Relationship Spotlight: Kate Bishop & Clint Barton (Hawkeye)

*A few Clint-Kate-related spoilers.*

It seems like the most I’ve ever been invested in Clint in the MCU is through his relationships: with Natasha, with Wanda, and now with Kate. When he’s interacting with one of these characters, he works for me in a way that he often doesn’t on his own.

Clint Barton is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent superspy who, in the face of alien invasions or robot armies, usually just puts his head down and gets the job down. It doesn’t bother him that he goes up against superpowered individuals armed with a bow and arrow. He doesn’t scare easily, is what I’m saying. But when he first meets Kate, it’s not an exaggeration to say she’s probably not far from his worst nightmare.

Where Clint is discreet, Kate is an enthusiastic wrecking ball. Where Clint is taciturn, Kate overflows with a zillion questions, and as soon as she has his phone number, she will leave him endless voicemails (psst—he’s hard-of-hearing, Kate. If you’re gonna bombard him with messages, text him!) Where Clint is serious, Kate is excitable. As she gloms onto him as Hawkeye’s #1 fan, you can practically see the dismay behind his eyes.

So at first glance, this seems like a classic odd-couple duo. They’re such different people, and it might appear like Kate’s goal in life is to aggravate Clint and get in his way. But it doesn’t take long for their “just leave me alone, kid” relationship to develop into something more important for the both of them. Even though Kate is very green in the field and often blunders in before she’s ready, she absolutely has Clint’s back and is always willing to learn and improve. Once she wheedles Clint into showing her the ropes, she proves a relatively quick study, and she helps him out of a tight spot more than once.

But it’s about more than just fighting alongside each other. At a time when Clint is chasing some ghosts from his past, away from his family and not sure if he can take care of everything before Christmas, Kate is there. She helps him through a phone call from his son after his hearing aid gets smashed in a fight. When he feels down about being away from home (but won’t admit that,) she makes him take a few hours off for them to get into the holiday spirit: wearing ugly sweaters, watching Christmas movies, and listening to holiday music as they make margaritas. Once the truth comes out about the Ronin, she doesn’t condemn him but listens to his regrets and assures him that he’s still her hero.

And Clint could use a little of Kate’s energy and enthusiasm right now. The Tracksuit Mafia’s vendetta against the Ronin is stirring up a lot from his past, and he’s dwelling heavily on the loss of Natasha while also missing home. Kate’s goofiness and warmth helps draw him out, which in turn allows him to let her in. He becomes the mentor she craves, teaching her to be a better archer and showing her some of the skills (both hard and soft) that go into being an Avenger. By the end of the miniseries, it’s entirely believable that he’d invite her to come home with him for Christmas, which, considering where they start out, is quite the journey for both of them.

A Few Thoughts on Rogers the Musical (Hawkeye)

In the first episode of Hawkeye, there’s both humor and emotion to be mined from Clint taking his kids to see Rogers the Musical, the awesomely-terrible new Broadway hit about Captain America. Within the context of the TV show, it’s used effectively, but while it does a good job skewering the idea of a huge Broadway cash grab, it falls short when it comes to conveying what a real Rogers the Musical might actually look like.

We’ll start with the musical’s function within the show. Clint is on vacation with his kids in New York, and during their night out at the theatre, we see his reaction to the lives of him and his close friends being turned into shallow entertainment. The Act I finale, depicting the Chiutari invasion of New York, is big and loud and dumb, milking Steve’s “I can do this all day” line for all it’s worth. It’s utterly tacky, and Clint is annoyed enough that he turns off his hearing aid so he doesn’t have to listen to it. Seeing the actress who’s playing Natasha, though, he’s overcome with the memory of the best friend who sacrificed herself to save the universe, dying in his place, and he and his kids wind up leaving at intermission.

All that is fitting for the story. It’s very within character for the discreet, even-keeled Clint to be turned off by such a tactless display, and of course Natasha’s death is still very much on his mind. And I have complete faith that some Broadway producer would cash in on rushing a musical about Steve’s life to the stage, that it’d be a smash hit but very lazy. It’s relying on Steve’s name, not the show’s quality, to put butts in seats.

So I absolutely believe that Rogers the Musical would be terrible and tasteless. That’s well within reason. What I do not believe, is that it would be cheap. We live in a world where Galinda floats down in a giant bubble in Wicked, where the actual stage in Titanic tilted to match the steep incline of the ship as it went down. We have Disney on Broadway now, where Aladdin and Jasmine fly over the audience on a magic carpet and Olaf the snowman is a well-operated puppet who looks just like his animated counterpart.

In light of all that, there is no way in hell that the Hulk would just be a guy in a green hoodie while Tony flies jerkily on obvious wires. Rogers the Musical wouldn’t be good, but it would be a certified spectacle. It would be the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child of the MCU. As a theatrical experience, it would be legitimately impressive, even if the show itself was trash. This is just a fact of Broadway.

On a final note, I’m very curious about Adam Pascal as “Lead New Yorker #1,” who probably has the most lines in that Act I finale. While I’m of course always pleased to see Adam Pascal, it doesn’t jive that would you end the first act on a song primarily led by a member of the ensemble (who, by the way, sings better than any of the actors playing the Avengers.) I don’t know whether this actor in Rogers the Musical is meant to be someone of Adam Pascal’s actual caliber/fame or if he’s just a chorus member who happens to sing like a Broadway rock veteran—shades of Glee, which purports that characters who sing like Matthew Morrison, Idina Menzel, and Kristin Chenoweth couldn’t make it on Broadway. Either way, the only way I can make sense of this guy’s prominence in the number is if he’s a sort of Lead Player for the show, a quasi-narrator who leads us through the major events of Steve’s life while assuming the roles of everyone from WWII soldiers to Hydra moles in S.H.I.E.L.D. to a baggage handler at that airport the Avengers wrecked in Civil War. He never plays anyone important, but he always stands outside the action as our window into it. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.

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.