Though the great reveal at the end of this week’s episode was a pretty important and cool plot point, I was more interested in how Laura Barton/Linda Cardellini, seemed to be some kind of operative in her own right.
Some of the way these things have been dropping make me think that there will be a second season of Hawkeye. I certainly want to see a lot more of Kate Bishop/Hailee Steinfeld.
I wouldn’t hate to see her team up with Echo.
Same.
Ok…I get the whole “Kate doesn’t have it in her to kill Widow 2.0 Thing”…but you coulda shot her in the shoulder or pinned her foot to the floor.
And has Echo been shot in the shoulder twice now? Maybe that was someone else. Bring some armor Maya!!
I’m not sure we were supposed to get that she didn’t have it in her, exactly. I think it was a callback to Clint’s story about his best shot being the one he didn’t take. Kate had the drop on Yelena but her instincts said to let her go - and I think the show is likely to have that pay off positively for Kate, the better to turn Kate-Yelena into Clint-Natasha 2.0.
Lotta scuttlebutt about Laura not being quite what she seems…so I was rewatching some Age of Ultron and…she…uhhh…seems to be a better body language expert then Clint is about people he’s around a lot more then Laura is.
Furthermore, if I recall AoU correctly (it’s been a while, so I might not be) it was Laura who got Tony to go to the barn where Fury was hiding out, suggesting that she’s the one Nick reached out to, or at least that they knew each other.
I’m leaning towards Laura being a former SHIELD agent and the person whose identity would be revealed by the watch (she’s the one who brings up the possibility of it being missing, not Clint). Also, I think Laura might not be her real name… coughMockingbirdcough
I thought Yelena had a very Splinter Cell look to her costume.
The show seems to be teasing something like that, but I personally hope that’s not what’s going on. If Laura is a normal civilian that adapted well to the weirdness in Hawkeye’s life, I think that’s a pretty interesting character. If she’s a former SHIELD agent, that would mean that she was a woman was was highly successful in a demanding-but-exciting and meaningful career who quit to become a stay-at-home mom while her husband continued his career. Which is a valid choice on an individual level, but for me it would be a disappointingly gender-stereotyped role in the MCU.
On the one hand, Mockingbird has already been introduced in Agents of SHIELD as a completely different character, and at the time AoS was supposed to be in continuity with the rest of the MCU. On the other hand, AoS was more or less de-canonized after Infinity War, so…maybe? Again, though, I’d personally be disappointed by the gender stereotyping of the female superspy retiring to become a stay at home mom while the male superspy goes on to become an Avenger.
So, am I the only one who, when they saw the one-eyed dog, immediately assumed that it was Odin in disguise?
I mean, he comes out of nowhere in the first episode, and has been hanging around the whole series so far. There has to be more to it than just appealing to the Dog People Demographic.
I mean, look at Captain Marvel’s Cat, after all. If the dog turns out to just be a dog, this puts us Cat People one up on the Dog People. 
I assumed he was Nick Fury.
I hadn’t thought of that angle!
I guess one of us gets to say I Told You So eventually
I read somewhere that that it’s a two-eyed dog with a fair amount of CGI. I wonder if they fitted a green eyepatch to the doggie actor?
That’s a fair point, although my interpretation was “in hiding” rather than “stay at home mom”.
I agree with all this. I’ve been really enjoying that they completely avoided the whole, “I have to do super stuff during Christmas - don’t tell my wife!” cliche, and making her another spy would sort of undercut that.
There was an interview somewhere where they said that was the original plan, but they realized it would cause the dog to behave strangely, walk in circles, etc. So instead they had to do a bunch of work on each shot, with crews tracking all the lighting and camera positioning, in order to do the effects work of removing the eye digitally.
How’s that easier than finding a one eyed dog.
Maybe they’ll actually address it.
Kate: “Ohhh…so she has to stay home and take care of your brood while you get to jet around the world??”
Clint: “Well…she actually chose this life. No one is ‘robbing her of her agenda here’. And if you’d been through the crap* she has, you’d want this too. This is real life here Kate…not…Spy Kids.”
Well, a one-eyed dog that’s trained to respond to commands, and not get distracted by all the crew activity going on. Probably not a ton of one-eyed dogs with that sort of training, especially since having one eye would probably get them passed over for a lot of other roles.
Again, I think that’s a perfectly valid choice for a real-life individual. But these are fictional characters, and the writers decide what choices they make. And if the writers decide that the male superspy makes the decision to continue his globe-trotting superspy career after having kids while the female superspy makes the decision to stay at home as their primary caregiver…that just seems like disappointingly gender-stereotyped decisions for fictional characters.
On the other hand, if that’s Laura’s farm, and she’s an ordinary civilian that somehow knows Clint and they fell in love and had kids and she continued with her pre-existing life on the farm while Clint continued his pre-existing career as a superspy, and she’s just adapted really well to his weird lifestyle, that would be an interesting character to me.