Hawkeye Just Got Endgame’s Blip Wrong

Warning: Contains spoilers for Hawkeye episode 4.

In Hawkeye episode 4, “Partners, Am I Right?,” Kate Bishop talks about Thanos and the events of Avengers: Endgame but makes a key mistake about the Blip. Despite his death at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Thanos and his actions have loomed large over the MCU Phase 4 as many of the plots have served as near direct responses to the events of his snap. This is understandable, given that every character in the MCU either disappeared for five years and came back to a changed world, or spent five years living without their loved ones.

After leaving the Bishop’s penthouse, Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) have a playful Christmas celebration together. After various hijinks, this leads to a more personal conversation and Kate manages to prod Clint into opening up to her a bit. Their conversation turns to his first meeting with Natasha Romanoff, giving more backstory to that relationship while foreshadowing a masked Yelena Belova’s anticipated MCU return at the end of the episode. Kate then correctly guesses that Barton’s family was lost after the events of Avengers: Infinity War. 

The problem for Hawkeye comes in how Kate Bishop raises the loss of Barton’s family. She asks Clint Barton if he “lost his family in the Blip?” In the post-Endgame MCU, various new terms have been coined to talk about Thanos and his actions. The term “Blip” is first raised in Spider-Man: Far From Home. However, “Blip” refers to the period of five years when half the population was gone, as well as their return, not to Thanos’ original snap that caused those people to disappear.

This might have been a mistake and Kate Bishop might have meant that Clint’s family was lost “during the blip” or “in the snap.” However, there is a larger possibility that could be an intentional choice on the part of Hawkeye and the MCU to represent how lexical choices can have power and meaning as they change over time. After the original invention of the term “the Blip,” the language might have evolved to cover a wider range of meanings. It is probably a lot easier for people to talk about people being lost to the vague and minimizing “Blip” than to refer directly to the actions of Thanos by referring to “the Snap.”

While it could be a mistake, it could also be an important point about how people’s choice of words can be important and ultimately used to defend themselves by guarding against certain feelings and emotions. The importance of this sort of way of viewing the world, removing agency from Thanos in the discussion of the Snap and the Blip, is subtly highlighted in this scene as well. Clint Barton is using a coffee cup borrowed from the apartment of Kate Bishop’s aunt at several points throughout Hawkeye episode 4, but it is not until this conversation with Kate that the text on the cup becomes clear: “Thanos was right.”

The choice of the mug is presumably an intentional choice on Clint Barton’s part, appealing to his wry sense of humor given that there were surely other mugs in Kate’s aunt’s apartment. While a section of the population is arguing that the removal of half of all life was the correct choice, those directly hurt by it are finding the best way to deal with their pain and trauma and Hawkeye is placing those two ideas alongside each other in a powerfully subtle way here.

Hawkeye releases new episodes Wednesday on Disney+.