I feel the same way. It felt like it came completely out of nowhere. I liked this episode otherwise but I don’t think the writers did a good job (or did anything?) to lead up to this moment and make it believable. 

I was watching some Capaldi era episodes and seeing how great the TARDIS looked and I thought the exact same thing!

Yeah I think this series was going for a looser shaggier feel than other MCU Disney Plus shows have done so far for better or for worse. That meant that a lot of plot elements didn’t really pay off in a clean way or at all and led to a lot of the plot goofiness which you’ve largely accurately described. I didn’t think…

Dinofrio may be 6-4 and 220 pounds but I’m pretty sure Kingpin, even this non comic version, is waaaaay bigger than that

Well Kabeletown is a family company

I don’t know anything about Kingpin at all that wasn’t in “into the spiderverse” so I don’t understand his deal at all: like, does he have super  powers or is he just a really big dude? It seemed like the way he just laughed off Kate’s arrows that maybe he can’t be injured easily and the way he was throwing her around…

That sketch was long as all hell. And it showed how a lot of the references on SNL have always been dated already. Dean Martin’s drunk bit was a 60s 70s thing I think. 

I really liked Pete’s Pete in 2054 film as well, and your bringing up Schillervision is very apt. I know the idea was for it to be a Raging Bull reference but it reminded me of early SNL Tom Schiller like that one classic Gilda Radner one that everyone loves. It’s amazing that it was made to be part of a more normal…

It’s been left vague what Clint actually did as “Ronin” but clearly we’re meant to think it’s something beyond the pale and not within the usual collateral damage and other killing he did as an Avenger. I’m not saying it makes a lot of sense or that there’s a consistent standard here but in universe everybody thinks…

Yeah this is what I’m going with. It’s still just really bad writing and storytelling

That’s basically all of them now lol

That’s a very generous way of parsing it

I don’t think it’s a true retcon, just really muddled and bad writing. I guess we’re supposed to think something like Julia Louis Dreyfus simply told Yelena that Clint killed Natasha (which is technically true but removes context) but at some later point Eleanor actually hired to kill Clint

Also for me a lot of the problem is the vagueness about what exactly Clint did when he was “Ronin” and why exactly it was so over the line. 

I thought it was going to be a “two hander” for Renner and Steinfeld. There’s been a bit of that but there’s also been all this stuff with the boring Maya/Echo, buddy comedy stuff with Yelena and Kate Bishop etc. It’s just a pretty shaggy ensemble thing

I agree on both accounts. Yelena is a better and more interesting character than either Hawkeye or Kate Bishop. Hailee Steinfeld is a great actor but the character of Kate Bishop as written just isn’t that compelling or likable to me. And Maya’s not a very interesting character either and the show has spent way too…

I definitely like the formal experimentation of it and would like to see them do more of it

I don’t know how often it’s said but I think it’s at least somewhat accurate. For a real mind-blower Scarlett Johannson is literally twice Billie Eilish’s age

I agree with you that the TikTok sketch didn’t come from the same ugly generational warfare place as for example that horrible Gen Z hospital sketch but I still don’t think the sketch worked for reasons I say above. Basically to me it was neither an accurate recreation of what scrolling your TikTok feed is like nor a…

Yeah all of the staging and lighting of that first number was fantastic