The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

[osprey_archer]

I’ve finally finished The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and boy, do I have mixed emotions about it. Some parts of it I loved! Some parts did not come together at all! Really a bit of a mess, but mostly a mess I enjoyed? Although the last episode in particular seemed EXTREMELY rushed and choppy.



First, the things I liked. I loved the way that the show dug into Sam’s backstory, his sister and his nephews, and the way that the show tied his struggle over taking the SHIELD to Isaiah Bradley’s story. (I’ve seen complaints that it would have been a more powerful statement if Sam refused the shield entirely, but look, this is a Marvel movie. “Character decides not to superhero and sticks to it” was never an option and we all know it.)

I also enjoyed Bucky’s scenes, particularly once the show allowed Bucky and Sam to get along. (Not sure we needed to spend quite so much time with them at each other’s throats, but such is life in TVland.) And Zemo was a revelation. I’ve seen Daniel Bruhl in non-Marvel movies (most notably Goodbye, Lenin!) so I knew he could act, but God! Now that Marvel finally gave Zemo some characterization other than VENGEANCE, Bruhl just went to town! Probably my favorite character in this series, which I did NOT expect when I went in.

(I also enormously enjoyed the scene where Zemo is pretending to sell the Winter Soldier, and he sort of wiggles Bucky’s chin with his fingertip as he says, “He will do a-ny-thing you want.” It’s so creepy and I’m here for it.)

My feelings about Sharon’s characterization are more mixed. I like that she’d carved out a badass niche for herself, and I like that the show actually pointed out that she’d just been more or less abandoned to her fate after helping Steve in Civil War (also, WTF, Steve)... but I’m not thrilled that she’s maybe being set up as a big bad for future installments. Although who knows! If it’s well done, that characterization might win me over. Even though her characterization has been a little all over the place, Sharon would still be a more richly characterized villains than most of the MCU’s baddies.

This brings me, of course, to the baddies of this show, the Flag Smashers, and OH BOY. This plotline was not thought through at all, which is unfortunate, given that it’s the A-plot of the whole season. We get a very lightly sketched view of what the Flag Smashers want, an even more thinly sketched view of the governmental body they’re fighting against, and no particular explanation for why they have decided that the best way to achieve their objectives is “blow up innocent people.” Have they considered, say, contacting the ACLU?

Of course they haven’t. That wouldn’t be conducive to thrilling fight scenes.

Really, though, the show could have blown past this problem if Karli Morgenthau, the lead Flag Smasher, had a stronger screen presence - if she had the aura of charismatic leadership that suggests large groups of people really would follow her as she uses questionable means to achieve poorly-defined ends. But she doesn’t.

The show also doesn’t manage to establish a sense of connection between Karli and Sam. In fact, it falls down on this so hard that I didn’t even realize that it was trying until the fight scene in the final episode, when Sam, in classic Captain America style, tells Karli “I’m not going to fight you” (although unlike Steve Rogers, he retains enough sense of self-preservation to at least block her punches).

Obviously this is meant to be a callback to the helicarrier scene in The Winter Soldier. For it to work, the show needed to establish a deep sense of identification between Sam and Karli - deep enough to overcome Sam’s knowledge that Karli has blown up buildings knowing full well that there are people inside, and probably will again if she gets away.

At very least, we needed Sam and Karli’s one scene together before their fight to establish a connection between them as swiftly and strongly as Sam and Steve’s scene at the beginning of The Winter Soldier (although obviously a more antagonistic connection than Steve and Sam’s). But it doesn’t - it can’t; Karli’s characterization is simply too weak to support it.

So in the climactic fight scene, when Sam tells Karli “I’m not going to fight you,” it doesn’t feel organic. The moment exists to call back that earlier iconic moment and establish Sam as the true Captain America, but it makes no sense in-universe. There’s no reason for Sam to do this for a girl he barely knows.

Comments

[kore]

Yeah, I loved Sam BEING Cap, even if it happened for like five minutes during the finale (a la Wanda becoming the Scarlet Witch in her final fight), Carl Lumbly as Isaiah was superb, I liked the micro- and not-so-micro-aggressions in various scenes, and once they FINALLY got past all the slap-kiss-slap bullshit, I did like the Bucky/Sam dynamic ("Good job, Cap" was great). I felt like the show didn't actually go into either Sam or Bucky deeply enough (that's what she said), in the same way Wandavision did, so although both shows wound up being setups for the upcoming movies (Dr Strange 2 and Cap 4), Wandavision felt more organic and character-driven, even though its worldbuilding also had giant plotholes. But that worldbuilding depended a lot on magic, and a lot less on the outside world after the Blip, because the show was so interior. I think MCU's Blip worldbuilding is just awful, and that showed up in various details (if Sharon got snapped, how was she able to build up a criminal empire in 2-3 months? and so on) but that was the real weakness behind Karli and the Flag Smashers. Karli also had that weak actress (maybe she's been good in other things but wow was she unconvincing here) but apart from a tiny bit of backstory, like you say, we don't have a good idea of what that organization is or why she's resorting to violence or much of anything. Even if people hadn't seen TFA, the setup in TWS was that the connection between Steve and Bucky was so strong that Steve was willing to do anything to save Bucky, and Bucky finally did remember Steve because of that bond. There was nothing like that between Sam and Karli, so the callback was really hollow. People kept comparing the series to TWS, but it seemed to me a lot more like Civil War, in that the showrunner was stuck setting up a lot of various plotlines (Karli, Walker, Sam becoming Cap, Bucky facing his past, Zemo, Sharon &c &c) and all of them suffered from lack of development. The showrunner said they cut it from eight episodes to six "because of flab," which kind of amazed me because they needed more time, or to use the time they had more efficiently. It seemed like it would've been a lot easier to tie Sharon and Zemo together somehow and just leave Karli out of it.

I am also the only person in fandom who didn't like seeing Zemo again, lol, altho that's more a matter of personal taste. I also thought Walker's actor wasn't equal to his part, and they just pretty much made a new character out of Sharon with the same name, her motives were so oblique -- and contradictory! Why did she help Sam and Bucky find the doctor making the serum when she was the Power Broker who was selling it? Why did she set Batroc on Sam and then help save Sam? Because she wasn't a character, much less Sharon, she was a Plot Mechanism in ways that would have been stupidly easy to fix -- there's even a whole comics backstory where she's in deep cover and then left for dead and is really bitter and angry because of it. For some reason, they totally just ignored it. (Because she wasn't a character, she was a walking Conflict Device.) People rightly mocked the "twist" of her being the Power Broker, because it was so obvious, and unfortunately that reveal was emblematic of how badly the show stumbled with the plots that weren't Sam and Bucky trying to move on.

All that said, that instantly famous image of Walker raising the shield to execute someone who'd idolized Captain America as a kid was powerful, and that airing during George Floyd's murder trial was pretty amazing. That encapsulated so much about America's literally bloody history in just one shot. But I felt like the show in a way didn't earn that image -- it didn't really go deep enough into the history of racism and lynching and betrayal of black veterans it was depending on for the emotional gutpunch. And on the one hand, well, it's a Marvel superhero show on Disney's streaming network, how dark were they really going to go? And it's pretty wild Disney is putting this on the air at all. But on the other hand, a big raison d'etre of the show itself was This Is Marvel Doing Racism, to the extent the characters themselves talked about it, and the bar was being set very high by the people who made it. So IDK, I don't want to write off the show for not succeeding at what it was trying to do, if that makes sense, because a black Captain America really is powerful, especially right now -- Bucky literally waking up to Sam's nephews playing with the shield was another great image. But at the same time the show itself felt deeply compromised in a way that was, finally, hard to ignore.

[osprey_archer]

I think recent Marvel projects have suffered a lot because so many of them are tasked with setting up for a later project... which will then in its turn have to set up the next project... which will be a blockbuster extravaganza so overstuffed with characters that none of the individual characters get sufficient screen time for any real character development. It's the worst of all possible worlds: none of the individual projects are fully satisfying because they're only tributaries to the greater whole, but in the end that greater whole is also unsatisfying and less than the sum of its parts.

In TFATWS, this particularly messes up the John Walker storyline. Okay, so the show is trying to tackle issues of race, and John Walker in some ways is representing the history of American violence/white supremacy and actually beheads a guy with his shield (which is a great image!)... and then the show gives him a slap on the wrist and lets him join Sam & Bucky in their final battle and then walk free, because it has to set up his part in some other project. You could contrast that to Isaiah Bradley being locked up for thirty years (white Captain America murders a dude & goes free, Black Captain America is a hero & gets locked up...) but the show doesn't do so effectively.

The Blip worldbuilding is awful, isn't it? I think a more charismatic lead Flag Smasher actress could have sold it (people will forgive enormous plotholes if the actors can sell a thing emotionally), but you'd still have the problem where the episode ends and you think about it for two minutes and go "But none of this makes sense."

Same with the Sharon-is-the-Power-Broker nonsense. I guess.... maaaaybe we're meant to think she wants that pardon (with attendant access to classified documents etc.) enough to sell out her own superserum scientist... but boy, that's a flimsy justification (why not build a supersoldier army and just take the classified documents?), and they didn't put much effort into selling it.

Would Sharon as head Flag Smasher have been a better choice? At least it would have made it easier to sell Sam's sense of connection/responsibility for her: he knows her, and, like him, she got screwed over by Civil War. Plus, of course, it would have made much more sense to have Sharon screw over the Power Broker if she was not the Power Broker.

[kore]

I think recent Marvel projects have suffered a lot because so many of them are tasked with setting up for a later project... which will then in its turn have to set up the next project... which will be a blockbuster extravaganza so overstuffed with characters that none of the individual characters get sufficient screen time for any real character development. It's the worst of all possible worlds: none of the individual projects are fully satisfying because they're only tributaries to the greater whole, but in the end that greater whole is also unsatisfying and less than the sum of its parts.

YES, wow, that's one of the best formulations I've seen of that problem (other than the rather glib "Feige turned movies into comic book events"). Arguably that started way back, as far as Age of Ultron, and was part of why Whedon flounced, and the Russo Bros' apparent eagerness to get with the program and fit in whatever Feige wanted ("He walked in, said 'Civil War,' and walked out") was why they basically got the job dealing with the whole rest of the MCU overstory. Then, essentially we wind up watching three-hour-long ads for the next part of the series. I was hopeful (especially after Wandavision) that the shows weren't going to follow that pattern, but unfortunately what "this is a six-hour-long movie" apparently meant was, the show wound up being a six-hour-long ad for a bunch of other movies. (It BOGGLES me, for instance, why we didn't see more of Eli, unless they're saving Eli for Cap 4, or probably Young Avengers.)

actually beheads a guy with his shield (which is a great image!)... and then the show gives him a slap on the wrist and lets him join Sam & Bucky in their final battle and then walk free, because it has to set up his part in some other project

Yeah, he is obviously going to show up somewhere else (Dark Avengers, Thunderbolts, wherever) and it's also part of MCU's villain problem -- they very rarely have serious villains who survive and also don't show systemic injustice. TWS was all about the infiltration of the Not!CIA and becoming the enemy you're fighting, only literally, and at the end, Robert Redford is dead and SHIELD is apparently totally gone, only not really? It's so murky. Walker getting to fight with Sam and Bucky in the final fight was really disorienting (in the comics, Sam and US Agent go at it, and I really missed seeing that, the symbolism was so great).

The Blip worldbuilding is awful, isn't it?

It's SO BAD, and all the future MCU shows and movies are stuck with it! And they kind of went and made it extra bad with the "okay, bring everyone back, BUT ALSO keep everything the way it has been the past five years" clause, which was basically to save Tony's daughter (and also maybe part of some weird right-to-life agenda on Disney's part? I've always wondered). They've saddled themselves with a really heavy topic, and to do it justice, they'd have to go all Walking Dead, but if they just handwave it like in Far From Home, it feels very off. I was fully expecting them in Endgame to just rewind it to the moment before Thanos does the original snap, which I think is what happens in the comics? I don't remember.

Would Sharon as head Flag Smasher have been a better choice? At least it would have made it easier to sell Sam's sense of connection/responsibility for her: he knows her, and, like him, she got screwed over by Civil War. Plus, of course, it would have made much more sense to have Sharon screw over the Power Broker if she was not the Power Broker.

Ohhh yeah, I was longing for something like that. Or even have Sharon working with Bucky and Sam from a much earlier point, only for them to find out she was betraying them, only they can't do anything about it because she's hooked up with Val or whatever. Sharon also actively helped Sam and Steve during CW, at the cost of her own job, and she's a final link with Steve and Peggy and that kind of moral righteousness. Having her decide to turn her back on that is potentially really powerful, only they really squandered it. Sharon going "that shield should be destroyed in this new world" could've been something. Only what we got was not only a tenuous connection between Sam and Karli, but an even more tenuous last-minute mentorship between Karli and Sharon?? Why not show at least some of that? -- And if the audience knows Sharon is leading the Flag Smashers before Sam and Bucky do, that's a classic bit of suspense the show really could have used to tighten that storyline up.

Also I totally admit I'm a sucker for scenes where an ally or someone mysterious promises to set up a meeting with Some Bigwig, the heroes get led to a deserted place, and they find out the ally really is Some Bigwig and ohshit now they're in trouble. It's a bit of a cliche but classic for a reason.

[sovay]

(and also maybe part of some weird right-to-life agenda on Disney's part? I've always wondered)

What?

I have seen people claim that the Flag Smashers were originally supposed to use biowarfare to level out the population Snap-style and then COVID-19 happened and awkward rewrites took place while production was on hold. (To be clear, awkward rewrites are known to have taken place; the question is whether this plot was really one of them.) I don't know that this goal would have made their activism-terrorism make any more sense, but it might at least have been more coherent than "open borders by bombing offices!"

[kore]

It is just a 1000% top-of-the-head theory of mine, based on Tony saying repeating in Endgame that he has a kid and he's not going to erase her, and the whole emphasis is they can't lose all the kids who have been born since the Snap. It's very reminiscent of pro-life rhetoric to me, but that might just be me. Frankly I think the devastation caused by the Snap would be so bad, wholly undoing it would be the only way to go. But they were going to have Morgan appear to Tony in the soul stone afterlife, so she had to be there. But again, it's just more of a personal resonance for me, not anything I would defend in an argument.

The showrunners are really closed-mouthed about what they had to rewrite. The director said they had 75% of the show done before the pandemic closed them down, "but we were able to sharpen our pencils and really use what was in our toolbox and get it even better than before" (Wandavision showrunners used eerily similar language, lol). They were also supposed to shoot in Puerto Rico, which probably would have stood in for Fake Orientalist Singapore, which makes me think if a storyline about a bioweapon or something with the serum happened, it would've been there and that would have been Karli's big dark moment. Then threatening everyone at the Not-The-UN gathering might have had some actual punch, and been a callback to Zemo blowing up the Sorta-UN-In-Vienna in Civil War. If Sharon was Karli's mentor, her melting off that guy's head might have been part of a plan she worked out with them. But that's just speculation on my part, &c &c.

(One thing that really did give me pause about Karli was reading an interview with Spellman where he bragged about being prescient re the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. If we're supposed to associate Karli and her movement with them, I really don't know what he thought he was doing.)

[osprey_archer]

Sam and Walker having a Big Damn Fight is so obviously something that should have happened that I'm baffled why the showrunners didn't go there. They have this whole sequence where Walker makes himself a new shield while practically steaming with rage (how DARE they take his shield away!!!!)... and then next time we see him, he's happily fighting alongside Sam who is in full Captain America gear, using the shield that it sure seemed like Walker thought was rightfully his?

It's SUCH a good set-up for Walker to take his eyes off the prize (stop terrorists) and pursue his own selfish agenda (fight Sam for shield RIGHT NOW because it is MINE MINE MINE), and it would have been a much more thematically resonant final battle. Of course, they couldn't have used the "I'm not going to fight you" thing, but sometimes that just doesn't fit in a story, you know? They could do a callback to "I can do this all day" or something if they want to tie Sam to Steve that way.

[kore]

YES, YES! TO ALL THIS, JUST, YES. I mean I know I was hoping for it from the comics, but just even in the context of the show, it seems weird that the person Sam winds up fighting is Karli, because he's totally going to pull his punches. (Which Steve actually wasn't doing when he fought Bucky for the chip, IMO. He doesn't say "I'm not going to fight you" until the helicarriers are firing on each other.) Walker seems like the kind of racist asshat who would TOTALLY decide all his problems stem from the Black guy who took My Shield Which Is Rightfully Mine (which ties in with his general Trumpian character) and yeah, "I can do this all day" would've been perfect as a callback line! because at that moment Sam IS asserting why he should be Cap. Hell, if they wanted a moment to go back to, have Sam APPEAR to be ready to kill Walker with the shield, just like Cap seemed about to kill Tony in CW, and then back down. ....it's just never a good sign when fans spitballing can come up with more compelling ideas. I know the whole theory that fanfic works best in the liminal spaces and loves filling in the holes (that's what she said) in less-than-perfect canons, but this show didn't even feel inviting like that, just sort of....tattered. "I don't want to fight you" would have worked for me with Eli, and maybe Sharon. The Karli storyline just couldn't bear the weight of the reference.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, Steve def. finishes the world-saving part before he starts pulling his punches with Bucky. He doesn't want to hurt him but he's not SO focused on it that he would let the Winter Soldier get those helicarriers in the air. (I think people in fandom sometimes overlook this when they talk about how Steve would do ANYTHING for Bucky. He definitely has limits!)

But yes, it would make total sense for Walker, furious at his demotion and convinced he's entitled to the shield, to fight Sam for it. It might be too on the nose to have Sam almost bash Walker's head in with the shield but pull back a mere two episodes after Walker actually did kill someone that way? But certainly a Sam-Walker match-up would have been a much, much better fit for the show's themes than the Flag Smashers.

[kore]

Something else I was thinking of was the possibility of having Eli as the head of the Flag Smashers, or at least in the organization -- someone else could be all "by any means necessary," if they wanted to keep him clean for a later heroic role, and it would have been a great tie back to Isaiah and some actual conflict for Sam if that was the person he wound up fighting and not wanting to kill. (And then they could not kill Eli, obviously.) Part of what frustrated me about the show was the "villains" felt way too underdeveloped and lightweight, especially Sharon and Karli. That made it easy for the show to treat them as dispensable, in a way. They weren't grey, or villainous for understandable reasons like Killmonger; they were just kind of weightless.

[osprey_archer]

I think we're meant to see Karli as a villain with a Point who nonetheless goes Too Far, like Killmonger... but the acting/writing/worldbuilding are just not there to sell it. Really such a waste!

[potofsoup]

yeah, the flag smasher stuff is just ... incredibly poorly thought out, which is such a weak link to otherwise well thought out aspects of the show.

And Sharon, sigh. I worry that Sharon Carter's characterization is just going to continue to be thrown about due to plot needs, so she's just ... all over the place. Like... at the end, when they invoke Peggy Carter -- shouldn't Sharon at least feel some remorse? Or like "oh yeah, I have that speech at her funeral..." It's one thing for her to reluctantly become Power Broker because it's one of the few channels left to her. It's another for her to do so because she has decided to completely go against everything else she's ever stood for (which ... would also be clearer if she ever stood for anything besides Convenient Plot Device). I just tell myself it's better than the mysterious pregnancy stuff in the comic books, but bleh.

[kore]

Yeah, I was so hopeful for Sharon getting an actual plot and characterization in this series that didn't involve mystical pregnancies or being brainwashed, repeatedly! AND THEN. I feel really kind of monkey pawed.

It's also a real shame plotwise, because if we'd seen a previously Very Good character actually have reasons for going dark, that would have increased the stakes considerably. (Hell, even just give Sharon a tiny monologue about how she worked for the organization Peggy gave her life to build, and it was corrupt and betrayed both of them and now she sees her job as keeping anything like that from controlling so much power again. And that's just a dumb idea I came up with right now. SOMEthing would have been nice.) (The beginning of the Mark Waid run with angry bitter disillusioned Sharon is RIGHT THERE. In fact that's what I thought they were originally going for.)

[osprey_archer]

What's especially galling is that they didn't even really *need* the Flag Smasher stuff; they could have easily run six episodes out of What Is the Meaning of Captain America. Hell, what if the people responsible for Isaiah Bradley's imprisonment where the ones who came up with the knock-off supersoldier serum? That would tighten up the plotting and make the season that much more pointed...

I wonder if Sharon Carter's actress feels this as a real monkey's paw situation. Like, "I wanted to be in the MCU! But... I thought I would get a character with at least a little continuity..."

[sovay]

This plotline was not thought through at all, which is unfortunate, given that it’s the A-plot of the whole season.

Having not watched the show but read multiple reactions now across my friendlist, I am getting the impression that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would have done just fine grappling with racism and the meaning of Captain America (and whatever excuse was necessary to spring Zemo) as the A-plot and leaving the Flag Smashers on the writers' room floor.

[kore]

I thought this was a pretty fair summing-up, that both gives credit to Mackie and a Marvel property finally addressing racism, and also points out some of the really bad structural flaws. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/04/falcon-and-winter-soldier-finale-review-ending-spoilers-1234632487/ I think it's a good point that some otherwise possibly nitpicky stuff -- why do people know who the Winter Soldier is if he's a ghost story, why are Sharon's actions contradicting each other, &c &c -- would have probably been handwaved if the overall structure and individual plotlines hadn't been so weak. The majority of the audience isn't going to care "Why can a tree stop Captain America's shield?" if they're really caught up in the emotions behind why he's throwing it.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think that's accurate. The recent MCU TV shows have been really artistically hampered by the fact that they have to end with big fight scenes. Wandavision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier were both at their best when exploring other themes (trauma, racism, etc), and most of their flaws grew out of the insistence that they adhere to that formula.