f13.net

https://youtu.be/IWBsDaFWyTE

Shooting! Explosions! Frisbee! Scowling!

Looks good.

unlike wandavision, this b string nonsense holds zero interest for me, but I still won't watch a trailer

Not sure if I care about this or not, but considering this and things like Wandavision, I am getting tempted to actually pick up a Disney sub.  Do you guys feel you get your money's worth?  I like the idea of access to the Marvel stuff, but is that really enough?

I got in on one of the cheap pre-launch Disney+ deals, but yeah I think it's worth it. There's a lot of good stuff on there already, and they're starting to roll out new series more quickly now.

Have kids, so we watch more disney+ than Netflix.

Without kids it is certainly worth subscribing for a month or two to see how you get on. Catalog isn't super deep, but it is growing. And for now it only costs the price of two beers a month anyway.

Disney+ for the 3 year deal was frankly fucking incredible.

Now? Dunno. In a month you could watch everything you wanted though. Their series are not long in episode or length per.

If you like the MCU and are okay with the traditional "new episode every week" TV model rather than the Netflix-style "release the entire season at once" model, then this year will have a new MCU-related show every week according to the currently known schedules:

https://old.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/ll6e83/am_i_crazy_or_are_they_going_to_release_something/

The yearly price for Disney+ is going up $10 on March 26th from $69.99 to $79.99 so don't wait too long to decide if you want the lower price.

Edit: yearly

I've found Disney good for the subscribe-a-few-months to watch a pile of MCU / Mandalorian etc, then cancel sub. I plan to resub in a few months once they have a bit more of a back catalog.
And thats coming from someone with teenage kids - if they were younger I'm sure it would just be a regular sub.

Marvel shit plus the Star Wars shit all made it worth it for me. I got in on the early deal too.

Disney+ is pretty much mandatory in my house, so I'm going to take the MCU stuff as a pleasant bonus. Would I sub just for this? No I'd hoist the black once a whole season was available. But it's going to be right there, and I'm going to watch it.

--Dave

I'll watch it. It doesn't particularly excite me but who knows.

I think this one is only six episodes, which seems smart. It won't wear out its welcome too quickly. I hope.

Another sign of MCU quality, compared to the Netflix shows--they understand exactly how much story they have and they're not trying to fill a standard-size series order.

D+ has a lot of good Nat Geo stuff to if you're in to that sort of thing.

I expect a mediocre buddy action series, without much character development and mostly just setting up them as a team (endgame coda) and putting another piece of the next MCU phase into place. I'm already not a fan, because it's Skrulls and I hate the weak trope of shapeshifting. But I expect to enjoy it nonetheless, the last aliens were lame af and it worked well enough as a crappy backdrop for heroes to hero.

I just wish Disney would stop releasing the same basic trailer over and over on their YT channel. I hope to see a cool facet of the show and it's the same couple of scenes recut into a different order :|

So I just assume it's mostly action and no further facets needed.

After this the next one on D+ is Loki, in June, which looks to be fun. I guess What If? is this summer. I guess Shang-Chi is still scheduled for theatrical release this summer. I have no idea what that's gonna be like.

I guess there's more variance than I remember, but there is also a ton of repetition (mainly the plane scene and truck scene and later the 'coworkers' schtick).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkBfGvb7NzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWBsDaFWyTE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbsRUNI7oh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqcgzj344ow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdBUjYJ4-GQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJO9xScVOB0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyrlYjSPlhk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqX4d3cWqk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqPsZlOBQok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt9ihEgJIZs (I believe this is the only unique promo thus far)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIG-HSaiotU

 :oh_i_see:

edited to add new upload just now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ySlvHLdxBw Some actual new clips and shows Mockingbird

Wait, Sharon Carter is going to be Mockingbird? I guess they can't have her go make googly eyes at Hawkeye since he's a family man in the MCU.

I don't think so, as Bobbi Morse was in Agents of SHIELD (played by Adrianne Palicki), although I don't remember if she went by that code name or not.

Right! Weren't they going to spin her off at some point? I am guessing that Feige et al really wish Agents of SHIELD had never happened at all.

Pretty sure that everything TV pre D+ is going to be torched as a multiverse feverdream, at best.

--Dave

"In Universe 613, Colson survived, but not in this one. So sad."

I was going to say Daisy Johnson (Quake) was confirmed to be in a new MCU show but all I see on google are rumors.

Yeah Secret Invasion was announced but not scheduled yet for Disney+ and she's rumored to be in it. It's scheduled to start shooting later this Spring so we may get confirmation of that then.

Ugh, I'd want to see this because of reasons (gimme eye candy boys!) but I utterly loathe the actress playing Sharon Carter.  My husband watches the Resident (which she's also in) and I can't stand her in that either.  She just bugs the hell out of me.

Yes, Bobbi Morse was on Agents of SHIELD and she and her boyfriend/ex-hubby left the show to go to a spinoff that never happened. She was basically Mockingbird in everything but name.

Both those actors were really good in the roles and Marvel TV did them pretty dirty. Glad whats-his-bucket (Inhumans idiot) is now gone.

My bad, I thought it was the chick from Agents of SHIELD. Too bad it seems they can't salvage the (few) good things from their non-MCU debacles.

I still haven't managed to catch Far From Home on any streaming service I'm on (Didny, Netflix, Prime). It's irritating.

Currently on Hulu and Starz. Still technically a Sony franchise, so unlikely to come to Disney+.

--Dave

Well the actress is confirmed to be in the powerpuff girls live action show, so they'd have to get someone else.

Homecoming and Far From Home are both on Prime, though I think you have to pay a rental fee to watch (I know Homecoming wanted a rental charge when we tried to watch it at my folks place on prime the other day).

I think I should stop watching shows while I'm having bouts of insomnia; it makes me cranky I think lol.


So I liked the show. Although the ending was telegraphed in the trailers I was surprised they'd do that in the very first episode.

The  way this started I thought it was going to be mostly action, but it was really a lot of character work and a bit of world building (more blip fallout).

A few things triggered me but not enough to bother writing about.

Seemed bitty to me.

And the blip fallout stuff was a lot of talking without enough showing.

Maybe if this had been a Sam episode and then they'd done a separate Bucky episode it would have flowed better.

I'm probably being fussy because Wandavision was so good.

So far this doesn't seem as good as Wandavision but we'll see how it turns out. I fear Wandavision set the bar so high that this show may struggle with those raised expectations. I actually found it dragged a little to be honest. I get they were trying to do character work but it felt like it was about 10 minutes too long. When a Wandavision episode ended I was almost always going "Noooooo...I want to know what happens next!" In this one I went "eh, so there's the start of the conflict they'll need to deal with."

The "broke superhero" thing just doesn't make any sense, it's barely reasonable when it's a teenager like Spiderman, but Falcon should be pretty loaded from the work he does.

I thought the stuff with the Winter Soldier was good character work. Actually with the Falcon too. I think the only Blip related stuff that didn't work so well for me was Sam and his sister not getting the loan. Garden-variety racism is fine (I completely assume the Blip wouldn't do anything to that), but it seems idiotic that a loan officer would say "well, you don't have any revenue in the last five years". I mean, if you were going in right now to finance a new restaurant after closing your old one in July 2020, no bank manager would say "look, you didn't have any business between March and July 2020, I think that means you personally are a bad risk for this new loan, because I can't understand why your business failed otherwise." I like that they're continuing to take the Blip seriously, but Feige needs to hand out a sort of MCU background document that reminds script writers and directors of what happened--half the people on the planet disappeared for five years, and for the most part, people had little to no understanding of why and little to no reason to think that it wouldn't happen again. More than WandaVision, this should be the show that really digs in to how that felt and how hard it is to get things back to normal. I assume any government that was still somewhat intact after people came back would be pressing super-hard for loans and financial assistance to anyone and everyone trying to get a business or a life back up and running. This just felt more like "we need to create conflict between Sam and his sister", which I think they could do simply by having her absolutely refuse to seek a loan because she's tired and depressed and doesn't trust him to be a part of this going forward.

That part actually made the most sense to me. It hasn't been long since everyone came back, that the bank would have no updated policies for returnees is absolutely believable.

Yeah, I think it kind of made sense in that as the guy at the bank described it, when everyone came back there were a lot of people who needed loans to rebuild/get back on their feet, and the banks just literally don't have the resources to handle it all.

I would think he would have something as a result of his military service, but he was an Avenger for like half a movie before he joined Cap's team of vigilantes on the run from the law.

I was kind of surprised and pleased that they're doing two old Cap storylines--the "fake Cap/replacement Cap" thing that has come up repeatedly in the comics plus they're actually using the Flag-Smashers in a much less goofy form than they had at first--I guess that'll be Zemo behind it all. Plus some kind of power-up that mimicks the Super-Soldier formula, possibly. (I keep forgetting that in the MCU it's canon that the Hulk is a consequence of a later attempt to recreate the formula.)

Not the Hulk.  I am pretty sure Banner was still a pure Gamma Radiation experiment accident and was not Formula related at all.  The Abomination was Formula related, as Ross uses one of their Formula Recreation attempts as the catalyst for the Abomination if memory serves.

No idea what the relative timeline between movies is, but his first Appearance is in Winter Soldier, and he makes a cameo appearance in Ant Man before going fugitive in Civil War, so there was at least maybe a year or more where he was operating as an Avenger.  You would have to balance that vs how long the gap between Civil War and the blip was, because Cap and friends are still basically operating off the radar right from the end of Civil War until they come out of hiding to team up against Thanos.   Pretty easy to assume Sam would be financially tapped out after a year or more of living off the grid with Cap.

I think in The Incredible Hulk, which is MCU canon apparently (esp. now that Blonsky is actually coming back in one of these shows), they revealed that Thunderbolt Ross deceived Bruce Banner about what they were experimenting with, so Banner didn't realize that what he was working with was a variant of the Super-Soldier Formula. But I haven't seen the flick for a long time so I don't remember the infodumping. There's some shit from Agents of SHIELD about this too but I don't even vaguely remember it.

His first appearance is in Winter Soldier but he isn’t an Avenger until the closing scene of Age Of Ultron.

In regards to Khaldun’s mention of Blonsky, Blonsky gets injected with a replicated Super Soldier Serum at first which seems functional albeit imperfect.

In Marvel comics proper, the way that the backstory of the Super-Soldier Formula has developed has been very interesting--there's the fake Caps (a couple of them) who were deranged by it, there's a kind of cheap-ass steroid version of it that's very bad for you that some mad scientist gives people who want to get powered up if they've got a lot of cash on hand but it usually kills or deforms them, there's the Tuskegee Black Cap version of it, there's the John Walker version of it (that I think is the cheap-ass version with a bit of extra government money in it), there's continuing US government experiments with it that kill tons of subjects and produce Nuke, there was a Nazi version that was taken by Master Man and the Destroyer (but not the Red Skull), the Black Widow and other Soviet agents got a version of it, Nick Cage got a whack-ass version of it (I think? in the comics? been real long since I read his origin). I'm sure there's more--it's one of those ur-origins that's been badly overused but it also makes a kind of sense. If you knew a scientist had been able to do something in the past, why not be able to figure it out again? Kind of goes for the guy who made the android Human Torch too--if he did that once, surely folks would have kept trying.

In the comics John Walker got his super strength from the Power Broker rather than any sort of Super Soldier variant. Doubt they're going that route here in the MCU, but it was notable in the comics because Walker actually had super human strength as opposed to Steve Rogers who was at "peak human". When Walker is getting trained by Taskmaster on how to throw Cap's shield he has to learn not to put too much force into the throw because he decapitates the training dummies.

Don't remember if it was from one of the animated TV serieses, but I am almost positive that I remember at least one incarnation of Felicia Hardy (Black Cat in Spiderman) having received her abilities from one of the few versions of the Serum that didn't have any side effects.

The Power Broker/Karl Malus is basically a mad scientist who gets a hold of shitty counterfeit copies of various power-up serums etc.--he had some Pym particles that he got a hold of somehow, and then he works for a company that does that kind of work for a fee (that's the Power Broker). I always got the impression that some of the shit he was giving people was a bad copy of the Super-Soldier Formula, the one that the US government kept experimenting with that created Nuke and killed lots and lots of other people.

There isn't anyone walking around with the skills to repair and maintain Stark tech who is lacking a good paycheck if they want it. It was such a good chance to tell a story of bootstrapping vs debt culture. I liked what they were trying to do with both storylines, but the execution was a mess. The pacing was a nightmare, it was vaguely unpleasant to watch, going from ultraviolence (albeit extremely brief, I just despise graphic violence, it's cheap) to slooow and forced character scenes.

But I'm down for weekly Marvel shows, they're not all going to be top-shelf. The ol Henny Youngman (and ofc Rodney Dangerfield) technique, just keep em coming and they average out to a good time.

Why did fake Cap look so weird? That was maybe the most disturbing thing in the show.

I think the point was that he really wasn't getting paid. If it's the government paying, that makes total sense.

It was also trying to tie into the racial aspect that was intrinsic to the character at his creation, when he was I think doing legal aid/community work in Harlem, which is very different from what it would be today. Some of the same racial themes of prejudice unfortunately work today with just a slight bit of tweaking, which is what they've done here. Reading the Wikipedia on his original origin (he was a criminal before the Red Skull changed his timeline to be a community worker with the Cosmic Cube), there's parts of that I didn't know as I hadn't read the earliest appearances.

One thing I noticed was they had no problem with the good guys straight up killing the bad guys, so this is going to be a distinct shift from the comics version in that respect. I liked the character work, and the set piece at the beginning was movie quality.

This is never going to be as good as WandaVision because it's not even going to bother coloring much outside the lines. That's ok, not everything can be innovative. It just has to execute well and I think they are starting well.

Fake Cap definitely looked like an incel doofus, but that may well be quite on purpose--I am guessing that both the Falcon and the Winter Soldier are not gonna stand for it but also that Fake Cap is going to prove to be completely fucking unacceptable at it, which is always the case with Fake Caps (there have been a bunch, not just John Walker).

Dat chin, doh.  :why_so_serious:

WandaVision was carried by expectations, the actual content was meh outside of the speculation of where the show is going. It was more a origin story for the Scarlet Witch persona that they never really established in the 3-4 movies she's in. Which is fine, still better than Thor 2 or Iron man 2 and I'd rather watch episodes 4-9 of Wanda Vision over Captain Marvel and captain marvel is leagues better than most DC movies.

Falcon x Winter Soldier is giving me the origin story behind the Falcon. Which again another avenger never really given his own explanation since the his introduction. I am motivated to watch episode 2, which is waaay more than i can say about Wanda but on the other hand I am concerned that they didn't think some things through on some of the details. Not enough to sink the boat, Sam has never really been banked rolled by a Stark and missed out on being a Shield Agent, so he is broke by comparison of an average Avenger who has the full support of say retired mad scientist, Wakanda, international shadow governments, or tony stark himself... but on the other hand he should be making 250k a year based on what we pay army contractors who show up for 3 months and gets paid hazard pay. I mean even when he was just an Avenger at Avengers tower he probably getting paid that much by Stark who is probably throwing 75k at janitors. Again not enough to sink the series.

Then there is the winter soldier stuff and i have to say...why isn't he in Wakanda? Like really, what's the point in being in America currently considering your barely allowed to live in the country and everyone you knew is either dead or a work associate from another planet. I understand the desire to make amends but I'd like it better if they started him there (found out about fake cap and rushed back to the states to handle business). His parts are still good though.

His sabbatical in Wakanda ended with back to back boss battles for the fate of the planet, neither of which he actually made a difference in. He might be done with Africa.

--Dave

True but he has a better chance of building a life there than in the states.

So I guess me not being able to sleep Thursday night/Friday morning is just a thing now and I should embrace it.  :why_so_serious:

I think this episode is much better than the first. I don't think the Sam/Bucky banter works for me though.

I hope the first 40 min. are going to be the status quo and swerve us. It's a much more interesting story than if they went the other way.

I think the show  goes off the rails in the last 10 min or so but other than that I strong episode.

BTW, Supersoldiers? literally not one of the big three.

I think everyone thinks that the serum was either lost or the the inferior versions aren't much of a threat compared to say Iron Man.

2nd episode is worth a re-watch. Definitely picks up a stride once the plot is revealed.

Not spoilering because this is speculation on my part: I am betting that John Walker is going to turn out to be a psycho spec ops guy with a dodgy version of the super soldier serum. He'll be full on My Lai, black ops wetwork type who the military picked because they wanted the 'best' and he had the perfect face to sell to the press (dat chin). I don't think this is going to colouring outside the lines as others have said and so he's probably going to have some connection to the bad guys. Fake caps are always bad news and unless they're being tone deaf I think they've set him up a devil with the face of an angel.

I kind hope he turns out to be a good guy. But I'd guess the serum has to make everyone crazy.

So I guess Hulkling and Iron Lad are the only Young Avengers unaccounted for now (with Kate Bishop coming in Hawkeye)?

Yes--Young Avengers sure does look like a go.

I was pleasantly surprised by this episode. They're doing a great job of dumpster diving in old Marvel stories and coming up with stuff that fits the MCU and is better than the source material.

I think the analysis of Bucky and Sam is basically right. It's not just that Bucky idolizes Steve, it's that he was Steve's friend *before* he became Cap and Steve was also his only anchor to the world that the two of them grew up in. I suspect he also knows there's something wrong about Walker and his partner (I was literally telling my daughter, "Yeah, there was a black Bucky and w/Walker and fans told them that wasn't a good look, so they changed his name to the dorkiest thing possible, 'Battlestar'" and then five minutes later Bucky confirms my opinion of the name) in that he knows that there have been many attempts to recreate the Super-Soldier Formula and all of them are messed-up. So he's doubly unhappy to see the shield with Walker. He probably wasn't entirely happy with Steve giving to Sam either, but he plainly doesn't feel worthy of it himself either.

I would guess that the formula does pretty bad damage to most of the people who take it; I would not be surprised if that's where Walker and his partner end up.

I was struck that Karli Morgenthau is
I did like the thought that there would be people from the Blip who actually preferred the world that way--folks who built other relationships or moved on to a new situation or found their services really needed, and yeah, folks who preferred a weak global government to competing nation-states. On some level that actually seems potentially reasonable. I wonder if the Hawkeye series will follow up on him having personally murdered most of the remaining criminals on the planet...

Has it been confirmed that Walker actually got the serum? he seemed to get pretty fucked up by those guys with actual serum and uses a gun.

I expect Walker will get the serum at some point in the show. I don't think he was painted as a deliberate bad guy in the comics, more of "takes patriotism to the extreme in really uncomfortable ways" sort of dude. Making him a more sympathetic character from the start in this allows some room for the character to grow or change. As for why Sam doesn't want to work with him, I think a lot of it may be hurt pride as much as anything. The government, despite having him do all these dangerous missions on the sly, doesn't feel like asking a black man to wear the shield and take the name Captain America, but they sure as shit will ask a slab-chinned, blonde white dude to do it without even consulting the guy who surrendered the shield in the first place. There's a lot of inherent racism just in the very act of giving it to John Walker even if the guys making the decisions didn't make that decision with race in mind. I'm not familiar enough with the original Flag Smasher storyline to be able to predict where this is going, but the show has so far done a good job of pointing out some inherent racial biases without actually having to explain any of them.

He hasn’t, but since the Power Broker has been mentioned and that’s where Walker got his strength from in the comic I wouldn’t be surprised to see it coming. I don’t see it necessarily turning him into a bad guy though unless they’re kinda merging his story with the ‘50s Cap and Bucky (which iirc was a story done to retcon the over the top anti-communist Cap stuff that was published back in the 50s).

I liked the flipped script with the white guy getting arrested for the warrant and the sheer annoyance on Sam's face when they initially profiled him.

Also, I instantly recognized the redhead as the leader of the pirates/rebels in Solo.

I could be miss-remembering this, but I thought the original implication in the First Captain America film was that the serum was effected by the persons personality.  Steve came out perfect because he was a good guy to the core, while Red Skull came out super messed up because he was a nazi.  It works if you look at the other few instances in the MCU it's shown.  In Winter Soldier, it turned a bunch of Hydra Assassins into barely controllable psychos.  And Banner into Hulk because of his messed anger management issues and split personality.  And then of course Abomination.  Though I may be crossing that with stuff from the comics.

Anyways, if that sort of holds true, then I could see Walker (who yes, will almost certainly get the serum from the broker in order to take out the flag smashers, whom he is also chasing) getting it and having his worst traits magnified.  I think he is a legit good guy right now, but as a special ops person with a lot of combat experience, maybe some dark parts/ptsd that come back to make him unstable once he takes it.

Interested to the story of Tuskegee Cap.

I need to rewatch, but wasn't Walker (and his partner) trading blows in a way that made it clear they were super-strengthed?

No, they get a few good attacks in early because of the element of surprise but I think Bucky is the only one that briefly goes toe to toe with any of the super soldiers.

Yeah, they make a point they are way out powered by these guys.  Particularly the last bit where New Cap says 'that was a big mistake' or something like that, and she just casually grabs his fist and knocks his has 50 feet away.  Literally made to showcase that.

Now, how the fuck he is able to throw his shield so hard and accurately without super soldier serum is another question, but I'm guessing show writers just want to make it like anybody can throw a giant metal shield 50 yards in a perfect line with no issue so everybody can use it.

I don't think strength is the issue when it comes to throwing the shield since you could just handwave that away as Vibranium being lightweight. Now having the reflexes to accurately throw and catch it, that is a bit of a stretch, although really no more far-fetched than Hawkeye being able to hit pretty much anything he's aiming for with an arrow.

Yeah, this was the whole point of the selection process. Scientist guy and Peggy didn't care about how physically capable the candidate was because the serum would handle that.


Reason this doesn't work for me is that it hits things like a 40 lb metal brick, not an ultimate Frisbee.

While I love this series, that is indeed a nitpick one can make. In the comics the Super Soldier Serum made Steve Rogers way smarter and thus he does on-the fly physics calculations to bounce his shield.

I take this as proof that this new Captain America also has a Serum Variant. If not, they might try to to chalk this up to a combination of "played football" and "he is naturally capable". While this would slightly undermine the whole idea of the Super Soldier serum and its importance, they never stated that this is a reason Caps shield works in the MCU so they could have changed it as they see fit. Maybe the fact that its shock absorbent makes it easier to handle as well light to carry (to work like a 40lb brick it only has to weigh 13lb after all - you know, magic metal).

While watching it first time I assumed he'd had the serum because of the shit he could do. But thinking about what was said I'm fairly confident we're supposed to think he hasn't.

I'm a little fuzzy on that point. I think they may start explaining things that he got some lesser version of it as they had tried to recreate it. Maybe he goes bad guy when he just wants more and more of it.

I think the thing they are trying to say is that NewCap is actually "peak human", able to make the triple bounce metal frisbee shots...and that's not enough. Super soldier serum puts the recipient on a whole different level. Bucky has had Hydra knockoff serum...and that's not quite good enough to match up with whatever the Power Broker has cooked up.

--Bad

I thought he had the serum until he got in a fight against those guys who did have the serum. Sam definitely doesn't have it and he was meant to use the shield anyways, so I don't think it matters with regards to that.

I mean, I'm sure as Vel said they'll just hand wave it away as Vibranium magic for the MCU, but in Endgame when he hands the Shield to Sam, I was internally scream "Why the fuck would you give it to Sam, he isn't powered and can't throw it!  Give it to Bucky who has a super arm!"

Again, chalk it up to Vibranium having unusual properties when it comes to kinetic energy or something. Presumably that's also how you handwave away the shield not imbedding itself in someone's chest when they get hit with it. I'm not entirely sure how he catches the shield though. At first I thought maybe magnets in the arm of the suit like Cap has had at times, but when they show footage of him throwing it during his interview he's bare-armed. Whatever, it's comic book science.

In the comics though, I know people with ordinary strength have been able to throw the shield and as I think I previously mentioned, they show in the comics when Walker is training to be Cap specifically why someone with super strength needs to avoid throwing the shield too hard.

I assumed in endgame he was saying 'paint your wings blue and stick this on your back or something'.

According to the original Cap movie, Vibranium is 1/3rd the weight of steel.  Not sure what that translates to in overall weight given the size of the shield, but it's probably a lot lighter than 40 pounds.

It doesn't really make sense in the comics or here, though. It absorbs all kinetic impacts so Cap can land on it from terminal velocity and have it not transmit any of that to him? Ok, then how does it work that it hits you hard if you get the edge of it in your face? But doesn't chop your hand off if you're catching it? But it's fine, it's Captain America's shield! Yeah!

Though now that I'm thinking on it, it's NOT his shield actually. It's not the MCU-Prime shield, that actually did get destroyed. It's a shield that Time-Travelling Peggy-Sexing Cap picked up somewhere yet to be disclosed. Which at the end of Endgame, Bucky kind of seems to know about, judging from his expression...

Yeah, the whole "completely vibration absorbent" was always a head scratcher, as that kind of property would have made most actual offensive combat uses impossible.   Can't bounce it off objects if it just slams into the first thing it hits and drops to the floor because it absorbed all the kinetic momentum.

The MCU shield wouldn't be too hard to duplicate since it's just Vibranium and Cap knows where Vibranium comes from. It's not like the comics where the shield was created almost by accident and they've never been able to replicate the process.

I always liked "Captain America's shield is a one-time accident and nobody knows how to make another", but of course it creates an immense story pressure--in most worlds, he'd be constantly pursued by people who want the shield either to study or to have.

Of course in the regular Marvel Universe, adamantium went from "this is super hard to make and there's almost none of it on the planet" to "I am putting adamantium foil on the baking sheet because it makes the cookies so very crunchy". As soon as you say "this rare shit can in fact be made", the rare shit becomes as common as dishwater.

Wasn't the first version of it made by Starks Dad?

My interpretation has always been that there is nothing particularly special about the Shield.  It's just a big metal disk made out of super rare metal that deflects things.  It only works as a weapon if the man using it has super agility, perception, and strength.

Yep.  Entire backstory of the shield was basically "What's that?  It's a prototype shield made of all the vibranium we know of.  It's lighter than steel and absorbs vibrations. Can I have it?  Sure." and that was it.  It's only "unique" property was being made of Vibranium.

I'm pretty sure there is only one shield.  But time travel is involved. (https://youtu.be/1SPk3NjYfmQ)

In the comics, the shield is made by a dude who otherwise doesn't matter except for this bit of lore--he's experimenting with some vibranium and some other metals, he falls asleep while one of his mixtures is curing in a mold, and some other metal accidentally gets in the mix, voila! an indestructible shield. Because he can't figure out what the alloy's exact composition is, he never recreates it, though the same dude goes on to create adamantium. The spiel on it is that the shield is light and because it absorbs kinetic impacts, it doesn't lose momentum when Cap throws it that's why he can richochet it off five guys and have it come back to him (and yet not take his hand off or break his wrist when it gets there--maybe that's the part that takes practice and strength).

Making that scientist into Howard Stark in the MCU was smart. Though Howard Stark in the main Marvel Universe is a fucking mess--at times he's been a vicious and violent alcoholic who hated his son and vice-versa, and I think more recently Stark discovered that his father wasn't even his father. Though I guess even more recently than that Tony Stark is dead, so who cares.

My interpretation of this based on the scene in Avengers where he uses the shield to block a swing from Mjolnir is that the shape of the shield combined with the properties of vibranium causes the energy of any impact near the middle of the shield to be redirected to the edges in the form of intense vibration, bleeding off the kinetic energy at right angles to the holder.  Hence the massive shockwave all around Cap in that scene, but Cap not being driven into the ground like a railroad spike.

Impacts at the edges wouldn't have the same property, which is why it recoils with apparent perfect conservation of momentum when it hits something on an edge.  And it returns to Cap because super soldier something something means he basically has Bullseye's superpower of being able to make every shot at the perfect angle for it to ricochet the way he wants it.

Fwiw the trailer also makes clear that non serum guys can use the shield the way Human Torch did.

Reinforcing the view that fakeCap probably isn't serumed, at least not yet.

Zemo so much better here than he was in Civil War.

Someone on twitter called Walker "dollar tree Captain America" and I can't stop giggling.  :awesome_for_real:

Not really digging the direction they are taking Walker but overall I really liked this episode.

Baron Zemo is the best part of this show.

Definitely enjoyed him in this episode. Much more fun than the dour and improbably master-planning Zemo of Civil War. 

I will continue my Always Wrong Comics Fan Speculations [tm]:

Tbh I can barely remember zemo from civil war. I vaguely remember him as a less memorable version of the bad guy from iron man 3 whose name I don't even remember.

I really don't think we need to spoiler speculation, especially with the track record some of you guys have.

I don't see Red Skull being involved. It felt like his appearance in Endgame was to write the character out after leaving his plot thread hanging since the first Cap movie. Internet speculation is mostly focused on Sharon, and I guess that's a possibility. With no SHIELD and no Cap, she no longer has the things that her comic book counterpart typically revolves around so it might make sense to do something else with her. Heinrich (Zemo the Elder) would be another possibility.

One thought is that it's a bit odd they're using Madripoor here as that's a location generally associated with the X-Men, particularly Wolverine. The only real non-mutant I can think of with a big connection to Madripoor is Viper, who ran Madripoor for a while. She's also got a longtime connection with Hydra so she would fit in the MCU pretty easily. I don't know why they would introduce her as the Power Broker, but she has had a number of aliases over the years.

Or it could be somebody connected with Bucky's past. The names of the people he's supposed to make amends with came up in this episode again, and thematically it would make sense if the Power Broker were somebody with ties to at least one of the heroes here.

Madripoor just reminded me of Marvel Heroes, RIP shit game.

I don't want to totally derail the thread bud: I loved that game, although admittedly more for the VA than the actual gameplay. I'd really like to know why people who love that type of Diablo style game think it failed. Bad optimization, graphics, gameplay, etc?

I wanted to see a 2.5 second flash of "Patch" just to throw fanboys into a tizzy.

Got a bit wonky ast the end, but it was a fine example of the 'click on things until they die' genre.

Weirdly i think they might have been too generous. I was swimming in cash store items and enough tokens to buy every hero as it came out just from regular play. A LOT of regular play granted, but still. And to me the gameplay was great, but yeah the VA was top notch. Jean Grey telling Emma Frost "I can read minds with my clothes on" still cracks me up.

It failed cause their CEO is a total scumbag and destroyed the company and ruined their chances of getting the license renewed. Screwing up the Omega console release didn't help either.

Tara Strong as Squirrel Girl was my favorite VA. I liked to play SG just for her lines even though she was kind of meh as a hero.

Here are some of her lines though it's missing her "nut facts" "legumes" one, which is one of my favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeabVZdQLCs&t=38s

One good thing was that even meh heroes were massively overpowered compared to the content. And yes, SG was hilarious.

Literally everything I say about what might happen is wrong, so yeah, spoilers are kind of beside the point. If I happen to get something right for once, you guys are all going to be just as surprised as otherwise. Hell, I'll be just as surprised!

Dude, speculation is not a spoiler even if it's right.

Having watched 2 episodes, this might be the worst MCU thing thus far.

Well, I think occasionally if you really have some kind of inside knowledge it can be when what you're watching is a close adaptation of existing work, at least if the people reading include folks who have zero knowledge of the source material. But MCU stuff has so far been just pulling little elements of past comic stories--they haven't really done any comics-first story arc closely enough that knowing the source material told you much in plot-specific ways about what was about to happen.

Compare to GoT discussions, where having read the books was a pretty good guide to exactly what was coming next even when they made some alterations to the material.

This isn't true, because thor 2, and iron man 2 and 3, and avengers 2, all exist.

I do think it is one of the most literal interpretations of a comic book idea out of  any of them. And it suffers for it. Comics are an incredibly low bandwidth format, and this show is the same. They only seem to have room in an episode for as few ideas as fit into a single comic book - and I'm not sure why.

i'm sorry but like

this is worse than all of those except thor 2 which I called out as being worse than i said it while watching (granted my original statement was a little hyperbolic - this is shockingly bad)

This is exceptionally bad, true to the comic or not - Falcon was already boring as hell but now he's a poor black guy with a shrimping boat? I don't give a fuck about his original backstory (if it is) but like, come the fuck off it. Dude has Stark Anyone on speed dial. Can't get a loan. Avengers are paid in goodwill.

Meanwhile, Bucky has been replaced with a neurotic character from Any Sitcom USA.

This show is a fuckin mess. I'm gonna keep watching it because it's canon but praising this bullshit after Wandavision feels like a defense of Star Wars.

Oh, and new Captain America looks like a genetic disorder. Where's the hell is your chin?

LOL I agree with every single critique but I still like it for some reason.

I've been reluctant to even ask (for some bizarre reason) but can Stan actually act? I've never seen him in anything but MCU stuff and I must say I'm underwhelmed.

All I know about Sam's comics origin IIRC is his father was a preacher, Steve specifically recruited him to be a CA-like hero for some island nation they found themselves fighting Red Skull over, and also later it was retconned Sam was a Pimp Named Snap the Skull mind-controlled as a Trojan Horse to screw with Cap.  I think the latter retcon was retconned out of existence.

Comics Bucky is basically:

Version 1: Pedo bait. I mean, he's maybe the most uncomfortable kid sidekick ever, maybe worse than Robin. He's a kid who hangs around a military base and then Steve Rogers basically adopts him as the camp mascot and has him sleep in his tent.

Version 2: Sainted dead character motivation. Cap and Bucky try to stop Zemo (the elder) from blowing up America and Bucky enthusiastically gets himself blown to smithereens while Cap just gets knocked into suspended animation. At this point inquiry into Bucky's actual background and personality basically ceases: he's just something for post-revival Cap to brood on.

Version 3: Brubaker rethinks him prior to reviving him: Bucky was a sniper, Special Forces, he was kind of Cap's yin-to-yang: hard where Cap was compassionate, etc. and then he revived as a Cold War pawn of the East Bloc, etc.

Comics Falcon is WAY WORSE:

He's a screaming Black stereotype straight out of incredibly square white guys watching a cheap blaxploitation film and thinking wow we gotta get down with the Negroes, dig it. He's a nice guy and then he somehow ends up on an island where Captain America is fighting the Red Skull and the Skull decides to turn Sam into a mobster pimp stereotype that Captain America redeems. Cap teams up with him, they work together because Cap is just that good: he's the white guy who can make a black pimp into a badass sidekick. Then the Black Panther and Marvel editors come along and say "I bet you thought we were a bunch of bigots, I mean, look at this character! It was the Cosmic Cube All Along! Actually Sam is just a nice guy from Harlem whose dad was a preacher. I bet he worked for a non-profit! Yeah! That's it! But he's become a badass fighter and now look, the Black Panther (our main non-embarrassing black character, natch) has some new powered up shit for him. Phew!"

There's some later garbage from garbage story arcs, but basically, Comics Sam Wilson is a fucking messed up incoherent character. Right around when they made him Temporary Captain America they decided he had always been, more or less, more like the character you're seeing now. So far MCU Sam is about 100% more coherent.

When Stark was alive and he wasn't dusted, Falcon didn't have financial problems. But Tony is dead and Pepper Pots doesn't have the same "You bought lunch, I'll cover the Cadillac" mindset towards his fellow vigilantes. There's no Rich Uncle Pennybags behind him anymore, and for most of the last 5 years, he was literally drifting in the wind.

That he's got money troubles is literally the most realistic part of the show.

--Dave

Edit: After re watching the episode, I'm about 80% on Sharon being the Power Broker.

Any avenger that was on good terms with Stark and was there when he died almost fucking assuredly could call Pepper Potts and be rich in 5 minutes. She's fucking Rescue, man. RESCUE.

This show sucks. I hate that I'm invested in the canon of the overall universe.

Not impossible it is Zemo.

Only 3 episodes left, so running out if time for it to be someone we haven't met. Sharon's last line kind of suggests you are right.

Not quite sure why she was killing everybody in sight all by herself then, kind of seems risky for the #1 badass in Madripoor. Though I can see why she might have wanted Nagle dusted if he was distributing the serum without her say-so and maybe those were his guys outside.

Also wonder if this ends with Zemo getting the mask glued to his face. I don't know that they'd want to lose Bruhl's facial expressions, which have been way more fun here than in Civil War.

it's sharon

she's the power broker

ADHESIVE X!!!11!

Always gives me Freedom Force narrator flashbacks.

JFC Marvel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nEzCv5u1O8&ab_channel=MarvelEntertainment

(one hour dancing zemo cut)

I'm so, so sorry.  :why_so_serious: I saw #ReleaseTheZemoCut trending and decided to join in. I didn't think they'd do it lol.

You know, thinking on Sam having money and family issues, part of that is them taking the Blip semi-seriously as a premise but part of it is just insisting that Marvel heroes have to have relatable human problems, none of them get to be archetypes or mythologies. (Hence even Thor has mommy issues, depression, drinking problems, weight problems, etc.)  In a way, you know you've progressed as a Marvel character from a side character to a main character when you get your own relatable problems as opposed to minor-character-schtick. Sam can just be "Steve's black friend who was trained on an exotic military technology" right up to the point that he gets handed the shield and handed a mini-series, after that he's got to be something more.

Wonder if he would be too proud to take money from Stark or whomever.

god draegan you somehow made this stupid fuckin storyline worse

It exactly the sort of thing that gets three panels at the start of a mediocre comic and then used for filler dialog to show how the hero sometimes has a rough time despite superpowers.

There is no thought out backstory - they just realised that Bucky has reasons to be sad but Sam was just a generic well adjusted military guy. What issues to generic well adjusted military guys sometimes have? The tropeotron says relating to folks back home and a shortage of cash.

Hoping Karli survives through the end of this series. Erin Kellyman is apparently in The Green Knight and the Willow series that's being made so there's that at least.

That last image of this episode is something.

Zemo in this series feels a bit like the slightly reformed Thunderbolts version of Zemo. He's still got that casual arrogance and he doesn't seem especially remorseful for all the shit he's done but he's also not going around being evil for sake of it. I can only hope they'll eventually work towards some sort of Thunderbolts series or movie.

Also continuing to like Wyatt Russell as the replacement Cap. Yes, being the child of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn scores him some points with me that he maybe didn't earn, but I also thought he was good in Overlord, and Everybody Wants Some. Walker in the comics had the unenviable task of trying to replace Steve Rogers as Cap. Here it's twice as bad as it's not just Cap as a character being replaced but Chris Evans. Also for some reason I actually like that in interviews Russell admittedly just does not give a fuck about comic books or superheroes.

Sam, Bucky, and Zemo were good in this one, but everyone else has started doing stupidity in lieu of plot.

The ending was well shot but really? Wasn't that a bit on the nose?

I think both Zemo and Enfys Nest are really nicely set up in this.

Sam's lack of a good answer to either of them is good too.

But for the plot to pay off and thereby demonstrate Sam really is Captain America, it seems like he has to reconcile what each of them represent and it doesn't feel like the show is smart enough to do that.

I think the idea is that to be Captain America you have to be able to boy scout your way out of this.

I think the JW character arc (a decent man cracking under the pressure of being replacement Cap) would have been better served by a slower burn but it's not his show.

I am enjoying that every faction is a little bit right. And I trust Zemo more than Sharon right now.

A lot of people outside the US are like yass yass that's how we see America, which is kind of what the Cap writers post-Brubaker were trying to do in the comics--acknowledge that Steve Rogers couldn't just Dudley-Do-Right his way to "but I'm a nice guy" if he wanted to be fighting "terrorists". I think that kind of beat them down in the end because they decided they still needed a Yellow Menace Bad Guy (well-motivated! vaguely sympathetic!).

I think it's more that you have to at least try for the peaceful resolution first when possible. Even Steve has had to get his hands dirty to do what he thought was right, up to and including fighting half the Avengers and going on the run from the government (and Sam was right there with him). I think Sam is ultimately going to have to fight Karli to stop her but he is able to at least empathize with her and tried talking her down.

I would honestly love it if the show ended up with Sam saying "I'm Captain America...and I'm a Flag-Smasher" (or something more or less along those lines).

It's pretty difficult to actually smash a flag tho

True dat.

As an Aussie, "smash" has a variety of contexts. To over-imbibe "I'm going to smash out a six pack of tinnies" (drink 6 cans). Another context is that smash = fornicate with - so yeah, I could see some flag smashing happening. Cue Homelander crossover.

Not if you dip the flag in liquid nitrogen first.

"Flash-Frozen Flag Smashers"

I liked a lot of parts of this episode but it also kinda highlights to me that thematically the Isaiah Bradley stuff maybe should have been the main plot of the series instead of Flag Smasher.

Isaiah's story is a bit more interesting because it's easier to understand his pov than Karli's (Karli's world being a lot different than our own). I think doing the show the way they did, it shows that while Sam can understand their opinions he's not Isaiah or Karli. He's not Walker or Rogers either.


I liked this episode a lot, even though it sort of mirrored the first episode, which I was just lukewarm about. I must admit I didn't see the obvious, mainly because I was attached to how the character was portrayed in the comics.

Not sure how I feel about what they are doing with [spoiler] and Walker but whatever. It's not their show.

The dudebros had already declared the show as too woke, this should really send them over the edge.  :why_so_serious:

Sam's training montage was really undermined by the previous Sam and Bucky scene. Outside of the dialogue I don't get the point in leaving it in.

I hate myself for knowing who the Countess was but at the same time I'm kicking myself for not connecting the dots re: Torres. My brain don't work good.

Also didn't notice that apparently Bucky had a good night's sleep for once. Interesting.

Kinda upset they are making us wait for the reveal. I'm wondering if it will be like the comic book version or something brand new.

Am I the only one wondering why Wakandans call Barnes the White Wolf? It's unlikely they had him doing any secret missions with only one arm. Maybe I should just let that go, but it really bugs me. Kinda feel they only call him that cuz he's white.

I don't see why, during the Sam and Bucky scene they were just gently tossing the shield while having a chat. It was literally playing catch.

Sure, I just think if they really wanted to get into race and how it affects Sam's perception on being Captain America, it would have been a lot more effective to show Isaiah's story rather than just have him tell it.

The weird thing is that after 5 hours of this show we have John Walker, Karli, Zemo, Isiah, Sharon, and Sarah all grumpy with the idea of the shield and captain America, and we haven't seen any of their stories that made them that way. They've just told us about them in a straight exposition scene.

Zemo gets half a pass for the story arguably being another film.

I did quite like this episode though.

Isaiah is obvious (he was the disposable lab rat they stuck in prison for trying to be as much of a boy scout as Steve, but black people don't get to break the rules doing the Right Thing). Sharon wound up an unperson for helping Steve, and he didn't do anything to help her. John Walker was a perfect soldier, a hero many times over, but Steve still made him look like a chump, without even being there or knowing who he was.

This is why Old Steve Rogers, even though probably still not dead, can't be in this show. He's the offscreen presence that everyone is responding to.

--Dave

I really appreciate what they're trying to do, which is to take white audiences into why Sam is a good equivalent to Steve Rogers, nice weakling from pre-war Brooklyn who just wanted to stop bullies. They know they can't play the same notes--you cannot have a sinister Nazi agent kill the nice scientist and try to escape in his Hydra submarine. You can't have a Red Skull representing everything horrible about the bad guys (though I have to say that MCU Red Skull is as many have noted rather less Nazi in the specifically racial sense than the Marvel Comics Red Skull). They know they not only have to show you "Sam is a really good man" in the same sense as Steve Rogers in a way that's emotionally convincing, they need to do it in a way that is situated in real circumstances the way that being a scrawny son of an abusive drunk in Brooklyn in 1941 was.

It's way harder than it looks--to bring the biggest audience possible into that emotionally. Because when Sam opens that box and assumes the mantle, folks are gonna have to believe it. I don't think they're going to do a magic "wait Chris Evans is back as STEVE ROGERS" thing the way the comics often do.

Is LeMar aka Battlestar dead? I was confused about that.

Also what's the big cameo? Is it whatsherface as Contessa Valentia de Fontaine? I have no idea why that's a big deal if so. She's a minor character in a minor key--she's basically Nick Fury's squeeze until the moment when she's his betrayer.

I was more inclined to get excited about Batroc getting a chance at round 2, but I hope they cheese him up in the next episode, because it's not Batroc until we get the accented cheese.

It's pretty heavily implied that Battlestar is dead.  At least, Sam, Bucky and John all seem to be doing a pretty convincing job of acting like he is dead, and Sam and Bucky for certain have no reason to be faking it.  Of course, that doesn't leave out the possibility that he ends up as Isaiah 2.0 if the suits got ahold of his body and he turned out to not have been dead, so we will have to wait and see.

Not 100% sure on the angle John is working in regards to scapegoating the guy he murdered with the shield as the killer, since both Sam and Bucky know Karly was the one who killed him, not the dude John whacked, so his story that he killed the person responsible for LeMar's death is way too shaky for me to imagine that the truth isn't going to come out in spectacular fashion in some form or another in the final episode.

Yes, Battlestar is dead. I'm not sure how that was ambigious in the 5th episode.

I look forward to the online alt-right losing their absolute shit at Sam assuming the Captain America mantle, just the way they did when it happened in the comics. I only hope any future stories they do with him as Cap are better written than the ham-fisted story that they used in the comics. I think they've done a decent job at inserting current issues with race in this country into the story without going full "Supergirl-level" preaching but it's a tough balancing act in a universe that's more "reality-flavored" than naturalistic.

The Flag-Smasher stuff is IMO the weakest part of this show. The original organization was very much a late '80's/early '90's comic level story, that had some good ideas but was still very dependent on the comics style of universe. The blip stuff being used as a driver for the org here just doesn't ever quite feel fleshed out enough to make sense. The refugees haven't really been explained well enough, IMO, nor has the GRC either. It's just one of those story devices that we're just supposed to roll with, I guess, but I think this has been a bit of a problem with all the post-Endgame outings - what happened during the Blip and how it was controlled is just this amorphous set of events. Probably for the best because I don't think there's really a good way to show it.

He's as dead as anyone can be in a Marvel story. But not so dead he couldn't be alive again.

I mean Sam and Bucky have both been equally dead before. Twice in Bucky's case.

As for the flag smashers, they are the best idea in the show. But yeah, so much screen time wasted that we really only know that Karli means well. And we get 80% of that from the casting.

Yeah, they mishandled Sam-as-Cap in the comics partly because the company brass got frightened by the right-wing noise machine losing its shit about it.

I guess with Battlestar, it was that we cut away from him collapsing and never went back to the body and there wasn't any funeral; in comics generally I take it for granted that if I don't see a body in a casket, the character might not actually be dead. Leaving aside all the ways to revive a character. I mean, John Walker died after his first story arc only it was a manipulative put-on (and it was Battlestar who figured it out) so I could see them drawing on that as a story element.

There was a really good Twitter thread about John Walker and how he was basically a great tool of the system and came to the conclusion that he’s sort of an inverse mirror of Killmonger.

https://twitter.com/ad_strider/status/1383081268045361152?s=12

That's a decent take on the scene. The dialogue bordered on being a little too on the nose, but both it and the racial messages of Isiah's story were riding that line pretty hard. I'm not sure there's a way to do both of those things without hugging that line pretty tightly, and most will go all the way over the line into preaching. I don't think this show has been great, but I also think the guys that have been shitting on it on Discord have been too harsh on it, likely because it's not as good or well-crafted as Wandavision.

Has a lot of the same problems as the winter soldier and civil war films.

Too much lore going on - or at least more lore than the writers can handle, and it rarely feels that the action and the dialog are connected.

My wife is usually interested enough to follow MCU through plots but this one she can't make head nor tail of.

But I'm happy to watch it.

Man, I think this is much more straightforward than Wandavision, at any rate, except for the Blip stuff (which they're trying to universalize as "folks have legit complaints but can't use illegitimate methods to pursue them").

That Twitter thread is smart. I hadn't thought of the Killmonger-WalkerCap comparisons but they're really rich once you start to think about them.

This story should be more straightforward. But it keeps bringing in minor characters and plot references without really showing you what they are.

This acts like everyone knows who Sharon Carter is. And does that often enough that a relatively casual viewer like my wife never really knows if she's missing something important.

To watch wandavision you only really need to know roughly what vision is. Ideally knowing he's dead probably helps but is still optional because wandavision shows you that he is dead, doesn't just dump the info in yet another exposition break between action scenes.

Incidentally, I think this is often true for captain America comics. They often seem aimed at comic book lore geeks.

I agree that Sharon Carter was likely confusing--even I could barely remember what it was that Sharon Carter supposedly did in Civil War that got her in trouble.

Zemo also was probably hard for some people to recall simply because he was a such a weak and improbable villain in Civil War.

Not sure Captain America in the comics is extraordinarily confusing on the whole--there have been long stretches in his comic where the problem was that he was a pretty boring, whitebread character. Brubaker's work on the title (that is used a fair amount in the MCU) did up the layering and complexity of storytelling somewhat. I think the big issue can be that Cap has a potentially huge backstory that can be retconned a lot and over time writers have done more and more of that. At some point, the time between his first career in World War II and his revival by the Avengers in the "modern" day is going to get so vast that they're going to have to rethink it. It's already weird in the comics to have Helmut Zemo be the child of a WWII-era Baron Zemo, it means the younger Zemo should be around 75 years old at *least*. It also means Namor is just as old as Cap, Bucky is just as old as Cap, etc. 

Captain America, like Superman, can be an incredibly boring character if not written right because he is a person who "represents the best in all of us." Layering humanity on top of that is difficult before you even get into powersets (i.e. Superman is too powerful, while Captain America should probably just be turned to dust in like 90% of the Avengers' fights, etc.). It's one of the reasons a lot of us comic geeks thought the first Captain America movie would be boring. Like Iron Man and Thor, all 3 of those characters had been sort of relegated to also-rans in the comics precisely because of that perception. The success of their 3 original movies was due in large part to the performances of Downey, Jr., Evans and Hemsworth each in their own way.

Then trying to inject a shitton of the Captain America continuity into it creates problems as well, like Khal said, mainly because a lot of his villains owe a tie back to his World War 2 days, and so have to be recreated as modern equivalents (like Zemo who really didn't get a good introduction but has improved with this show) that have little ties to WWII or the writer has to do some serious "magic or tech" reasons that they aren't dead of old age by now (similar to the gymnastics required for Cap to still be young and powerful). I don't think Cap works at all if he isn't attached to that WWII origin, because none of the US's wars since then are considered to be such straightforward good vs. evil sorts of scenarios. Imagine Captain America from the Vietnam War and all I get is the goddamn Comedian from Watchmen.  :why_so_serious: Even a Desert Storm Captain America is a wholly different beast.

It's not just that there have been no wars since WWII with easy morality, it is also that greater self awareness prevents any hero named for a country really making sense.

I rewatched Iron man and captain america recently. Iron man has aged poorly, aside from the very problematic scenes post MeToo and MAGA, it just feels a bit mean and excessively targeted on a dudebro audience. RDJ saves the film. First avenger though, was the first really great MCU movie.
 

....iron man aged poorly what

Yeah, well. I watched it last week. It's OK, RDJ is great, but aside from him doing the stark bit there just isn't much there by the standards of better MCU films.

It might be as much my expectations being higher now as it is the film aging.

I think in the current MCU they'd think more carefully about whether IM actually really saved people in a meaningful way by blowing up a tank. But you could argue that's the place the whole thing kicked off--a guy who was willing to turn what he'd made to what he thought of as a more personal, more focused, more human way of saving people. And who discovered in his own lifetime that this was both a great and terrible idea--superheroes are kind of like atomic power, you can power a city or destroy the planet with them.

You know what the funny thing about Captain America is that he is a straight up black and white superhero who when given the choice of morally grey, would purposely choose not to fight rather than muddle in dirt. There was two times in the MCU where Cap was challenged in the morally grey area of his job; in Winter Soldier where he promptly started questioning the legitimacy of his orders once the reality of "beating your enemies before they are a threat" become shields mantra, and Endgame, where instead of directly dealing with the chaos outside Captain America simply retired his shield until a black and white plan to undo the damage was discovered.

Which makes his choice for Sam as the new him make more sense. Sam is fine with fighting in the morally grey while making Steve Rogers like choices. As far as new MCU vs OLD MCU, I think you guys are thinking too far into it. I think the MCU has always focused on telling personal stories as oppose to superhero fights X bad guy stories. I think its more that they have to be even more reliant on the personal stories as the big bombastic supervillains aren't around.

I have no idea what you’re trying to say.

I quite liked the ending. Last two episodes improved the show quite a bit.

Sam's big speech worked just as well as when the Human Torch would do it.

He somehow didn't seem ridiculous using the wings and the shield. And the various antagonists all had a reasonably satisfying ending.

Don't know if it was a budget thing or a COVID thing, but this series needed 8 episodes. Felt rushed.

I dunno, they had over 5 hours.

That's a long time for an origin story.

I think you could remove episode 1 and 3 and have a better show.

Could've been a 2 hour movie

I haven't watched the last episode but this was fuckin rough

My commitment is only due to the MCU being pure phenomenon

Sort of thinking they're setting up a Thunderbolts that's

Zemo as the brains
US Agent as the brawn
Ghost as the tech
Maybe if the other Black Widow survives the upcoming movie she'd be in the mix too.
Kind of needs a morally questionable alien/Asgardian as the over-the-top powerful person. Could always have a version of Moonstone, maybe from the next Captain Marvel film, she's got a Kree connection.


Was kind of disappointed in Batroc getting killed and not being kitschy enough in the process.

Otherwise I think they stuck the landing pretty well. I kind of wondered if Isaiah Bradley, private and angry guy, would be happy with a museum exhibit created without his knowledge, permission or participation. I suppose it depends on the content, which we don't really get to see--if it doesn't mention his mistreatment at the hands of the government, maybe not.

Edit: Also, they just confirmed they're doing Captain America 4, with Anthony Mackie in the titular role, with some of the folks involved in making this one.

Apparently, Captain America 4 movie is a go (with Sam Wilson as Cap, naturally), and this show is the biggest show on Disney+ (beating out WandaVision and both seasons of the Mandalorian).

Personally, I enjoyed the show (though I felt the last episode was fairly weak; the worst of the season, imo), but it had its fair share of cringe moments. Still, be interesting to see where they take this in a movie.

Spoiler regarding a cut end-credit scene/Thunderbolt stuff;

really because i remember the chracter development being "black avenger can't get loan for shrimping boat"

Well, Captain America apparently can. Get ready for the hard-hitting sequel, "Captain America trades on Instagram fame to pump up failing shrimp business, in other news, Tony Stark is still dead and Pepper Potts is using all his money to start a new business where women put herbal liquids in their vaginas".

fuckin lol I just finished this

this was not THE worst but it was the SECOND worst

That surprises me. I couldn't wait for each new episode of Wandavision or Mandalorian but this one I sort of had to force myself to finish. I did enjoy it and felt like that final episode ended things about as well as it could have though I think they had Karli go too far. I would have liked to see her realize what she was in danger of becoming or something. I guess I'm just a sucker for redemption arcs.

I wanted to like this more than I did. The fight choreography was decent, and I like how they handled Falcon with the shield. There were just way too many plots for only 6 episodes and none of them were well thought out enough, well developed enough or well executed enough to feel anything more than rushed. Perfect example is


That scene had no emotional impact because it was literally one sentence, two cuts between the actors and we're done. There was no time for it to have any emotional impact whatsoever, because the actors didn't have time to emote. The Flag Smasher plot and the GRC resettlement stuff was really way too abstracted, even with showing some of the refugee camps. It had about as much thought and execution as the trade embargo in Phantom Menace.

I didn't realize they'd announced Captain America 4 with Sam, but good. At least that makes the feeling that this is just set up for something else make sense.

I wager that this show had more broad appeal than either of those two, largely because it was far more accessible to the general public; there just isn't anything massively complicated or niche about the show and it is fairly easy to just.. sit down and watch -- in a way, it has something for just about everyone, even if it doesn't anything overly well. I know the sitcom stuff turned a bunch of people off WandaVision, and Mandalorian, as good as it is, still suffers from being related to the mess that is the new Star Wars movies. Combine that with the fact that Disney+ has grown several million since even WandaVision, let alone the Mandalorian, and it isn't too hard to fathom.

I thought it felt like the writers felt they had be too explicit about everything.

They just didn't need to show a half assed version of Bucky making amends. They didn't need the entire Sharon plot. The entire 1st episode was unnecessary.


I kind of wonder if Sharon will turn out to be the thunderbolts antagonist.

As a narrative, this series wasn't especially strong. A lot of the show was moving pieces around and establishing the post-Steve Rogers status quo for Sam, Bucky, and Sharon, introducing U.S. Agent, and making Zemo an actual character.

The flag smashers and the GRC are the real problem. Felt like there wasn't enough budget or airtime left to explain the central conflict of the show. So we just got those awful awful fake radio and TV spots.

We kept being told how these were massive organisations relevant to the whole world, but the flag smashers looked like 6 homeless guys with inexplicable access to money and resources, while the GRC appeared to consist of 8 random jobsworths at a mediocre accounting firm.

Bucky was fine but really only needed two scenes, in the hanger calling out Sam for giving away the shield, and then the one near the end where he apologises to Sam. All the rest of his character was best handled by all the grumpy looks among the rest of the action.

Sharon just didn't need to be here. She made the show even more flabby but didn't really impact it. 100% of her role could have been more efficiently handled with by zemo. I think she's the big cut you make to give the main story some room.

US agent was mostly fine. Could have been trimmed a bit, but he was fine.

I still kinda chalk that up to wanting to acknowledge the issues that would be caused by the blip and then people returning 5 years later, while at the same time not wanting to get too much into the actual details because in reality shit wouldn't be anywhere near as back to normal as it's shown to be. It's kind of a fine line to tread because the MCU still has to more or less be recognizable as the world we live in, but given what happened it shouldn't be. We're still getting stuff that was originally supposed to be released closer to Endgame though so I hope with whatever they've been working on more recently they've gotten past the point where they feel the need to pay lip-service to it. It's really not the sort of thing you'd want people people thinking about too hard.

Really agree on the GRC stuff. We got hints of it but we really needed to see it viscerally.

Basically, what know about the Blip at this point from Endgame and these two series:

1) People died as the result of drivers, pilots, doctors, engineers, etc. disappearing mid-job. They're just plain gone.
2) People were sad and depressed once the whole thing settled in--and I am guessing that probably meant suicides too. Also just plain gone.
3) Folks mostly did not keep a lot of the usual past-times going (hence, no baseball games; I would guess few new films or TV shows; etc.)
4) But people kept the lights on and kept working at jobs and kept getting paid--something like a global economy kept going. There was still plenty of food, etc.
5) The Avengers functioned as a kind of first responder squad dealing with natural and human emergencies.
6) Organized criminals became far more powerful and predatory but Hawkeye murdered a huge number of them. We don't know yet quite why he fixated on them in particular or how he got around the world so readily and was as well-supplied as he seemed to be.

And now from this series, I think another thing has become clear--if people were living in a place they didn't like or felt vulnerable in (as they were in many cases pre-Blip) they left and crossed what had been borders and resettled elsewhere. Likely in the millions. Because otherwise, why would there be that many people squatting in that many houses that weren't their houses before? I mean, I get it--if half the people in my neighborhood disappear and they're not coming back and the government basically goes dormant, I might go live in the better house up the street. But that would still leave half the houses in a given place vacant and it would be a relatively trivial matter to tell the squatters in the better houses to go back to their ok houses. But on the other hand, if the entire populations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador came north and moved into the vacant houses of North America, when people came back to life, not only would their house be gone but all the houses might be full. So either those folks have to live in refugee camps (and I think that's another situation we could have seen, because presumably *those* people are furious too) or the people who moved in have to be put in refugee camps and resettled (which would also be a humanitarian disaster: five years of safety, peace and comfort and now you have to go back into a place where the worst people are in charge and life seems hopeless and impoverished).

I think they could have done a more visceral job of showing all that and given Sam's audition speech more power and intensity. (While also making it clear that the people on that council are in a genuinely tough spot.)  I can see all of this in the bits of exposition but they really didn't show it.

Tbh it seems like they've taken the very sensible decision to carry on as if Thanos only removed maybe 1 in 50 people rather than half.

Level of impact we're seeing is probably about that level, and that is fine. Because turning the MCU into a dystopia doesn't sound sensible.

Totally opposite reaction for me.  Ending speech felt cringey and forced.  Like, terrible half assed ham-fisted writing I literally had to pause and walk away from for awhile before coming back.  Whole episode was like that.  "Thanks for taking care of those terrorist, now we'll do our part."   Dear god did I suddenly tune into Adam West Batman?  Long rambling moral speech where everybody looks at him in shock and shame, even though half the shit is easily shot down horse shit, is just the worst cliche.

This series had some good points, but no, so many things about how it was put together bothered me through it, and final two episodes just fell apart hard.  If just talking about MCU movies and Disney+ series, going to agree with some discord comments that is his is the worst thing procured for MCU.

This is another aspect that bothers me about his.  Like, MCU made the decision to do the snap thing, so fine.  Whatever.  Just bring everybody back and try to pretend nothing happened. 

But the more they dig into it to flesh it out, and especially how this show does, really highlights just how silly the whole thing is.  As Khal lined out, a shit ton of people would have died in the immediate aftermath of this.  And of course, governments around the world would have collapsed, so who can count the millions dead in fighting in the 5 years since.  War, rape, murder, child abuse, starvation, nuclear disasters... endless suffering for the billions that remain, and 10's of millions dead.  World in Endgame should look like post-apoc but they just tried to ignore it.  And keep in mind, this happened on a galactic scale.  How many millions and billions died across the galaxy in the immediate aftermath?  In the next 5 years, how many billions or trillions died across the galaxy as civilizations collapsed and wars raged?  And none of this was fixed with the snap.  All because Tony Stark didn't want his 5 year old girl to go away.  Despite the fact he could have just told them to snap everything back to the way it was right before the snap, but leave the girl.

With Thanos original snap undone, this in fact makes Tony Stark the worst mass murder in the history of the galaxy.  Trillions dead in his name to save his little girl.

That's just hilarious conjecture, but it shows how half assed they approached his whole thing.  I understand why they did it, in that they didn't want the fix to the issue to be able to also bring back previous heroes they killed off for dramatic effect.  But trying to double down on it and try to justify the new world in terms of the snap just highlights how half assed it is.  Even Sam's stupid speech a the end.  I don't even know what they're fighting against.  Government organization trying to peacefully resettle people in the new reality after people returned?  The only other action is mass civil unrest and racial violence as people in their home countries fight to take back their actual houses and cities from foreigner invaders.  I imagine within 48 hours after the GRC reversed it's decision after Sam's speech, mass civil violence breaks out across the globe.  Within months, millions of people dead and millions more refugees forced back to where they came from only to die of starvation. Race relations now worst than ever.  Thanks Sam!

Gah, to much that bugged me about his show.  They just should have done his from so many different angles....

They're trying to get back to a place where the MCU is still relatable (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LikeRealityUnlessNoted),  but they didn't do it very well.

They could paper over the way that Tony Stark's nanotech should have changed everything (he's rich and doesn't share his toys). But yeah, there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. To some degree they're just going to have to ignore that the Blip happened.

--Dave

For me, the reason the speech was fine was that we'd established that what the GRC (and everyone else for that matter) was doing was demonstrably insane.

Given that fact, what the fuck else could Sam do.

It irritated me in earlier episodes that the GRC was set up as such a ridiculous organisation but once you accept that, the final episode seemed reasonable.

Also this didn't seem any less silly that Steve Rodgers position in Civil War. I appreciate Civil War is not a high bar for coherent story telling. But this show was about Sam becoming Captain America, and the final episode made him as sensible a captain America as the last one.

I have no problem at all with them saying "You know, it's weird, but when half the people in the world disappear suddenly due to a power that was godlike but verifiably not God, the reaction isn't world-wide chaos and murder and war for the most part, it's people coming together and being kind of emotionally subdued and rethinking everything they've valued up to that point." That's after five years. Sure, I think after fifty years, the wheel would be merrily turning along again towards all the usual garbage--which even the MCU's world-building would endorse, given that SWORD was clearly the powers-that-be getting ready to fight again if they had to and organized criminals were clearly starting to prey on people and so on. But for five years, I can see people just staying pretty low-key and sticking with simple food and not having a lot of consumer demands--time to play that Steam backlog, right? And people who wanted to leave where they were just kind of going somewhere else; families gathering their surviving members together; the bereaved finding new partners. If they want to tell me everybody was very well-behaved for the most part or in most places, I'll completely believe it.

But then that really does make what the GRC was doing completely wrong. I think on some level they didn't want to flesh it out too much because we need to believe that Sam could be both on the side of the GRC and the people in the camps--that he's right to stop Karli and he's right to cuss out the Senator. But they didn't earn that part by showing the situation because I think they know to show the situation is to pop the bubble of that pre-ordained equilibrium. The MCU has always been at its best when they've actually been willing to do something genuinely surprising--SHIELD is HYDRA, destroy it! Hela is going to control Asgard, blow it up! Stark didn't undo the last five years with his counter-Snap! etc. They couldn't make themselves go all the way on this one because they can't figure out how to balance out "Sam is a black man willing to represent America" and "Sam is an American man willing to represent the oppressed masses of the world".

It's hard to know everything the GRC was really doing.

But all that was presented in the show was that GRC were about to use troops to round up people who legally emigrated and transport them to concentration camps in other countries. And almost certainly spark sectarian wars in the process.

Yes that is really wrong. It is Hydra level moustache twirlingly wrong.

I think they were aiming for 'not doing so will cause another unspecified bad thing', but they never really explained it.

I think the obvious implication was that those people basically took over the homes of the blip returnees.

The issue of specific property rights is a problem needing an answer. It doesn't justify forcibly transporting one of the two entirely legitimate owners of a house to a camp in a different country. I would think you just print a load of money and give it to whoever doesn't get the house - not much else you can really do.

By the way, the people being transported would have paid for these homes and that money would have gone to the estate of the disappeared persons. So to be honest I'm not sure I would immediately jump to the conclusion that the returnee obviously has rights over a house they were living in 5 years ago.

The GRC existing is complicated but conceivable. But the only specific policy of the GRC described in the show in patently ridiculous.


I don't even understand why the countries that would receive a net inflow of prisoners under this scheme would be remotely OK with it.

At least when Hydra attempted something this ridiculous in CA2, they understood they had to murder all the liberals on day one to get away with it.

Yeah. I think this is one of those cases where they wanted to lean in to the world-building they've been doing but realized that if they lean in hard enough, they're going to make it hard to do story-telling set in a recognizable world with superheroes we root for.

I can kind of see an opening here for Victor Von Doom, by the way: a warlord who offers GRC refugees his country of Latveria that he's "liberated" with his amazing inventions etc. that it just so happens is formerly a region of some other established Eastern European country, and once they get there they find out that all their needs are catered for but also that they have to praise Doom etc.; that would put him in interesting tension with the rest of the world's governments but maybe also make it hard for them to do anything about it.