TV Rewind: Hawkeye Perfectly Captures the Joy and Melancholy of the Christmas Season

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

Despite being the most wonderful time of the year, the Christmas season can actually be very difficult. From having to see your least favorite relatives to the constant reminder that the magic of childhood has long since fled from your being, Christmas brings both internal and external crises with its tinsel and holly down the chimney each year. While there have been many TV episodes (or sometimes entire shows) and movies made about the complicated feelings that come with the holiday season, there is one show that stands out from the rest: Marvel Studios’ Hawkeye. 

It’s no secret that the MCU’s attempts at television have been… inconsistent at best, and straight-up bad at worst. For every one WandaVision, it seems that there are four Secret Invasions or Moon Knights to argue the point that Marvel simply has not cracked the code when it comes to making TV shows (which may be due to the fact that they were, pointedly, not making TV shows the way that they should be made; you know, with showrunners and writers’ rooms…). But Hawkeye, at its most superhero-focused, is a street-level coming of age and redemption romp, and at its most grounded, a genuinely moving examination of the holiday season through the heightened world the MCU has always offered. 

Following Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop as she gets caught up in a dangerous conspiracy surrounding a suit once worn by the murderous Ronin, she teams up with Jeremy Renner’s jaded Clint Barton to clear her name in time for Christmas, which is just around the corner. Hawkeye deals in Christmas cheer and sadness through its various superhero threads, which each find their grounded origin in real, human emotion and realistic holiday scenarios. 

Clint, who lost his family for five years during the Blip, simply wants to make Christmas perfect for his family. He takes his kids to New York City for a holiday getaway, hitting up Rogers: The Musical on Broadway and discussing their pre-Christmas agenda over dinner. But when his past gets in the way, Clint has to continue to delay his return until he finally makes it home Christmas morning. One of the most simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking moments of the entire series comes in the form of a phone call shared between Clint and his youngest son, Nate (Cade Woodward). Clint lost his hearing aid in a fight, so when his phone buzzes with an incoming call from his wife, he can’t hear who is actually on the line when he picks up the phone. Turns out, Clint’s youngest son Nate was bored and used his mother’s phone to call him, so Kate helps him respond by writing down what his son says. It’s an adorable game of almost-charades until Nate insists that it would be okay if Clint couldn’t make it home for Christmas. Clint’s attempts to do and be everything for his family while balancing his superhero life find their roots in the pressure to make every Christmas special and perfect, but Nate’s kindhearted attempt to make his father understand that he still loves him whether he’s home for Christmas movie marathon night or not pushes back against those expectations; even at his young age, he understands that Christmas is about spending whatever time you can with the ones you love, offering forgiveness and leniency to both yourself and others. 

Hawkeye also portrays the inherent grief present within the holiday season. There will always be reminders of the people you have loved and lost lingering amidst the cheer, with those empty spaces feeling even more barren in the glow of the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. For both Clint and Yelena (Florence Pugh), they mourn the loss of their friend and sister Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), and the anger and pain is magnified tenfold by the Christmas setting. Yelena’s struggle to reconcile with the fact that she lost not only five years of her life, but also five years (and, ultimately, five Christmases) with Natasha during the Blip is heart-wrenching. She is sad and angry and looking for someone to blame, only to ultimately realize that hurting Clint won’t heal her pain. In fact, her healing starts long before she exchanges blows with Clint on the ice at Rockefeller Center, during her “girls night” with Kate Bishop. Yelena expresses genuine gratitude for Kate keeping her company over her mac and cheese dinner, with Kate offering this lonely and hurt woman kindness—even if her fear was ever-present during the interaction. Yelena’s heart grew three sizes that day, as evidenced by the text Kate later receives, informing her of her worst nightmare: her mother isn’t who she thought she was. 

Through Kate’s newfound knowledge, Hawkeye explores the growing pains of getting older and losing that sparkle of childhood innocence. There is a haunting element to Kate’s coming of age, an unshakable sadness as this young woman is forced to grow up in the blink of an eye. When Yelena sends Kate the video of her mother meeting with Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), finally learning the truth of her mother’s longstanding betrayal and shady dealings, it’s like watching her learn that Santa isn’t real—magnified to the nth degree. She learns that all the pretty, shiny things in the Bishop apartment were obtained with mob money, and that every good and just thing she believed her mother to be was all a lie. It’s the pain and devastation of growing up condensed into a single text message, the disillusionment of adulthood hitting through a single sentence sent from a woman attempting to kill her partner. 

From the beginning of the series, Kate is naïve, stubborn, and genuinely hopeful and happy. She sees teaming up with Clint has an opportunity to help people, the one thing she’s always wanted to do since she was a child. By the end of the series’ six-episode run, Kate is markedly different. She turns her own mother over to the police, her face is covered in cuts and scrapes, and she has now seen all sides of a cruel and unjust world. But, even in the midst of all that heartache and pain, Kate still finds hope and joy in her Christmas morning with the Bartons in the series’ final moments.

In that way, Hawkeye remains hopeful that there is still magic and joy to be had within the Christmas season, even if so much pain, anger, or heartache hangs heavy over so many adult hearts. Kate lost her innocence, she lost her mother, and she ultimately lost the life she had always known, but even in all of that, spending the morning around a Christmas tree with a new warm and welcoming family is more than enough. Hawkeye‘s finale is titled, “So This Is Christmas?” after the John Lennon and Yoko Ono song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and that subdued and slightly melancholy song perfectly captures this series’ beating heart: adult Christmases will always come with a hint of pain and sadness, but hope and joy can always be found, too.

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Anna Govert is the TV Editor of Paste Magazine. For any and all thoughts about TV, film, and her unshakable love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can follow her @annagovert.

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