the survivors and the perpetrator, but also treats the death of a gang member as a throwaway gag. And I still find it tonally inconsistent and jarring for the series to repeatedly and pretty explicitly show those gang members as being comically bumbling and incompetent but also have Our Heroes apparently killing them left and right.
As @msmith537 points out, though, a viewer could assume A-Team violence, where the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked, and all of those goons actually survived with recoverable injuries. Which I did, actually, but it was a conscious act of will to convince myself that was what was going on.
Look, I actually enjoyed the show overall, and this didn’t ruin it for me. But I still thought it was a real weak point, where the writers themselves didn’t seem quite clear on what they were trying to do.
It’s perhaps more jarring for Kate and one of the TSM guys stop fighting and resume their casual conversation about Maroon 5 tickets and relationship advice and whatnot. Like they are both humanizing the Track Suit Mafia, while treating them as arrow fodder for Clint and Kate Bishop to cut down as easily as LARP players.
I don’t mind the treatment of the Track Suit Mafia in the show. For all their comic relief value, the TSM guys are still violent, murderous thugs. One of the first things they do to try to get Kate is to start lobbing molotovs into an inhabited apartment building. I thought the show did a good job striking the balance between, “These guys aren’t dangerous to an Avenger,” and “These guys are still pretty dangerous.” Clint and Kate are skilled enough that they don’t need to go for kill shots to disable them, but if one of these murderous arsonists accidentally gets eaten by an owl, oh well, too bad, shouldn’t have been doing crimes in the first place.
I do think that the episode with Maya’s backstory setup an expectation that the series would have the interrogation of the social effects of violence that it never really intended to carry through with. There’s a lot of themes in the show that are undercooked. For example, Kate and Maya are both motivated by the deaths of their fathers, and both have criminal parents, but there’s virtually no connection between these elements, or these characters in general. I liked the show overall - it had great action scenes, first-rate character writing, and amazing screen chemistry between the two leads and a lot of the supporting cast (Kate and Yelena, particularly), but it didn’t really seem to be “about” anything. Which is a shame, because it had a lot of interesting material to work with.
It was an allegory about Capitalism. A man just wants to get home to spend Christmas with his family, but work keeps getting in the way. A new gung-ho manager wants to start making waves, incompetent workmates keep screwing things up, and then some rich guy tries a hostile takeover in the middle of it all.
I think this is an entirely reasonable reaction. Mine was different, but I think that’s just down to individual tastes.
This, I pretty much entirely agree with.
Yeah, thinking aboout it, I think the show was somewhat derailed by the studio’s desire to backdoor pilot Maya’s show “Echo.” Drop all that and have Eleanor running the TSM and using her connections to hire Yelena, and you clean up a lot of this. We could have gotten deeper into what Kate’s dad was up to and how Eleanor was drawn into a life of crime, and spent more time with Yelena.
Two other things this series accomplished: the introduction of a new Hawkeye, which I assume will jump to the movies at some point, and/or be front and center in a second season. Also, a significant plot point between Clint and Yelena was resolved, if not exactly as neatly or thoroughly as I would’ve liked.
I really wanted that scene to be played as a mirror of the Black Widow introduction scene in the first Avengers movie, and for Clint to not have the finesse to carry it off, so he has to resort to substantially more brute force. Kate blundering in didn’t play quite so well …
I had taken it that Ronin was told “Hey, this is is a crooked shop, go do your thing” and the informant knew Echo’s dad would be there and get killed. Not that Ronan singled him out. And yes, wedging Echo’s story into the series was awkward (though I thought she did a good job).
The contrived conflict sort of bugged me. In the same way it’s a trope that nobody in a zombie movie has ever heard of zombies, private eyes and assassins never consider the people hiring them are lying or have ulterior motives. But blaming Clint for his best friend and partners death was reaching. And they had a better explanation right there in the script.
Clint told Maya he became easy to manipulate due to the grief from losing his family, and got duped into killing her dad. Now Maya was being manipulated using her grief into going after him, rather than asking questions. And we learn that Yelena - another human weapon - was being manipulated the same way.
Update: “Rogers: The Musical” is now showing at Disneyland:
https://disneyland.disney.go.com/entertainment/disney-california-adventure/rogers-the-musical/
So does AntMan get royalties?