The MCU returned after a forced hiatus with WandaVision earlier this year, and that was a delightful bit of weirdness. Given the other shows coming down the pipeline, the second such Disney+ offering, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier may be the most conventional of the lot. Spinning off from the popular Captain America movies, this mini-series followed the buddy pairing of Cap’s two former partners, Sam “the Falcon” Wilson and Bucky “the Winter Soldier” Barnes. If WandaVision was all sitcom recreations to mask psychiatric therapy, at least The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would be something more grounded.
And yes, given the Falcon flies, that pun was very much not intended.
Picking up not long after the end of Avengers Endgame, we quickly learn Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) is still doing missions for the U.S. Government while Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is getting much-needed therapy for his time spent as a mindless killing machine under Hydra’s thumb. Sam, though given a shield of his own by former Captain America Steve Rogers, isn’t comfortable enough to actually use the shield or the name and donates the shield to the government to act as a museum display. He’s much more concerned with saving his sister’s fishing business, though despite being an Avenger, not existing for five years does make it very hard to get a bank loan. Sam and Bucky soon see a problem, though, when the government simply assigns the shield and the Captain America name to decorated soldier John Walker (Wyatt Russell). Though neither Bucky nor Sam outright hate Walker on sight or anything, both seem to get the feeling he may not be up for the task, a sense he may share in his more private moments with his wife Olvia or his own longtime friend and partner Lemar “Battlestar” Hoskins (Cle Bennett).
However, there is a problem on the horizon: a group of terrorists calling themselves the Flag-Smashers, led by Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman), are causing problems. Their goal is to recreate the sort of international cooperation that existed for the five year period when half the world’s population, including Sam and Bucky, didn’t exist called the Blip. With everyone back, there are all manner of refugee problems and old bureaucracies are firing back up. Worse, the group of eight seem to have somehow acquired for themselves some form of the Super Soldier Serum that made Steve Rogers into Captain America, and even Steve’s first movie made it clear that only people with the highest and strictest of moral codes could possibly get that stuff and stay good and moral. Since that stuff doesn’t exist anymore, Sam and Bucky will need to work not only with John and Lemar, but also exiled former SHIELD agent Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) and imprisoned Sokovian intelligence officer Baron Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) to get some answers and prevent something really bad from happening. And if they can do so with minimal bloodshed on all sides, so much the better as far as Sam is concerned.
Now, I had for a long time commented that the only really defining characteristic of the Winter Soldier up to this point is he is Steve Rogers’ friend. Arguably, you could say something similar about Sam Wilson, but Sam at least got a few scenes in Captain America: The Winter Soldier where we saw him working with victims of PTSD and his backstory is that he was a medic in the military where he learned how to use that jetpack. Point is, Sam, perhaps owing to Mackie’s own onscreen charisma or some other factor, at least seemed to have a personality. Bucky’s best movie had him mostly glaring and saying very little. As such, it was really welcome to dig into both of these characters, Bucky especially, and define a bit more of who and what they are. Oddly enough, Zemo, a rather forgettable villain from Captain America: Civil War, also becomes something of a scene steeler, and VanCamp’s Sharon gets to do more than a handful of scenes as Steve’s neighbor/potential love interest. That just shows the real advantage to these Disney+ series. Like WandaVision, we get to dig a bit into what makes characters who seemingly would never rate a movie of their own into more three dimensional characters. It worked out great for WandaVision, owing largely to what a fantastic actress Elizabeth Olsen is when she’s finally asked to do something more than wiggle her fingers and speak in a vaguely Eastern European accent, and it worked out pretty well here, not just for the two title characters, but others in their orbit as well. John Walker could have easily come across as just some sort of villain, but he is less a bad man and more someone who probably should have never been given the Captain America identity, something he himself suspects deep down. Likewise, side trips to the house of former super-soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) give more background to the world of Captain America that the movies never touched on.
That, after all, is probably the real point of this series: to find a new Captain America. Comic book readers know that Walker, Bucky, and Sam have all spent time under that identity. But which of them, if any, is the right man to fill Steve Rogers’s shoes? Both Sam and Bucky are, for different reasons, initially uninterested, and the show doesn’t ignore the fact that Sam is a black man who would possibly be taking up the mantle of a role held by blonde haired and blue eyed men up to that point. Indeed, Bradley’s presence there is a reminder of the potential mistreatment that an African American could receive from his own country. That said, this is not a series of simply discussing the poor treatment of African Americans around the country or what to do about refugees. There’s still a good deal of action, with some really jaw-dropped fight scenes, particularly at any time Sam straps the wings on and goes for a flight. After the final episode had dropped to Disney+, Disney did reveal that there is a fourth Captain America movie in the works, and if you needed a good understanding of why the shield ultimately goes to who gets it, this show does give those reasons.
However, compared to WandaVision, this show was still rather conventional in its depiction of life in the MCU. While the previous show used mystery and misdirection to provoke online theories, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier went for a more straightforward adventure and espionage show. There’s nothing wrong with that, but anyone hoping to find a lot of theories about where Mephisto was hiding or the life will probably be disappointed this time around. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier played it a lot more safely than WandaVision did, and while that is not a bad thing, it is a little disappointing that they didn’t try to experiment a little more. Then again, experimentation might be more along the lines of what the next MCU show will be, namely the return of the Asgardian trickster god with Loki.
Grade: B+
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