Favorite Characters: Kate Bishop (Hawkeye)

*A few Kate-related spoilers.*

Despite it being the Marvel show I was looking forward to the least (in no small part due to the allegations against Jeremy Renner and yet another MCU character with a disability being played by an ablebodied actor,) I came away liking Hawkeye a lot. But before the show premiered, the main thing I was expecting to be a saving grace was Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop, and she 100% delivered.

The series opens on our first look at Kate, a flashback to the beginnings of her origin story. We learn that she was a kid living in the city when the Battle of New York happened, and her father was killed during the Chitauri invasion. As Kate frantically watched the destruction from her apartment window, amid the alien monsters and superhuman heroes, she saw a man in the thick of the battle, armed only with a bow and arrow and his remarkable shooting talent. Not long after, Kate insisted to her mom that she needed to take up archery. I really appreciate this opening, because it was hard for me to imagine how Hawkeye could be anyone’s favorite Avenger. This makes sense, though. Kate can’t build her own super suit and she’s not Asgardian, but she can get a bow and arrow, then practice and practice until she considers herself within the same league as her idol.

Not that she’s there yet, which is part of her appeal as a character. Skip ahead to the present day, where Kate is an impulsive college student from a loaded family who’s very cocky about her own abilities but doesn’t always think about the follow-through. She’s obviously skilled, and she demonstrates some intuitive thinking to problem-solve on the fly, but she also gets in way over her head very easily by plowing into situations before she’s ready. Case in point? When she finds herself at an underground auction that gets held up by the Tracksuit Mafia, she dons one of the auction items (the Ronin’s suit) as a disguise to fight the mafia goons, but she then puts herself in their crosshairs and proves transparently easy to track after the fight.

So yes, she’s something of a trouble magnet, and while she’s supremely confident that she can handle it right up until the moment the shit hits the fan, she still has a lot of growing to do, as both a person and a hero. When she messes up—which she does, badly, on more than one occasion—her first instinct is usually to deflect rather than apologize, eager to explain why it wasn’t really her fault. Needless to say, when she meets Clint and latches onto him like a puppy that desperately wants to be his padawan, he spends a lot of time just trying to keep her out of his way.

But Kate is tenaciously driven, and she does very genuinely want to help. And although she can be overly cocky, she’s always eager to learn more and improve. She incessantly peppers Clint with questions about the Avengers and begs for him to teach her the tools of the trade. And she can adapt; when she initially struggles to keep track of which trick arrow does what, she makes labels for the next batch so she won’t get confused in the heat of battle. She may not always fess up to her mistakes, but she does try to get better and make up for them. By the end of the series, you can see why Clint has grown to trust her, and even more, why he thinks she’s ready to take up his mantle.