The Hawkeye Easter Eggs You Might Have Missed In Episode 4

The first four episodes of "Hawkeye" are streaming now on Disney+, and this series, like all the Marvel shows on the streaming service, is chock full of Easter eggs and little hints for diehard fans. Last week was certainly packed, and this week is as well. "Partners, Am I Right?" not only has fun bits of lore, but it gives us a lovely look at the chemistry between Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner). One thing this series has done is taken a character that a lot of people sort of blew off and turned him into a sympathetic man suffering for the sins of his past. 

In this episode, we travel from Jack (Tony Dalton) and Eleanor's (Vera Farmiga) apartment, to a phone call with Laura (Linda Cardellini), to a private Christmas party for Kate and Clint and Pizza Dog. We visit Kazi (Fra Fee) and watch a fight between Clint, Kate, Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), and a certain familiar face which we'll get to later. Warning: spoilers for episode four ahead.

The episode starts off in the Bishop apartment, right where we left off last week, with Jack holding a sword up to Clint. Jack calls him "Archer," which is a name he's been called in the comics. Clint is known as the Golden Archer in Captain America #179. Jack drops the sword, of course, and everyone has a delightfully tense little cup of tea. 

Speaking of that tea, Jack's is in a mug covered in hexagons and bees. Oh no. No! Please do not suck me back down the hexagon rabbit hole that was "WandaVision." Between trying to decode everything, figure out who the beekeeper was, and looking for Mephisto at every turn, I don't want to go there again. Still, hexagons, you guys. Of course, this could be a reference to Tony Dalton's "Better Call Saul" character, but to stay in the Marvel Universe ... yeah, it's probably the hexagon/bee thing from "WandaVision." I don't know why yet, but I'm sure we'll find out if – it's not a misdirect. 

We do see Clint nab the retractable Ronin sword as well. Does Jack know? As we see later down the line, he's certainly in on something that involves Ronin.

On the homefront – Clint's homefront, that is – we may just have gotten a bit of info about his wife Laura. Since the series started, it's been very clear that the writers weren't going in the sarcastic, whiny, "please come home for the chiiiiiildreeeen" route with Laura. She's a true partner to Clint. She knows about his past as Ronin, she understands his sadness about losing Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), she totally gets that Clint's superhero profession is going to require absences sometimes, and she knows specifics about the Tracksuit Mafia. Now we're seeing that she speaks German (!) and can do some pretty heavy research. 

Clint asks Laura over text to look up Sloan LTD. I had to do a bit of a dive for this one, but it's possible that this is a reference to a Walker Sloan, who is the CEO of the research company Alchemax, as pointed out by HitC. And as we learned in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, owns Alchemax. Maybe it's a stretch, but with all the Kingpin references we saw in the third episode (and heard "big guy" as a nickname for the off-screen boss in this episode), we can't count it out. 

So who is Laura Barton? Could she be Mockingbird? She's got language skills and the spy skills to find out that Jack Duquesne is the CEO of Sloan LTD, which is the company laundering money for the Tracksuit Mafia. She's not Bobbi Morse that we know of (the identity of Mockingbird in the comics), but she's clearly got a depth that fans didn't know about. She mentions the watch that was in the auction, and Clint says it belongs to someone he used to work with. Did he and Laura work together in the past? It would explain a lot. 

One of the best scenes of the week was the impromptu Christmas party that Kate throws in her aunt Moira Brandon's apartment. (Yes, she is a minor Marvel character.) Not only did we get a really beautifully-acted scene where Kate figures out that Clint was the Ronin, we see him in a Christmas cat sweater. It's adorable. 

Clint is drinking from a "Thanos Was Right" mug, something that was also scrawled on the urinal where that creeper asked him for a photo in the first episode. Is Moira a Thanos stan? She wouldn't be alone, going by the very disturbing images I've seen on the Internet. I just went to find a link for you, but what I saw means I'm just going to let you decide if you want to pollute your search history by yourself. (He looks like grape bubble gum! I don't understand this stan.)

Clint and Kate also discuss boomerang arrows, with Kate suggesting them and Clint – ahem – shooting the idea down. (I'm not even a teensy bit sorry for that.) In the comics, specifically Hawkeye #3 from the Matt Fraction run, Clint does indeed use boomerang arrows, and it's Kate who thinks it's weird. He also teaches her to throw a tiny, coin-like ornament with precision, which is a nod to his amazing throwing ability in the comics. 

Speaking of Kate, she's wearing a shirt at one point with Laika the cosmonaut dog on it, which is something she also wears in the Matt Fraction comics, which were a big inspiration for this series. 

The LARPers are back, folks, and Grills (the grilling cook from the comics and LARPer from the second episode) isn't the only one who has a Marvel Comics counterpart. Clint sends Kate to see if she can track down one of the cops in the group and get back his trick arrows. She joins them and makes friends. A certain officer named Wendy Conrad (Adetinpo Thomas) agrees awfully fast (a bad sign in a cop) to get them back if Kate does something for the group. 

Kate brings some of them back to her aunt's place and has promised enough materials to make new costumes for everyone ... plus for her and Hawkeye. Wendy pops in with a bag of arrows, but is hesitant when Clint tries to take the bag. Her wife got it for her and it says "Bombshell" on it. In the comics, Wendy Conrad is the villain Bombshell. I think it might be best if Clint brings that bag back with him. They made such a point of this detail that it's fairly likely that we're going to see her again at some point.

Also, one of the gang is named Orville (Robert-Walker Branchaud), who might be a character called Oddball from the comics, but we didn't get much on him. 

Laura, our possible Mockingbird, tracks the Rolex watch that was stolen from the Avengers compound to 3715 Godfrey Rd., which I couldn't place anywhere in the comics. After Kate defies Clint's order to stay behind, we discover it's Maya's apartment. Kate shoots some of the purple goo arrows (oh my God, stop thinking about what you saw when you looked up Thanos stans!) at flashing lights, which were sensors/cameras. She finds the watch, but also uncovers a piece of paper that indicates Clint's family is being tracked. They realize it's Maya's place right before she tries to take Kate down. 

In the meantime, a certain familiar face covered in a suit and mask with green goggles attacks Clint on the roof. Yes, folks. That is Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) from "Black Widow"! Those goggles? She wears similar ones in the comics, but we didn't need that to tell us who this was. The fighting style combined with the fact that we all knew she was going to be in the series was a dead giveaway. Also, she's got red stun gauntlets that indicate her Black Widow status to Clint.

If you recall, the post-credits scene in "Black Widow" showed Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) recruiting Yelena by telling her that Hawkeye killed her sister. The fight is fantastic, involving Kate getting stuck in the middle of Clint's zipline, Yelena, Clint, Kate, and Maya all fighting, and Yelena doing the Natasha landing pose that she made fun of her sister for. We also see Clint having a terrible moment when Kate falls off the building, reminding him of Natasha's death. 

There were a few other moments in here that stood out: 

Clint strapping frozen food to his injuries is so relatable that I now love Hawkeye the most!

So Eleanor knows that Kate logged into her computer. I wonder why Kate didn't realize that her mom would see that, since she also works for the company. Now that Eleanor knows that part, does she know exactly what Kate looked up?

Kazi is being set up as a sort of sympathetic guy, but in the comics he's the Clown, a very dark character who kills to get to Clint. It will be interesting to see if he gets a different treatment as the show finishes out its run and maybe continues when the "Echo" spin-off series begins. Also, Kazi actor Fra Fee looks so much like Kit Harington that it's hard not to say, "You know nothing, Jon Snow," whenever he appears on the screen. What happens if we see Kit playing Black Knight in the MCU as was teased in "Eternals," and there is a crossover? Twinsies!

Hailee Steinfeld is just damn good at acting. Watching her response to seeing her mother and Jack happy while trying to contain her hatred of him was pretty great. It's going to break her heart when Eleanor inevitably becomes a villain (I think).

The station Clint is listening to in the show, 107.6 Lite FM, is indeed New York's Christmas music station.

Are we going to finish the series with Clint giving Kate a collapsible bow like he mentions in the episode? It's the perfect gift for a young vigilante!

The ending hurt. It was like the end of "Harry and the Hendersons" when Harry is being told to leave. Sniff.

More Pizza Dog, please!