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.

[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.

[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.