Hawkeye Episode 6: MCU Easter Eggs and Marvel Comics References

This article contains major Hawkeye spoilers, as well as potential spoilers for the wider MCU.

Hawkeye Episode 6

Marvel’s Hawkeye season finale is here, and it’s the perfect capstone to a virtually perfect MCU series. Heavy on action, with just the right amount of humor, and a heaping helping of the brilliant Vincent D’Onofrio returning as Wilson Fisk, Hawkeye went out strong. Maybe not with as many explicit Marvel Easter eggs as in previous episodes, but a lot of fun nonetheless.

Here’s everything we found. And if you spot something we missed, let us know in the comments!

SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS?

The episode’s title, “So This is Christmas?” is taken from the opening line of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s holiday standard, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” which opens with the singer asking “So, this is Christmas…and what have you done?”

KINGPIN

• It feels like a deliberate choice to make Kingpin’s intro as colorfully lit as possible, with festive purple and green lights in the background. It’s a nice contrast to the starker, street-level realism of Daredevil and other Marvel Netflix shows and how Wilson Fisk was presented there. Plus, he’s wearing his traditional comics white, which he didn’t wear regularly until the very end of Daredevil’s run. The jewel-top cane is a nice (and stylish!) touch from the comics, as well.

• There’s nothing here to explicitly contradict the events of Daredevil, so it’s still possible that all the Marvel Netflix shows exist on the Sacred Timeline. “People need to be reminded that this city belongs to me,” feels like a sly meta reference to that.

• Does Kingpin seem a little tougher to you than he did on Daredevil? That’s because they’re leaning into the comics idea that he isn’t fat, he’s all muscle. Basically a human hippopotamus, Kingpin is incredibly tough. Not tough enough to stop a bullet, mind you, but we don’t expect that ending to really be his ending.

• Kingpin’s ridiculous Hawaiian shirt look is taken from Amazing Spider-Man: Family Business by Mark Waid, James Robinson, and Gabriele Dell’Otto, a graphic novel about Peter Parker meeting a woman believed to be his long-lost sister. 

KATE BISHOP

• Kate and Kingpin’s fight takes place at classic NYC toy store FAO Schwartz. This is the second battle in a toy store this season after episode 3’s brawl in a defunct KB Toys.

• Kate says that her mother “doesn’t even jaywalk.” That is demonstrably false. All New York City residents jaywalk at every opportunity.

• One of the new codenames that Kate suggests for herself is “Ladyhawk” not knowing that Clint is perfectly happy handing the name off to her. Ladyhawke, however, is the name of a kind of cool fantasy flick from 1985 directed by Richard Donner and starring Matthew Broderick. Coincidence? Probably. But you should totally watch Ladyhawke anyway!

BLACK WIDOW

• After brawling through the office, Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova unknowingly reenact their mentors’ battle over sacrifice. Yelena jumped out of the window despite Kate Bishop’s attempts to stop her. The imagery of Yelena’s descent is similar to that of Natasha’s, albeit with a safer landing.

• Kate Bishop (sorry, we are continuing Yelena’s tradition of only referring to Kate by her full name in this section) and Yelena have a rather chill elevator fight, compared to, say, the ridiculously great elevator fight in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

ECHO

• When Kingpin and Maya have their meeting, “Silent Night” is playing. That’s just a little too on the nose for the deaf character.

• As Kazi dies, he places his hand on Maya’s face just like the way her dying father did. Presumably, once she fully becomes Echo, she’ll have the handprint design painted in the same spot.

KAZI

When Kazi is on his way to really take care of business, he’s wearing a brown overcoat that is very much like the one he wears when he goes out on hits as “The Clown” in the Hawkeye comics where he made his debut.

THE OWL

Clint encounters an owl in the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree. In 2020, an owl was actually discovered in the enormous Christmas tree brought to New York City from Oneonta upstate. She was dubbed Rockefeller (“Rocky” for short), rehabilitated and released back into the wild. She’s now the subject of her own Christmas childrens’ book: The Christmas Owl.

PIZZA DOG

This episode doesn’t have enough Pizza Dog for our taste, BUT…we do finally hear him get referred to by his actual name from the comics: Lucky. Pizza Dog is just a code name, of course. We love you, Lucky!

THE ROLEX WATCH AND AGENT 19

The mystery of the Rolex watch from the black market auction is solved in this episode, and it belongs to none other than Laura Barton. It’s engraved with a “19” on the back, which confirms some of our suspicions from a few episodes back: Laura is a retired SHIELD agent. But if she’s Agent 19, that’s the same SHIELD agent designation held by Bobbi “Mockingbird” Morse in Marvel Comics.

The only possible problem? Laura can’t be Bobbi Morse, because Bobbi already exists in the MCU, having appeared in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD TV series. However, to the best of our memory, she was never referred to as “Agent 19” there. In the comics, Hawkeye and Mockingbird were married, but there was never any romantic relationship between Adrienne Palicki’s Bobbi and Jeremy Renner’s Clint. Making Laura a retired “Agent 19” nicely ties a little piece of comics continuity to this show, without eliminating an element of Agents of SHIELD from continuity.

THE POST-CREDITS SCENE 

We finally get the full rendition of “Save Our City” from Rogers: The Musical in the post-credits scene. We already unpacked that in detail here, but the NYC-based members of the DoG Marvel crew would like to just draw special attention to lines like “the rent and the garbage are both sky high” and “we lived through the ‘80s and this too shall pass.” 

MISCELLANEOUS TRICK ARROWS

• The trick arrow building montage is an absolute delight, from the Stark arrowheads to Chekov’s Pym Particles (and their brilliant deployment in the episode). It’s so rare to see a “street level” Marvel project just completely embrace the ridiculousness of being a superhero, and this did it beautifully.

• Clint and Kate get their very own hero/team-up shot like we had in The Avengers during the battle on the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

• There appears to be a “Dragons of Despair” poster in LARPer HQ. Old-school Dungeons & Dragons fans may know this as the first adventure module in the Dragonlance series.

• We demand Tony Dalton in a Swordsman spinoff, thanks.

Spot anything we missed? Let us know in the comments!