Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ep 6, "One World, One People" and Season Overview

 

Well. This has been quite a ride. 

You can't help but compare this show to WandaVision, because that show set such a high bar I think all the following Marvel series will suffer by comparison. WandaVision's laser focus was Wanda's grief and the actions she took as a result, and the show benefited because of it. While this show had its highlights (episode 4, "The Whole World Is Watching," and episode 5, "Truth," were the two best episodes), it seemed unfocused and thematically, it was wandering all over the place. 

This is not to say the characters, for the most part (with some glaring exceptions, especially Karli Morgenthau) weren't well treated. The whole point of this show was to prove that Sam Wilson is the worthy successor to Steve Rogers and deserves to take up the shield and the title of Captain America, and there the show succeeded admirably. (I read somewhere about some wag complaining that Sam ends up in the same place here as at the end of Avengers: Endgame, with the shield in hand, and thus the entire show was superfluous. Well yeah, we the audience always knew Sam was worthy, but Sam had to decide that he was worthy. He had many conflicting emotions to work through before he felt he could take the shield back, with the end result being he has no reservations about stepping up and taking on the shield and title.) Bucky also has to deal with his lingering trauma and guilt over being the Winter Soldier, and that storyline succeeds as well (with some help from Counselor Sam, utilizing his background at the VA). 

John Walker, however, is another kettle of fish. This is not to take away from Wyatt Russell's excellent performance in a pretty complicated role. But I almost wish the show had left him where we saw him in the mid-credits scene of Episode 5, pounding out his own handmade Captain America shield after being stripped of the title (and after visiting Lemar's parents and lying to their faces about how their son died). As far as I was concerned, his character did not need the BIG, FAKEY REDEMPTION SCENE in the finale, where he had to decide between killing Karli Morgenthau and rescuing the people in the truck. That long-drawn-out shot of Walker shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, visibly hesitating and finally, almost grudgingly, moving to try to drag the truck back from the edge was just too much. And then afterwards, to show some back-slapping camaraderie with Bucky, when just two episodes prior Walker had murdered someone in cold blood? Nope nope nope. I was reading an interview with the show's director, Kari Skogland, explaining how they structured the finale so viewers would end up liking John Walker, and I just rolled my eyes. At best, John Walker is a smug, complicated, entitled villain who tried to be Captain America and failed miserably, and that's how he should have been portrayed. I wish they had not included him in the final fight at all, and just showed him at the end with the Countess Valentina and his new U.S. Agent anti-Captain America suit. He would've still gotten to hug his wife and exclaim, "I'm back," four times over, and the audience (and the show) would have left with everyone knowing he's still an asshole. 

But my irritation over that pales to the manner in which Karli Morgenthau and the Flag Smashers were treated. Honestly, I think the MCU's biggest blunder so far is having Bruce Banner undo Thanos' Snap, as this opened an enormous wriggling can of worms they seem to be completely unprepared to deal with. (But of course had they not made Avengers: Endgame, Kevin Feige wouldn't have gotten to boast [at least temporarily] of having the biggest money-making film of all time, and presumably we wouldn't have all these Disney Plus MCU shows paid for.) Just as in WandaVision, this show dances right up to the edge of saying something serious about the consequences of Blipping three and a half million people back into existence five years after they left...in this case, through the storyline of Karli and the Flag Smashers, who are trying to return Earth to what they view as the superior state of "One World, One People." But each time we started to think, "Huh, she's making a helluva lot of sense," the writers wound up putting some gratuitous "let's kill the hostages" dialogue in Karli's mouth to rob her of any nuance and turn her back into a cliched terrorist. Her characterization and motivation were inconsistent and contradictory, and while actor Erin Prettyman did her best with the often bad material she was given, that whole storyline just left a bad taste in my mouth. 

But Anthony Mackie showed everyone that the shield and title are in good hands, and I wanted to post his climactic speech in the finale in its entirety (as transcribed here):

"You have to stop calling them terrorists," Cap responds. "Your peacekeeping troops carrying weapons are forcing millions of people into settlements around the world, right? What do you think those people are going to call you? These labels...terrorist, refugee, thug. They're often used to get around the question, 'Why?'"

When it's pointed out that Sam has no idea how complicated the situation is, he responds: "You know what, you're right. And that's a good thing. We finally have a common struggle now. Think about that. For once, all the people who've been begging, and I mean literally begging for you to feel how hard any given day is, now you know. How did it feel to be helpless? If you can remember what it felt like to be helpless and face a force so powerful it could erase half the planet, you would know that you're about to have the exact same impact. This isn't about easy decisions, Senator."

When the Senator reiterates that Sam doesn't understand, it's then the hero really strikes a chord.

"I'm a Black man carrying the stars and stripes. What don't I understand? Every time I pick this thing up, I know there are millions of people out there who are going to hate me for it. Even now, here, I feel it. The stares, the judgement, and there's nothing I can do to change it, yet I'm still here. No super serum, no blonde hair or blue eyes. The only power I have is that I believe we can do better. We can't demand that people step up if we don't meet them halfway. You control the banks. Shit, you can move borders. You can knock down a forest with an email; you can move a million people with a phone call. The question is, who's in the room with you when you're making those decisions? Is it the people you're going to impact? Or is it just more people like you?

"I mean, this girl died trying to stop you and no one has stopped for one second to ask, 'Why?' You've gotta do better, Senator. You've got to step up. Because if you don't, the next Karli will and you don't want to see 2.0. People believed in her cause so much that they helped her defy the strongest governments in the world. Why do you think that is? Look, you people have just as much power as an insane God or a misguided teenager. The question you have to ask yourself is, 'How are you going to use it?' " 

This is where the show excelled, in the story of Sam and Bucky...and for a while, at least, the downfall of John Walker, before the misbegotten attempt at redemption. It fell on its face with Karli and the Flag Smashers, and the unnecessary inclusion of Sharon Carter (in the end, I really don't know what she was there for, other than to give Emily VanKamp a fat paycheck). Overall, the show was ambitious, spotty and muddled, and only partially succeeded. 

Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ep 5, "Truth"

 

Now that's more like it.

The show is recovering from the stumble of episode 3, "Power Broker." This episode allows both the viewer and the characters to pause, take a breath, and come to terms with what has happened so far. It also slots the pieces into place for the finale. It does all this via a series of welcome character interactions that let Sam and Bucky, and Sam and Sarah, and Sam and Isaiah, and John Walker and his wife and a surprise guest....just talk to one another. 

I don't care if anyone thinks that's boring. It's not, if you're invested in the characters. And you can't get invested in the characters by constant run-slam-bang-pew pew battle scenes (as much fun as watching the Dora Milaje whip John Walker's ass in the last episode admittedly was). This is one advantage these limited streaming series have over the big screen. They can slow down and look at the characters in a way the movies simply don't have time for. We saw it in WandaVision, and we're seeing it here. 

Not that we didn't get a pew pew battle scene in this episode, but there's only one. It's at the beginning, and follows the horrific scene that concluded last week's episode, when John Walker murdered a man with the Captain America shield. He runs away to a warehouse, bloody and shaken, and has flashbacks of Lemar. Bucky and Sam follow him, and the resulting fight is not only a throwdown between the three main characters--it's a treatise on the future of Captain America himself. Wyatt Russell does fine work here (indeed, throughout the entire episode) in showing how Walker has become unhinged, either by taking the serum or the weight of his own entitlement (he repeatedly yells, "I am Captain America!" and re: the shield, "It's mine") But Sam and Bucky succeed in taking it from him, even though he rips Sam's wings off. Sam and Bucky knock Walker out cold, and Bucky picks up the shield and drops it to the concrete beside Sam (with a pointed look that clearly says, "Steve gave the shield to you, jackass").

This isn't the last blow this episode gives John Walker, as he's given what seems to be a combination Senate/military hearing (although one would think the legislative branch of government wouldn't have anything to do with military decisions, but I suppose that was so they could use a previously seen actor) where he's stripped of the Captain America title, his rank and pension, and given an "other than honorable" discharge. Which seems to be getting off awfully damned light for murdering a man in cold blood in front of the entire world, but obviously the gov't and military want to sweep this under the rug as quickly as possible.  Walker tries to object: "I only ever did what you asked of me, what you told me to be and trained me to do, and I did it well. You built me." This goes over about as well as you'd expect, even though it's sort of true. Not to take away any of Walker's culpability, but he was never given the support, logistical/psychological and otherwise, a person should receive to take on the mantle of Captain America. (Not that Steve Rogers did either, as far as that goes. But John Walker is a helluva lot less stable than Steve Rogers.) It's at the end of this scene that we get our heralded cameo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the Contessa  Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a character that apparently has decades of history in the comics. She tells Walker that she knows he took the supersoldier serum and he doesn't have the shield anymore, and she'll be in touch. 

Walker also goes to visit Lemar's parents, and he tells them the same lie he yelled at Sam and Bucky in the warehouse, that the man he killed murdered their son. This seems to be a lie he's also telling himself, in a sad and pathetic attempt to justify what he did. After he leaves, he walks down the alley and comes upon a poster tacked to the wall, put up right after his being made Captain America, proclaiming "Cap is back." This leads to the after-credits scene where we see him with a welding mask on, painting and hammering and firing metal--and making his own Captain America shield (festooned with his Medals of Honor). (Although a homemade welded shield sure as heck isn't going to hold up like the vibranium one does, and he should know that.) Again, Wyatt Russell's nuanced performance almost makes you feel sorry for the guy--but now he's on a collision course with Sam Wilson, who as we see in this episode, fully deserves to be Captain America and has finally made up his mind to embrace the role. 

Before Sam does so, though, he takes the shield back to Baltimore to visit Isaiah Bradley and get his story. Isaiah sets Sam down and tells it, in a truly extraordinary scene (one of the two best scenes in the episode). Isaiah was part of a group of Black soldiers who were experimented on with various strains of supersoldier serum, trying to duplicate the initial success with Steve Rogers. This didn't work well and Isaiah's fellow soldiers started dying, even as they were being sent on missions. Some of them were being held in a POW camp in Korea and the powers-that-be were going to bomb the camp and kill the prisoners, to hide what they were. Of course, Isaiah could not abide this and busted them all out of the camp. But the attrition rate continued, until he was the only one left--and he was experimented on for 30 years, with government scientists trying to determine why he had survived. His wife was told he was dead, and died herself before Isaiah was released, with the help of a sympathetic nurse who faked his death. 

Sam is understandably horrified by this and tries to talk Isaiah into going public with what was done to him. Isaiah, still bitter and justifiably so, refuses. He questions why Sam has the shield at all: "They will never let a Black man be Captain America, and even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be." Sam doesn't argue with him, but as the camera lingers on his face, you can see he doesn't really agree, either. At any rate, after this he takes the shield and tells his sister he's coming home. 

He goes home to Louisiana to think about what he has seen and learned, and figure out what to do next. But in these scenes, we get a deeper insight into who Sam Wilson really is--a man who has been taught by his family to give to the community (his parents did that for decades, and Sam calls in the favors owed to their family to get their boat fixed), and a man who cannot and will not squander what others have done for him. In another important conversation, with his sister Sarah, he finally hones in on what he has learned from Isaiah Bradley: "What would be the point of all that sacrifice if I wasn't willing to stand up and keep fighting?"

At that moment, in his face (and kudos for Anthony Mackie's performance), you can see it: he has made up his mind to take up the shield and become Captain America. There follows a training sequence, set to the show's terrific theme music, as Sam learns how the shield works (in defiance of all known laws of physics, but hey, vibranium seems to be like that) and hones his own body and reflexes to work along with it. In the last scene in the episode, his sidekick Torres says they have tracked Karli and the Flag Smashers to New York. Sam opens up the huge suitcase Bucky brought him earlier, containing one last favor from Ayo. We don't see what it is...yet. 

Speaking of Bucky, he has his own epiphanies in this episode, and is led to one of them by Sam, drawing on Sam's counseling experience. After tracking down Zemo and surrendering him to the Dora Milaje (and collecting that favor from Ayo) he heads on down to Louisiana to give Sam his gift. He ends up working alongside Sam on the boat (and flirting with Sarah) and the two of them come to a genuine understanding, which includes an apology to Sam: "When Steve told me what he was planning, I don't think either of us really understood what it felt like for a Black man to be handed the shield. How could we? I owe you an apology." He also confesses that the reason he reacted so badly to Sam's giving it up was "that shield's the closest thing I have left to a family." Sam points out that what Bucky has been doing to make amends for his actions as the Winter Soldier isn't cutting it, and that instead of concentrating on what would make him (Bucky) feel better, he should focus on what would make the people he wronged feel better. "Start with one person," he says. Of course, we know that one person will be the elderly Chinese man we met in the first episode, the one whose son Bucky killed. 

(In other I-Don't-See-the-Point-of-This news, Sharon Carter sends the villain from the very first episode, Baltroc, to New York to deliver weapons and explosives to Karli Morgenthau. Unless she plays a larger role in the finale--say, if she were revealed to be the Power Broker, driven to the dark side by her bitterness over basically being abandoned by the Avengers--I don't understand what the point was in having her in this series at all. Aside from Emily vanKamp's getting a hefty paycheck, which of course is sufficient motivation in and of itself. But the storyline sure hasn't done her character any favors.)

So. Everyone, including the viewer, had a chance to breathe, we see several important character beats, and all the pieces are in place for the finale. This series has been very uneven (and Karli's character has suffered the worst, with her wildly varying and contradictory characterization) but this episode got a lot of things right. Hopefully the finale will pick up on it. 

Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ep 4, "The Whole World Is Watching"

 

This episode was quite a turnaround, thankfully. If the show had produced another stinker like last week's "Power Broker," I would have seriously considered dumping it. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. 

(And Marvel? Let this be a lesson to you. Don't let the John Wick writer anywhere near your properties from now on. Keanu Reeves is in a class by himself; Sam and Bucky don't need to be Wick-ified.)

This episode moved the plot forward quite a bit, while still allowing for the nice character-based conversations and scenes that, as far as I am concerned, should be the heart of any story. The opening scene is wonderful, in Wakanda six years ago (and thus a year before Thanos snapped away half of the Earth's population), with Bucky and Florence Kasumba's Ayo, the Dora Milaje we saw in the final scene of the previous episode. Ayo has been working on deprogramming Bucky, and here she puts her work to the test. She says Bucky's trigger words, one at a time, while he winces and cringes and waits for his Winter Soldier programming to take hold, and flashbacks to his time as the Winter Soldier flash across the screen. But nothing happens, and at the end of the scene Bucky is crying with relief. Ayo says, "You are free. You are free." 

See, this sort of thing, the character exploration and nuance, is exactly what was lacking in the previous episode. We also get good character-based scenes with Sam, who draws upon his VA counselor training to attempt to talk down Karli Morgenthau. He tells Bucky and Zemo that Karli's not wrong; after the Snap, international borders pretty much ceased to exist as immigrants were welcomed to help countries rebuild, and world governments (or whichever governments were left, I suppose), came together to manage the remaining population and keep civilization running. Then, after the world population was restored, all those people were tossed into the street. In his conversation with Karli, Sam says he understands her motivations and agrees with her fight; just not the way she's going about it. It looks like he's found common ground there, and he might very well have succeeded in stopping her...if a certain red-white-and-blue bull in a china closet hadn't charged in, which I will get to. 

(Honestly, Marvel is better off not tackling the ramifications of the Blip at all, because the more they try to do so, the murkier and more unbelievable it gets. My blogpal Steve J. Wright discusses some of those ramifications here. Frankly, someone should have set the Avengers down in Endgame and made them debate whether or not the Snap should be reversed. It's five years later and the planet/civilization is probably starting to recover; and climate change and environmental degradation, like it or not, would have been greatly mitigated by the halving of the population. It seems to me reversing the Snap is tiptoeing toward the proposition of the cure being worse than the disease. That should have been a discussion for ethicists, not superheroes.)

Zemo is back to his smarmy manipulative kinda-villain self, using a bribe of Turkish Delight (which I've never eaten, but I've heard from several different sources that it's just yucky) to talk some kids into revealing the time and place of the funeral of Karli's adoptive mother, Donya Madani, and who later, after all hell breaks loose at the end of the episode, pursues Karli and tries to kill her. She drops the world's final remaining bottles of supersoldier serum, and when Zemo realizes what they are, he stomps them into tiny shards. Bucky had said, a couple of episodes back, that while Zemo is crazy he also has a code, and that seems to be true. 

But the biggest beneficiary of this much better written episode is John Walker. In "Power Broker" he was just an asshole; here, he seems to be morphing into a tragic asshole. He's obviously in over his head, burdened with the weight of the shield and the legacy of Steve Rogers. The second best scene in the episode takes place after the Dora Milaje--Ayo and another warrior--come in and try to take Zemo and end up kicking everyone's asses (which Sam tries to tell Walker is precisely what will happen; he says, "You're better taking on Bucky than the Dora Milaje"). This includes a stunned Walker, who starts out condescending to Ayo and says after she whups him, "They weren't even supersoldiers." Wyatt Russell is doing some very good work here--indeed, the acting throughout this episode is stellar--and the bewilderment on his face is almost enough to make the viewer feel sorry for the guy, as least until you remember his oozing condescension and entitled arrogance. Anyway, going back to the previous scene where Zemo destroys the serum, Walker shows up afterwards--and finds the one remaining vial. He looks at it for a long minute and tucks it in his pocket. 

The scene I'm talking about is right after that, when Walker and Lemar are trying to recover from having their butts kicked. Walker asks Lemar straight out if he would take the serum if he had it, and Lemar says, "Hell yeah." (When Zemo posed the same question to Sam, Sam's immediate reply was "No.") Lemar justifies this by saying that (paraphrasing) "power only amplifies who you already are," and when Walker says, "And me?" Lemar notes that he's earned three Medals of Honor and "consistently makes the right decisions in the heat of battle." (An opinion that, sadly, as shown by the ending of this episode, turns out to be dead wrong.) Walker notes that day in Afghanistan that earned him those honors was "the worst day of my life," and then states the motivation for him wanting to be Captain America: "We both know the things we had to do in Afghanistan to be awarded those medals felt a long way from being right. Being Cap is the first time I've had the chance to do something that actually feels right." Lemar counters, his mind still on the serum: "God, the lives we could have saved that day if we'd had that serum." 

I rewound that scene three times to write down the dialogue, because it defined what's going on with John Walker's character. At the end of the episode and the final confrontation with Karli and her crew, Walker bursts in and you realize he's taken the serum (among other things, he hurls the shield against a wall so hard it buries itself halfway into the sheetrock, and kicks one of Karli's followers through the air and down a flight of stairs). Karli's minions kidnap Lemar and tie him up, trying to lure Walker in so she can kill him. As Walker, Sam and Bucky battle to get to where Lemar is, he pulls a hidden knife out of his uniform and cuts himself free. When Karli comes running up, ready to kill Walker, Lemar throws himself between them--and Karli's superpowered kick sends Lemar smashing back against a concrete column and breaks his neck.

Karli and her crew take off running. Walker completely loses it and chases a random follower, pursuing the poor guy into a courtyard where they're surrounded by people. Walker doesn't care; he screams, "Where is she?" The man, realizing what is about to happen, tries to protest: "It wasn't me!" But Walker raises the shield like a scythe and drives it down into his body. We don't see it actually hit; we see the fellow's hand go limp and blood splatter across the flagstones, but when Walker stands up and away and the camera focuses on the shield, the bottom third of which is drenched in blood, you realize he probably decapitated that man. And the whole thing has been filmed on the phones of all the people in the courtyard, and Sam and Bucky, arriving too late to stop Walker, stand there looking at him in horror. 

My goodness. Watching it again, this episode was riveting. That's what I mean about John Walker being turned into a tragic asshole--but make no mistake, he's still an asshole, and Sam and Bucky need to take him down.

Two episodes remaining to do it. 

Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ep 3, "Power Broker"

 

Yeah....no.

This third episode, unfortunately, is not good. It's mainly a series of strung-together prison breaks, chases, fight scenes, shootouts and explosions, apparently written by the same person who wrote the John Wick movies. Now I have no objection to any of the above in and of themselves, but when those things come at the expense (and in one case, an actual regression) of character development, then...nope. 

Let's start with the worst thing: the new Captain America, John Walker, in both of his scenes this episode, is turned into a cliched asshole. Admittedly, this possibility was shown in the last episode, especially when he snapped at Sam and Bucky to stay out of his way when they refused to work with him. But that was also part and parcel of scenes giving the character some genuine nuance. He stated he didn't know if he could live up to the weight of the name and the shield, and reassured Sam and Bucky he wasn't trying to replace Steve Rogers (although that also came with the barb of wanting to get Rogers' "wingmen" on his side). But here? When Walker and Lemar raid the same house we saw Karli and the Flag Smashers hiding out last episode and the owner not only refuses to answer questions but spits in Walker's face, he loses it completely and yells, "Do you know who I am?"

Well. Any number of responses could be made to that, including, "Did you even watch the last episode, clueless writer-dude?" But since Marvel wants to keep this fairly family-friendly, the only thing that should have been said (and wasn't; the actual line in response was, "Yes, I do, and I don't care") was, "Yes, someone pretending to be Captain America." A prime opportunity was lost there, like so many other things in this episode. Where Walker and Lemar later turn up at the prison where Sam and Bucky (mostly Bucky, since he didn't tell Sam anything about it until the plan was already underway) bust Helmut Zemo out of prison, Walker states he knows what they did and he's going to go "off the books" for this one. Which apparently means like the lazy-ass second-rate Captain America he is portrayed in this episode as being, he is going to follow Sam and Bucky around and let them do all the work before swooping in to get the glory. This writing is inconsistent and contradictory, and I don't care if this person also wrote for Keanu Reeves, the showrunners should not have let him do this. 

This fundamental misunderstanding of the characters, it seems to me, also bleeds over into the relationship between Sam and Bucky. There was some snarky pissing-match dialogue for them last time out, but their scenes together also showed some real character development. Here, their dialogue is just tiresome macho sniping, and at the worst possible moments, to boot. (Especially when they're in the middle of a shootout and Bucky complains about Sam not going to the left, and Sam shoots something back to the effect of, "It's in all the action movies," which made me roll my eyes. I mean, really? That just came off as, "HEY, LOOK AT [JOHN WICK-WRITER] MEEEEE!!!")

Helnut Zemo (who's revealed to be an actual baron! who still has all his money which hasn't been confiscated by the government after he assassinated a head of state! so Sam and Bucky get to ride around the entire episode in a private jet and/or one of the Baron's collection of  classic cars) is actually the best character in this episode, and that's mainly due to the actor, Daniel Bruhl. He makes several interesting observations, as a matter of fact, such as that Bucky fell back into being the Winter Soldier right quick (when the three of them visit Madripoor to hunt down the source of the super soldier serum). He also waxes about the perils of putting superheroes on pedestals and ignoring their flaws. These snippets of dialogue, along with Sam's bitterly noting that he should have kept Steve's shield and destroyed it rather than giving it away and letting Steve's legacy be twisted and perverted, are some deeply buried nuggets of ideas that a PROPER writer, instead of a cheesy, Mission Impossible-style knockoff, would have brought to the surface and fully explored. 

But no, instead we have this mess. Bucky comes off the best of all, which is damning with faint praise. Sam, on the other hand, falls prey to Required Plot Stupidity Syndrome. When he, Bucky and Zemo meet with Zemo's contact--and after Zemo warns them, "No matter what happens we have to stay in character; our lives depend on it"; a warning he repeats at least three times--SAM DOESN'T TURN OFF HIS FUCKING PHONE SO HE CAN BE INTERRUPTED BY HIS SISTER AT A CRUCIAL LIFE-THREATENING MOMENT. He also gets to spout such cringeworthy dialogue as, "I can't run in these heels!" (presumably high-heeled boots, to fit in with what he calls "looking like a pimp").

I swear, if I had been Anthony Mackie, I would have thrown an absolute fit. 

Karli Morgenthau is similarly cheapened as a character, again after having been given some interesting layers last episode. Someone close to her dies in this episode--either her mother or adoptive mother, although exactly who is never clarified and thus we're given no real reason to care--and she takes the Flag Smashers on another raid, stealing six months' worth of hoarded supplies from a Global Repatriation Center compound with the intent of taking them to a refugee camp. The Flag Smashers all get away with the supplies, and then Karli blows up the building with the tied-up guards inside, and gets to snarl some more cliched dialogue: "That's the only language these people will understand." Argh. Really? This, from a so-called professional screenwriter? 

This episode was incredibly disappointing. At the very end, in keeping with the show's tradition of introducing a surprise character in the final scenes, we see one of the Dora Milaje from Wakanda, who has come hunting Zemo. I hope the writer of the next episode is not the same as this one, or that character is going to be wrecked too. 

Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Ep 2, "The Star-Spangled Man"

 

Two episodes in, this second Marvel series is more of the typical Marvel offering, as opposed to the metatextual weirdness of WandaVision. I think it suffers a bit in comparison, although your mileage may definitely vary on that. Having said that, this is a solid episode that moves the plot and does some good character work both for Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, and surprisingly, John Walker, the heroic, ultra-patriotic, clean-living, square-jawed Captain America replacement. And Wyatt Russell is very good in the role. 

In fact, the opening scene focuses on John Walker and does a good job of giving him some depth. He knows what the Captain America shield represents and is worried he won't be able to live up to it. As he says, "Everybody in the world expects me to be something, and I don't want to fail them." He receives a couple of pep talks, the first from a woman--maybe his wife? girlfriend?--and then his sidekick, Batttlestar. Then he goes out to a televised interview at his high school football stadium where he explains that while he's not a supersoldier, he has guts, and while he never knew Steve Rogers, he thinks of him like a brother.

At that we cut to Bucky Barnes, who is watching this with a horrified, disgusted expression. This does not sit well with him at all, as we see in the very next scene where he barges in on Sam, who is about to take off for a mission in Munich, demanding to know why Sam gave up the shield.

In fact, this is a running theme for Bucky throughout the episode: he cannot understand why Sam gave up the shield, because Steve handed it to Sam and wanted him to have it. He's wondering if Sam is the person Steve thought he was, and if Steve was wrong about Sam, then maybe (which is Bucky's real worry) Steve was wrong about Bucky, too. This revelation comes out during a well-written and acted scene of Sam and Bucky facing off in a version of "couples therapy" demanded by Bucky's therapist Dr. Raynor. The two of them sit close together, facing each other, looking into each other's eyes, and after Dr. Raynor finger-snaps them out of their little staring contest/pissing match, the two of them exchange some stark, honest truths. 

This is not the only stark truth we see in this episode: after Sam, Bucky, John Walker and Battlestar take on the Flag Smashers (who Sam realizes are supersoldiers, suddenly popping up after 80 years), Bucky says there's someone Sam should meet. He takes Sam to visit an older black man in Baltimore, who is revealed to be Isaiah Bradley, a black supersoldier he ran into in Korea seventy years before. (Which means the man's got to be in his nineties, but he's still strong enough to pick up a little metal container of something off his kitchen table and fling it across the room with such force it buries itself halfway into the wall.) Bucky tries to tell Bradley there are more people around like the two of them, and they need to find out where they're coming from and who's making them, but Bradley orders Sam and Bucky out of his house. Outside, Sam unloads on Bucky for not telling him about this man, but Bucky says he didn't even tell Steve. (I hope we see more of Isaiah Bradley. In this one brief scene, we meet a complex, troubled character, well played by Carl Lumbly, who leaves an indelible impression.)

There is some of the usual CGI'd superhero pew pew, including an (overly long) fight scene atop two semi-trucks, where the Flag Smashers are smuggling something out of Munich and kick our four heroes' collective asses. This sequence also has a wonderful moment where Bucky breaks into the back of one of the trucks and tries to free a young woman he thinks is a "hostage," only for the woman--Karli Morgenthau, the leader of the Flag Smashers--to give him a chilling, sinister smile and hurl him clear out of the back of the truck, to smash into the grill of the truck following. John Walker keeps trying to talk Sam and Bucky into working with him, and these scenes inject more than a bit of ambiguity into his character. In one, he's the humble new Captain America who's not trying to replace Steve Rogers, but later on when he pulls his shield-bearing rank to free Bucky from the police station where he was arrested for missing one of his therapy sessions and violating his parole, Walker looks every bit the entitled, clueless white ass. You can tell he wants to be Captain America, or he thinks he does, but he really doesn't understand what being Captain America means. And when Sam and Bucky refuse to work with him and walk away, he turns ugly as he says, "A word of advice. Stay the hell out of my way." 

At the end of the episode, Sam and Bucky decide that the only way to find out who is making more supersoldiers is to visit an old Hydra villain. This is Zemo, the villain from Captain America: Civil War, who we briefly glimpse in the last scene, sitting in his prison cell. 

I guess, for me, the jury's still out on this. It might be worthy, but despite the character work done here, it still seems to be a bit more of the same old-same old. It all depends on what is done with this setup. We shall see. 

Streamin' Meemies: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ep. 1, "New World Order"

 

This is Marvel's second streaming series, following on the heels of WandaVision. Right from the get-go, we see this is going to be a more typical Marvel storyline. We have a short scene where Sam Wilson is dressing up as if for a funeral, picking up Steve Rogers's shield while snippets of dialogue from Avengers: Endgame play in the background.

Steve: How does it feel?

Sam: Like it's someone else's.

Steve: It isn't.

Sam hasn't taken up the Captain America mantle like Steve wanted him to, and we can see he's torn about it. Then we shift to a jarring helicopter rescue scene that turns into a CGI hurlyburly pow-pow, which seems to be there for the sole purpose of jumping up and down and proclaiming, "OH HAI THIS IS A MARVEL STUDIOS/DISNEY PLUS PRODUCTION AND WE MUST SHOW OFF OUR HIGH BUDGET SUPERHERO TRICKS." Sam jumps/falls out of planes and helicopters, gets shot at, dodges missiles, shoots back, swoops into helicopters midair and gets into nauseatingly fast-cut fisticuffs with the bad guy, dives down a canyon with the tips of his wings scraping against rock, and spins and twirls in the air, all in service of snatching some guy before the helicopter crosses the Libyan border.

It's boring, and we've seen it all before. The CGI is also a bit dodgy in places--the results of doing special effects over Zoom and at home? At any rate, I rolled my eyes and wished I had an edit button to chop this right on out. It only lasted ten minutes, thankfully, and then we got into the meat of the episode: "What happened to Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes after Endgame?" 

Sam's been working for the Air Force for the past six months, and working with his sister Sarah in Louisiana, trying to salvage the family fishing and shrimpboat business. Fortunately, the episode pays more attention to the latter. It's really nice to have a look at what turns into some complicated family dynamics: Sarah kept the fishing business afloat as best she could while Sam was Blipped out of existence, and she rather resents him barging in after five years and trying to take over, despite his protestations that he only wants to help. This comes to a head during a scene at the local bank, where Sam and Sarah try to take out a consolidation loan. Despite Sam's fame--and the extremely off-putting sight of the white banker fanboy asking him for a selfie "with arms spread"--they are turned down. Of course, both Sam and Sarah know why that is, and so does the viewer. 

Meanwhile, Bucky Barnes is having his own post-Blip and PTSD problems, which take the form of nightmares about his Winter Soldier days. In one nightmare in particular, he assassinates some Russian higher-up, and then kills a poor Asian guy who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed the kill. There follows a long scene with Bucky's court-appointed psychiatrist, a no-nonsense older woman who does not take one iota of Bucky's shit. These sessions are a condition of his pardon, and he also has an "amends list" he is working on--in the case shown, a woman put in power by Bucky's work with Hydra, who he then proceeds to bust. The psychiatrist (I didn't write it down, but I think her name was Dr. Naylor) tells Bucky he needs to learn to trust people, and he really is very fortunate: he has his mind back. She reminds him, "you're free." Bucky objects: "To do what?" 

After the session, he meets an older Asian man, Yori Nakasima, for lunch. This has apparently been happening for some time. Unfortunately, we soon learn Mr. Nakasima is on Bucky's "amends list," and is the father of the man he killed. Obviously, this is going to come out sooner or later, and it's not going to be good. (Mr. Nakasima more or less bullies Bucky into asking the waitress where they are eating for lunch out on a date, which goes about as well as you'd expect.) Bucky still has to meet up with Sam, which I presume will happen in the next episode or two.

Earlier, in a continuation of the opening scene, Sam had turned Steve Rogers' shield over to the Smithsonian Institution. During this sequence, Steve is spoken of in the past tense, and Sam says, "He's gone," so I think it's probably safe to assume that Steve Rogers is dead. (Which would only make sense, as Steve and Bucky were contemporaries, and Bucky is specifically established as being a hundred and six. When Chris Evans reappeared [as if in a poof of magic--seriously, how did that happen?] at the end of Avengers: Endgame, he was buried under a ton of centenarian latex. There's also an unexpected cameo from Don Cheadle as War Machine, discussing the post-Blip world: it's broken and needs somebody to fix it.) Later, on his parents' boat in Louisiana, Sarah tells Sam "you'd better look at this." 

The last scene in the episode is a press conference announcing that the United States of America has a new hero--and this turns out to be (and y'all saw this coming, right?) a new Captain America: a bright, white, square-jawed Captain America. (This is Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, and he definitely has his father's prominent chin.) Sam closes his eyes and doesn't say a word, but the betrayal is written all over his face. 

There's some other odds and ends, mainly an establishing of what I think the series' antagonist is going to be: a group called the Flag Smashers, who think "the world was better off during the Blip." But the main focus (aside from the idiotic ten-minute CGI pow-pow) is on character work for Sam and Bucky, which I for one was glad to see. (I'm finding that the older I get, the less I like explosions and the more I like characters, which is one reason I'm quite fond of the first season of Star Trek: Picard.) This limited series is only supposed to be six episodes, and both its stars clearly have a lot of things to work out. I hope the show gives them the space to do it.