The Falcon and the Winter soldier

[Ceryse]

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 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.

[eldaec]

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.

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Teleku]

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.

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.

[Teleku]

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:

***Lots of stuff***

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....

[MahrinSkel]

They're trying to get back to a place where the MCU is still relatable,  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

[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.

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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".

[eldaec]

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.

[Threash]

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

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.