Ultimate Spider-Man Episode Thirty-One: Hawkeye

Hawkeye

First Aired: February 10th, 2013

Synopsis: Spider-Man heads to a SHIELD base in New Jersey where the new SHIELD Helicarrier is being built, since he needs some space from his team. Shortly after arriving Beetle appears and attacks it, but he's driven off by Nick Fury and Hawkeye, one of the Avengers. Fury explains that Beetle was probably there to disrupt the helicarrier being built but will be going after Spider-Man for revenge now, and as such he's assigning Hawkeye to protect Spider-Man. Spider-Man's disappointed, but begrudgingly accepts it. Shortly afterwards, they're in the city, and Hawkeye's able to find Beetle from his armour's energy signature. Spider-Man rushes in blindly, and after fighting a swarm of Beetle's drones, the two heroes get their hands stuck together due to a mishap with Spider-Man's webbing. Spider-Man doesn't trust Hawkeye to be able to hit Beetle with an arrow when he's only got one hand free, but when he tries to help accidentally breaks Hawkeye's bow.

The heroes are able to ram Beetle with Hawkeye's skycycle, which takes him out for the moment. It doesn't last long, however, and Beetle soon smashes them into a building that's still under construction. Hawkeye is able to injure Beetle enough to distract him, and after the two save themselves from falling through the air, realise that Beetle's lost them. For some reason this means that Beetle will return to where the helicarrier's being built, so Spider-Man and Hawkeye take a taxi there. As they fight Beetle, he unintentionally destroys the sticky bonds keeping Spider-Man and Hawkeye bound, and Hawkeye distracts Beetle long enough for Spider-Man to take him out. In the aftermath, he's locked up and Spider-Man apologises to Hawkeye for not giving him enough respect.

Clint Barton is Actually the Best:

• When Spider-Man and Hawkeye are in the city, Spider-Man shows off his spider-cycle to the latter. Hawkeye comments that he's "not sure why a guy who swings on webs needs a set of wheels," because Hawkeye cares not for your toy advertisements.
• There's a brief respite in the battle with Beetle where Hawkeye tries to cut through his and Spider-Man's bonds, and during that time, he tells Spider-Man that "despite this whole situation, you're pretty good at this stuff." This is because he's excellent at reading people and realises that telling Spider-Man the truth (i.e. that he's done nothing but make the situation more and more difficult throughout the night) will do nothing to help their situation.
• I'm not going to go through every time that Clint points out that Spider-Man screwed up or that he's wrong, but it happens a lot in this episode, and he's right every single time.

Review: In general I'm not a big fan of episodes that are mostly an extended fight sequence - they're difficult to write synopses for, for one thing, and for another, they're just not really that interesting. A show like Spectacular Spider-Man could probably make them interesting, between different problems to overcome in the fight and the reasons behind the fight, but Ultimate Spider-Man's fight scenes are generally bland at best. They generally consist of random events until it's time for Spider-Man (or occasionally, one of his teammates) to defeat the villain with one or two hits. This episode is no exception - "Oh no, Beetle's drones!" "Oh no, Beetle fired a missile!" "Oh no, Beetle's smashing us through multiple floors of a building and somehow we haven't broken all our bones!"

Making this episode worse is that Spider-Man's incredibly obnoxious throughout the entire thing. He heads off to see how the Helicarrier's reconstruction is going, since he wants his teammates out of his house (in spite of his continued insistence that they're his family). He complains that he's getting Hawkeye helping him because he's not an Avenger he knows. He rushes off to fight Beetle the moment he's detected in the city, ignoring Hawkeye telling him to hold back - and this is all before we've gotten to the real meat of the episode. He consistently acts like a five-year old, unable to shut up or listen to what his ally has to say. In most episodes his immaturity is balanced a bit throughout the episode, but here he's just a pain throughout the entire thing.

Naturally, Hawkeye is the one bright shining spot in this episode. I'll admit that this isn't my favourite Hawkeye (in order: 80s Hawkeye, Thunderbolts-era Hawkeye, 60s Hawkeye, Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, all the rest) - he's cold and professional, and I don't know why his costume has red rather than purple highlights. But he knows what he's doing, he's got cool arrows, and he holds in his rage at Spider-Man a lot better than I am, just watching the show. And let's be real - if he's not the highlight in this episode, what is?