Eleanor’s initial reaction to the video’s fine—she’s in elite black hat corporate security after all.

Ok, but what about the watch itself is supposed to identify Laura more than the Ronin gear would identify Clint?

The problem there is that what we see of Kazi’s behavior is pretty consistent and it’s Maya who misread the situation. But everything that led her to do so is in the background, either cut for time or the MCU’s sexlessness or saved for the spinoff.

Well, that could just be the difference between being your 20s and your 30s? Not that I think it needs to be realistically explained.

This isn’t a complaint, but a fair question to ask is why a character whose signature weapon immobilizes people without really harming them would not simply have left Kate writhing on the elevator floor. The MCU’s always been about starting from the story beats and working backward.

“I’m all for womens’ rights but since abusive men aren’t necessarily a womens’ rights issue, I just wanted to mention that I’m not only in this for the misandry before we really get to it.”

If she doesn’t know what happened

Not impossible, but the thing about the explanation to Maya is the more Clint knew at the time he was helping Kingpin cement control of the gang, the worse it scans in terms of the MCU’s usual morality—the parallel here will be that Yelena decides not to kill Clint bc it’d be on behalf of villains, and thus she’s no…

No, I mean there’s no reason for Clint to trace the informant back to Kingpin after hitting the shop unless he had misgivings about it, hence talking about being used/manipulated.

If Yelena knew that Eleanor had hired her, why was it necessary for her to trail Eleanor to determine that that was the woman behind her hiring?

I’m not sure how credible it is in terms of inworld timing, but it’s what we’re led to think. Right after Kate leaves the penthouse, Eleanor leaves a voicemail requesting an urgent callback from an unidentified person. It’s possible she called Val, or Fisk or some other go-between, but I don’t think we’ve seen…

The wording’s actually pretty consistent—Val says that Clint is responsible for Natasha’s death, and Yelena tells Kate that he got her killed.

she retreated last episode and Hawkeye had her pretty much beat this episode.

Who knows, but that’s how it felt at the time. We only see Yelena for a few seconds before Val cuts in, but she walks up to the gravesite and just looks at the headstone before Val blows her nose.

That makes sense on a certain level, except that Clint was already out in the open by coming to NYC, and even Kate’s access to Bishop Security is able to easily track his location. Including the Ronin gear as causal rather than coincidental just makes it make all more complicated, IMO.

Sorry for so many different replies, but the reason Yelena needed to be hired for this is because without it, she has no reason to want to kill Clint, and the plot needs her to attack him before they’re able to talk.

Well, for starters, there’s the Chekov’s gun of Jack’s swordplay, Kingpin’s confirmedly in play, and honestly, I’m not sure Maya’s convinced? Fisk is her uncle whom she’s been close with since she was a child, and Clint’s only got his word that he was behind the hit on the Tracksuits. I don’t read her confronting Kazi…

Yelena’s a spy, so I don’t think her following Eleanor really needs to be explained; it could be Val scheming, it could be Yelena doing more background work, it could be happenstance. It’s not explained, and though it might be getting saved for more worldbuilding, it doesn’t particularly have to be.

Possibly? But we’re having an unseasonably warm December in the mid-Atlantic right now and the trees are bald.

I don’t think there’s much to explore with Clint morally, tbh. He feels terrible about the things he’s done, but only to the extent he suffers no consequences for it. It’s why he leads with the threat, which feels pretty nonsensical under the circumstances.