#72. 'Hawkeye' Finale
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With Vic out this week, Sonny fills in as JVL's lone co-host to close out the Hawkeye season, digging into episodes five and six. Both agree the finale doesn't stick its landings: JVL says the Kingpin material is wildly unearned (he loves the character in the comics but hates Vincent D'Onofrio's slow, "old man" physicality here, arguing Kingpin should have stayed an offscreen menace), the Kate/Eleanor Bishop denouement falls flat, and the Yelena/Clint confrontation makes no emotional sense given what Yelena actually knows about Natasha's death — though the Kazi/Maya breakup scene is the one beat that pays off. Sonny is generally cooler on the season, calling it more of a placeholder to hold fans over than a real story, though he singles out the Kate/Yelena mac-and-cheese scene from episode five and their elevator slap-fight as highlights, and the two spar amiably over which live-action Kingpin design (brutish vs. ninja) works better and whether the Netflix Daredevil/Defenders shows are canon. What actually redeems the whole season for JVL is the post-credits stinger: the full seven-minute "Rogers: The Musical" number, "Save the City," which he declares the greatest fake musical ever staged, surpassing the Simpsons' Planet of the Apes number and Team America's AIDS song, and which he insists is clearly just the act-one closer of an entire Hamilton-style Steve Rogers musical the writers have plotted out in their heads. Sonny, self-professedly musical-blind, can't tell if it's sincere or parody and wanted a Paul Rudd reaction shot to clarify the joke. Before any of that, JVL opens with a bit about his daughter's deep dive into a bizarre subgenre of Australian gymnastics movies (specifically Raising the Bar), which he assures Vic he will never subject him to.
From the show notes
JVL and Sonny talk about the end of Hawkeye and how it was a little disappointing ... at least until JVL got to the mid-credits sequence.
Full transcript
Sonny00:00:00Hey, welcome back to the Sub-Beacon. I'm Sonny Bunch. Vic Mattis is out today, so I'm playing guest host, I guess. JVL, how are you?
JVL00:00:21Hey, Sonny. I'm great. How are you?
Sonny00:00:26I'm okay. I just got my booster. So if I sound a little sluggish or confused about anything, it's because I woke up this morning shivering in my sheets.
JVL00:00:37Well, the nanobots are taking over your body right now.
Sonny00:00:39I am channeling 5G through myself, and that's what we're running this show on. So if the connection gets a little bad again, that's me.
JVL00:00:48Did you see that? I think it was Australia. Some firm in Australia is trying to come up with a little... A microchip that they can implant under your skin and your forearm to serve as a vaccine passport. And I thought to myself, you know what, you guys, you're not... You're not helping. Not helping.
Sonny00:01:06You're not. You got to read the room on that sort of thing. That's not...
JVL00:01:10So listen, before we start talking about Hawkeye, I would like to tell you what just happened to me. I was upstairs working and my younger girl, little E, who is very into both gymnastics and ballet right now. His... His... Also, she's doing gymnastics and ballet in IRL, in real life, but is also into gymnastics and ballet as content. Oh. And has been finding... I don't know why, but it seems like Australia seems to put out a very large number of gymnastics-related content. So there are just a lot of Australian series on Netflix and Prime and, you know, either TV shows or direct-to-video movies that you and I have never heard of before. That are all involved with gymnastics? All about gymnastics. And so little E has been making her way through these, and she put on something called Raising the Bar, which is a feature film from some sort of Australian production company starring a former Disney kid, Kelly Helgand. I don't know. I've never seen her before. I've never heard of her before. And she is a former elite... Elite U.S. gymnast who gacks it at nationals and then decides she doesn't want to do gymnastics anymore and wants out. So she and her mom move to Australia, where she enrolls in some sort of hoity-toity private high school and then starts out coaching the other girls, but then becomes a... All I know is that I was very uncomfortable watching this with my daughter, and if we put this on for Vic... He would black out after ten minutes. We can't do that. He could not stay conscious.
Sonny00:03:00I don't understand. Did they move to Australia because she didn't want to do gymnastics anymore? She was like, I'm so ashamed of my failures in the United States gymnastics program. We have to move to that tiny island down...
JVL00:03:15I think she just wanted a change of scenery. To be honest, it was a little bit hard to concentrate on the actual whys and wherefores because... Look, I'll say this much. I believe everybody in this movie is over the age of 18. So it has that going for it.
Sonny00:03:35That's good. That's what we're looking for on these things. We're talking about a different form of content today, though. MCU content. We just finished... We're finishing up the run of Hawkeye episodes. It's the latest installment of content on Disney+. JVL, I think you like this show a little more than I do. And I like the middle episodes okay. The last two, again, I like them fine. But it definitely feels like this is just kind of a placeholder to keep people somewhat interested in MCU stuff until we get the movies all up and running again, I guess. I don't know.
JVL00:04:19You know, I... So I started out with Hawkeye when I said to you guys last week that this was the first Marvel... Marvel series TV that I actually wanted to finish. And that's because the middle... It's six episodes. Episodes one and two are sort of slow and uninteresting. Episodes three and four are great. Episode five is really good. And then episode six, I think, is not very good. It does not stick the landing in really any of the storylines.
Sonny00:04:53Well, so let's talk about this because I have... I have a lot of questions about what is actually... Or at least I want to highlight things that I think are just lazily done in this show. So as you say, episode five is okay. It's a big fight between Hawkeye and Maya. It's that episode, right? And he's like, I don't want your boss to get involved. And we find out the boss... If you haven't been able to guess from all the allusions to the big guy or the fat man car lot or whatever it was called. Kingpin. Kingpin is the big bad in this. And Kate Bishop's mom, Eleanor Bishop, is in hawk to the Kingpin. And as a result of all this, she is the one who killed Armand, the old guy from the first episode. Here's my first question. What exactly... Why? Why is any of this happening? I don't understand the relationship between Kingpin and Eleanor Bishop at all. I literally am not 100% sure what her business with him is. What are they doing together? Why is Kingpin involved in this?
JVL00:06:08So her husband, who dies in the first five minutes of episode one, was in deep to the Kingpin. Sure. This is the source of their... his debt by working for the Kingpin. And one assumes that the entire security company, which she stood up, was, if not a front for the Kingpin, was then something the Kingpin was using. There is a single... So I do not... I like the Kingpin character a very great deal. I am a huge Wilson Fisk stan as a character. I think you have to understand the Kingpin has been drawn any number of different ways over the years just as a character. I don't mean drawn physically. And the best version of him is the version who was trained by the same ninja clan, The Hand, as Daredevil was, who is a quiet guy who is not a psychopath but who is just smarter than everybody else around him. Kind of... He's basically the Batman of crime. You know, he just wants... He's smarter than everybody else. He thinks everything else He thinks everything through at a deeper level than everyone else. He's playing chess. Everyone else is playing checkers. And he just wants to organize crime. That's all. He just wants to run the crime world. That's what he wants to do. You know, he's not in it for vengeance or anything stupid like that, really. I mean, he is slightly... He just wants to make money. He just wants to... He's a businessman. Businessman. And there's one great line of Kingpin which gets that side of the character right in Hawkeye, which is that when Eleanor goes to see him and she says that, you know, this is now a line that I can't cross. And he says to her very quietly, he says, we don't have lines in this business. And that's exactly right. He's not like Threadne. He's just like, no, you don't understand. We don't have lines. That's not... That's what they do in that world. That other world has lines. What we do, what I do, is a world which does not have lines. And that's great. Everything else about the Kingpin character as written in this is not good.
Sonny00:08:24All right. Here's my second question about the Kingpin.
JVL00:08:27And is not earned.
Sonny00:08:28We are in the sixth episode in the... I think it's the sixth episode. In the sixth episode, there's a whole sequence with Kingpin where he's talking to Maya about how she's like family. And where did any of this come from? Why are we supposed to believe this relationship at all on his end?
JVL00:08:50Totally unearned. Totally unearned. As I just said, yeah. So all of the Kingpin stuff in this is, wildly unearned. And the inclusion of the Kingpin on screen, I think was a mistake for this series. Kingpin should have been a character lurking off screen that everybody is talking about, but doesn't. And all of those emotions should have been between Kaz and Maya. And we get some of them, right? It's actually one of the few successful moments of... Actually, I said none of the things paid off well. One thing pays off well in the sixth episode. Which is the climax of the relationship between Kaz and Maya. Where Kaz, you know, she says, go away with me, right? She has figured out that he sold out her dad and she doesn't want vengeance. You know, she says, I don't want to kill you. Let's just get out of here. Let's go away together. And he says, I can't because this is my life. This was never supposed to be your life.
Sonny00:09:47Yeah.
JVL00:09:48Right? And it's not even that he's jealous of her. He just, he realizes that she was not supposed to be in this and it has never made sense to him that she's there. And he can't walk away because his whole life, this is the business he's been running towards.
Sonny00:10:03So here's, but here, here's, so here's my issue with that whole, that whole sequence is I, I feel like he gives up on her too quickly. With it compared to like how we have seen them behave the rest of the, the rest of the show. I feel like I, I don't, I didn't, I didn't buy him just being like, all right, I have to be, I have to be the Kingpin's guy and Kingpin wants me to kill you. So I have to kill you. I just like, I didn't, I didn't buy it.
JVL00:10:31Well, he tells her that she should go, right? I mean, he doesn't, he doesn't go to kill her. Like, he's like, you should just go walk away, get away from this, right? He doesn't, he's not trying to kill her just because Kingpin said so. He wants her to leave and he's perfectly willing to buck the Kingpin stuff. He, when she won't go though, he can't leave the life, right? He's like a Sopranos character. He was born to this. And I kind of dig that. But everything else, other stuff is unearned. The, the denouement between mom and Kate Bishop doesn't work at all. At all. Uh, the, the climax between Yelena and Clint honestly doesn't really work. It is not paid off in, in the right ways because Yelena is doing, Yelena is acting in ways that actually don't make sense. Right? I mean, her, her blaming Clint for Natasha's death only makes sense if she misunderstands the situation. But she seems to understand it perfectly well and just be angry about it. That doesn't make sense. That's a foolish reaction, which...
Sonny00:11:39It was never, it was never clear to me how much she actually knows about what happened when they were getting the Soul Stone.
JVL00:11:46Right.
Sonny00:11:47That, that never, I, that, that did not come across to me.
JVL00:11:50But once, you know, once she, she understands that the truth is, Tasha sacrificed herself and, you know, her response is, well, you should have stopped her from, like, that's not a, that doesn't make sense. That's not the reaction that character would have there.
Sonny00:12:03I will say, I did, I did enjoy the Kate Bishop, Elena stuff in this, in this episode. The, the like little slap fight in the elevator. That's fantastic. I thought it was... Everything with the two of them.
JVL00:12:13But this is, so the reason I liked episode five so much was almost entirely because of the scene in Kate's burned out apartment. Yeah. Where Elena has showed up first and made Matt, Kraft macaroni and cheese. And that whole thing almost feels like it's written by the Coen brothers. It's such a fabulously off-kilter scene between these two characters, one of whom knows a great deal about the other, the other of whom knows almost nothing about them. One of whom is a professional, the other is a greenhorn who really doesn't know what's going on. And it's such great character work in the writing, but then also in the performances of the two of them. I really like Florence Pugh.
Sonny00:12:53Is that okay? I think she's okay. She, sometimes she is very, very good in the show and sometimes she is less good. Like I didn't, like you said, I didn't really buy all the stuff between her and Hawkeye at the end. I just didn't, I didn't, it didn't work for me. But the scene, but all the stuff with between Yelena and Kate Bishop, I thought was very good. I thought that was like an actual, it was like an actual relationship. And I liked her in the film as well, Black Widow. I thought she had, she had, she has very good chemistry with the rest of the family in that movie. And they're like, she gets the best, she gets the best moments, like the little hair flip.
JVL00:13:29The movie should have been about her. Right. Not Natasha Romanoff. I mean, that's the problem with the Black Widow movie is that it should have been a movie about Yelena Romanoff and not Natasha Romanoff. And by focusing on Natasha, the story sort of falls apart because it shouldn't be her story. It should be Yelena's story.
Sonny00:13:49The one thing, the one thing I did like in the finale was Jack, the character, Jack getting his moment in the sun after he's been, he's been like falsely accused of all these things. I just, I found that very entertaining and amusing. Yeah. I also really like that actor who I think is on Better Call Saul, right? Isn't he the, he's like the Mexican killer for the cartels. I don't know who he is,
JVL00:14:11but he's great. And he's great throughout the whole series playing this simp. But I also thought, again, that wasn't really paid off. No, not at all. He is the swordsman, I think, right? Unless that was all just a giant head fake. He is the character of the swordsman. I don't like the, the, the too cute. Did Kingpin get shot by Maya or not? That doesn't make sense. Like all, none of this stuff. I hated that. None of this stuff makes sense. And you know what? I don't like Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin. I'm sorry.
Sonny00:14:44Oh, that's interesting.
JVL00:14:45I don't like it. And I especially don't like the physicality of it because Vincent D'Onofrio is an old man and he moves like an old man. That doesn't, doesn't work for the Kingpin. And nothing, nothing about the King, and Kingpin works. And on screen, he might be the single hardest Marvel character to pull off. Right? Because the, the actual comic book depiction of Kingpin only really works in the comics.
Sonny00:15:12Well, you have to have a man who is shaped like a square, like a rounded, a rounded square with like a little bald head on top. And I, I see, I disagree with you on this because I actually like this depiction of, I, I've always, I like this depiction of, of, of the Kingpin. And I like the kind of big, brutish, physical Kingpin just kind of like literally throwing his weight around. I've always liked that version when he would fight against Spider-Man.
JVL00:15:38More than the ninja version?
Sonny00:15:39Yeah. I mean, it always just made more sense. I mean, he's, he's a guy who's big and bulky. Like, I, I don't necessarily buy the, like, you know, doing, doing, you know, ninjitsu about the place.
JVL00:15:51Well, then, then we should not see him fighting.
Sonny00:15:54Right? Then the Kingpin should always be,
JVL00:15:55he should never be pushed to the point of actually fighting. And, uh,
Sonny00:16:00I don't know.
JVL00:16:01He should also be more cultured.
Sonny00:16:02Between, between this and No Way Home, uh, which has the Matt Murdock cameo, is this Marvel's way to, like, kind of brush the Daredevil, uh, show kind of away? Just, you like, get rid of it? I don't know. Acknowledge that it exists and, and be done with it?
JVL00:16:21I, I mean, I guess so because it's Netflix, right? None of that stuff is, is canon. I don't believe any of the Netflix. I think it is.
Sonny00:16:26I think it is.
JVL00:16:27Are the Netflix series canon?
Sonny00:16:29Yeah. All that stuff is, all that stuff is, uh, uh, all that stuff is, like, takes place in the aftermath of the Battle of New York. There, there's talk about, like, how the city's been destroyed and... Right.
JVL00:16:38And what, uh, so we have Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and what, I think there's one more.
Sonny00:16:42Luke Cage.
JVL00:16:43Luke Cage.
Sonny00:16:43There was a, wasn't there a Power Man? Yeah, I think that's right. There was a Luke Cage. Iron Fist. There was an Iron Fist. And then they came together. It was the Defenders. There was a Defenders. There, there were, like, there were, like, 60 episodes of shows for these dumb series. And I have only watched, oh, there was a Punisher, too. There was the Punisher. There was the Jon Bernthal Punisher. Uh, which I watched, I don't think I actually watched. I just watched, I think I only watched seasons one and two of Daredevil. That was it.
JVL00:17:09Yeah, I... Just too much. I just don't think they really work. They're very TV-ish. And, you know, the other thing which I have watched this week is I watched an episode of the Melissa Benoist Supergirl. Mm. Uh, and I just watched it because, again, G-Money had that on, you know, because he is just a sucker for anything superhero. And that show is terrible. And I don't mean, like, oh, it doesn't work. I mean, it's terrible even at the level of television. Nothing about it works. Everything about it is wrong.
Sonny00:17:46And there were
JVL00:17:47a couple moments when, episode six of Hawkeye felt like that. And there's a lot of stuff in the Netflix, at least the ones I watched, which is why they just felt like that.
Sonny00:17:59Well, the Netflix, the Netflix ones have Netflix problems, which is that they are all, they're all like 50% too long. It's not even 20 or 30% too long. All running in place. All of those, all of those series were twice as long as they needed to be. They didn't, they weren't that good. And they all looked kind of cheap. Have you watched any of the DC TV show stuff? Because I know people who are super, super into that. And every time I've turned it on, it looks like the cheapest shit in the world. I tried Gotham. It looks like the cheapest, most terrible shit.
JVL00:18:26I tried the original Gotham when it was on, was that on Fox? Well, that was at least a Fox show, right? And it was terrible. With the guy,
Sonny00:18:32the kid from the OC. Yeah, it was terrible. But the, but the, but the, You mean the Warners
JVL00:18:38to Titans and Birds of Prey.
Sonny00:18:40Yeah, the shows that are on like CW and Warner Brothers or whatever.
JVL00:18:43So I, you know, I dabbled in Arrow. I liked Arrow a little bit. I liked Flash kind of but Arrow was, I liked Arrow. Arrow was a, was a fun show because it took the idea of Green Arrow seriously. But, but it gacked the Terminator Deathstroke so badly that I like, I punched out simply because I was offended at the portrayal of Deathstroke. You threw it away in disgust. I did throw it away in disgust, yes. But, yeah.
Sonny00:19:18Wait, which one is, which one is Deathstroke and which one is Deadshot? Okay, Deathstroke is the guy with one eye. Okay.
JVL00:19:25Who, who has the sword.
Sonny00:19:28Is he the one who was, is he, was he the one who was going to be Joe Manganiello in the, the movies?
JVL00:19:32I don't, no, I don't think we've ever had him in the movies.
Sonny00:19:36Because Deadshot was Will Smith, right? Deadshot is Will Smith. But Deadshot just shoots people. Yeah, you know,
JVL00:19:40his superpower is he's got a gun on his wrist and he shoots people. Deathstroke is like way better. He's the original teen, he's a Teen Titans villain from back in the day. He's fabulous.
Sonny00:19:50There's a, there's a post, there's a post, all right, so there is a post-credit sequence in the, in the Whedon Justice League that has Deathstroke showing up on Lex Luthor's yacht.
JVL00:20:01Yes.
Sonny00:20:02And they're going to have the Injustice League. Yes, that is,
JVL00:20:05that is correct.
Sonny00:20:06And it's terrible. That's, I don't think that's canon anymore. I think the Zack Snyder Justice League has erased that. I believe that's right. I believe that's right. I don't think that's, I don't think that's going to happen.
JVL00:20:13So I, you know, so when I look at the, when I look at the, Hawkeye series, it's only six episodes. I don't think it's really too long. I don't think it is padded basically at all. The first two episodes aren't good, but it's not because it's padded or running in place. They just aren't as tightly written as they should have been. And the sixth episode doesn't work because it just doesn't stick any of the landings. But the middle three are great. Like really, really fun and really entertaining. And they open up a world of possibilities. The problem is the show doesn't deliver on them and you have to, you have to deliver. All of that said, I'm willing to forgive literally everything because of the post-credit stinger on episode six and what they do in case you miss it. And I missed it until Matt Robarts texted me last night and said, did you stay for the stinger? And I said, what stinger? No, I just turned it off after he goes, go back, go, go look, go look, go look. And what they do is the entire musical number, which we are shown bits and pieces of in episode one, we get the whole thing. We get the whole thing. All seven minutes of singing and dancing and it's even more glorious than you could have possibly imagined. In my, in my canon of the greatest fake musicals ever, it used to be number one the Simpsons version of Planet of the Apes.
Sonny00:21:53Stop this planet, I want to get off.
JVL00:21:54The Planet of the Apes, the musical, Stop this Planet, Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius. Right, that's great. He can talk, he can talk,
Sonny00:22:00he can talk, he can talk. I can sing.
JVL00:22:03That followed by, by Lise, the Team America World Police. Right. AIDS, AIDS, everybody has AIDS. I think that this goes to the top of the mountain and is now the single best version because it is also, the song itself is unbelievably catchy. I just have it, it's an earworm. I have it running in my head. The production is insane. Like, they have built an actual Broadway-style set for this thing. They have choreographed it at a very, very high level in a way that functions both as a satire of Broadway and also kind of a love letter to Broadway.
Sonny00:22:50Well, so this is, this is my question is, I can't tell if it's making fun of this stuff or trying to, like, actually do it right. Because I am, I've discussed this before on any number of shows, but I am, I'm not a musical guy. I, like, can't, I can't discern the difference between good musicals and bad musicals, really. This looks bad. It looks, like, bad and corny. But it also, obviously, is, like, that's kind of what they were going for. I needed, here's what I needed. I mentioned this last night. I needed, like, I needed a button on the end of that scene that had, like, Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, like, like, gloriously happy. That would have been great. Like, just somebody, somebody, like, somebody who we know is, like, kind of a goof, like, really, really enjoying it to, to, to really drive it home. Because I, I, again, I'm watching it. I just can't, I can't tell what the, what the, what they are going for exactly.
JVL00:23:40So that would have been, would have been great. But the other thing is, I believe that it is clear, that the writers on this show have actually constructed the entire full musical in their heads. Because this number, Save the City, is clearly the last number before the intermission. Right? So we, so the whole first act of the show is, is from him becoming Captain America through the first Avenger through the end of the first Avengers movie. And then the first song after intermission is about the Winter Soldier. We then transition into the Civil War period. And then the final, the final number, the feel-good bring-down-the-house number for Rogers the Musical is Steve and Tony reconciling together.
Sonny00:24:33Do you think that's, I mean, so do you think it's, so you think it's essentially like Hamilton, like going all the way through Hamilton's life. But I, I, the way I read that scene was that this was the, this was, if not the finale, pretty close to it. No. That this is, this is actually the story of the Battle of New York. That's like.
JVL00:24:50Nope. I am telling you right now that this is the end of the first act and it is building to the way to tell the entire Avenger, the entire Marvel story through the character of Steve Rogers. Again, in the same way that Hamilton is the story of America through Alexander Hamilton. And I wouldn't be surprised if at some point we were to get at least the score of some of the other songs. I would not be surprised if at some point it surfaces that there are a couple other musical numbers in this that have already been written and thought out. And it is so, this thing is so good that I think it justifies the entire existence of the Hawkeye series. As if Haley Steinfeld did not, which I think it does. She's great. And I, she's a character who I am excited to spend some more time with. I like her. I think she will translate to the big screen very, very well. Do you disagree?
Sonny00:25:56I think she's fine. I think, I think she's fine. I think she's fine. I, I, like, I, I don't, the Kate Bishop character, again, I just am not, I'm not, I have no real attachment to.
JVL00:26:07Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm excited for the Tom Holland, Kate Bishop, Yelena Romanoff movie where we get the three of them who are essentially the Young Avengers. Yeah.
Sonny00:26:21I think that'd be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to that.
JVL00:26:24All right. And, I don't know. I, again, it's, you know, we talked about this a few weeks ago, how putting the, we talked about this when we did the West Side Story thing, right? How you, you put a, put a great ending on something, even if it's only mediocre, the audience will forgive you a lot. Yeah. Giving us the full Rogers musical.
Sonny00:26:45That was, that was, that sold, that sold you on the whole rest of, It honestly did. Fair enough. Fair enough. It honestly did. So if you, if you, if you are listening out there, you have no idea what we're talking about. Go look and it's a post, there's a post credits, mid credits, sting. You can fast forward on your,
JVL00:27:00Watch the whole thing and, and you will, you will find yourself humming Save the City throughout the rest of the day.
Sonny00:27:10I, I, I disagree on that, that, but I'm, I'm cold and dead inside. So, all right. All right. A good episode. Sure. It's fine. See everybody. I hope everybody had a good Christmas and we'll, we'll see you guys next week. Bye.
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