The Falcon and the Winter soldier

[Velorath]

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.

[Raguel]

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.  

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.

[Threash]

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 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.

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[SurfD]

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

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Surlyboi]

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

[HaemishM]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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. 

[HaemishM]

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.  Even a Desert Storm Captain America is a wholly different beast.

[eldaec]

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.
 

[schild]

....iron man aged poorly what

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[MediumHigh]

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.

[Velorath]

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

[eldaec]

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.

[Abagadro]

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

[eldaec]

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.

[schild]

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[Ceryse]

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;

[schild]

though I felt the last episode was fairly weak; the worst of the season, imo

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

[Khaldun]

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".

[schild]

fuckin lol I just finished this

this was not THE worst but it was the SECOND worst

[Riggswolfe]

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).

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.

[HaemishM]

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.