Captain America and the Winter Soldier

   Six episodes is what we got for this story about Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes reckoning with the legacy Steve Rogers left to them. We also had Zemo, John Walker, Karli Morgenthau, Sharon Carter, the Dora Milaje, and "Val."

Did The Falcon and the Winter Soldier bite off more than it can chew? Yes.

Six episodes, the third of which was a mess of weird pacing and story choices, was not enough to cover what this show set out to. But was it all bad? No.

Let's talk themes:

The biggest theme, or idea, that the show dealt with was the complex legacy of America as an identity, a history, and a nation, particularly in its treatment of Black people. Steve Rogers handed Sam the shield at the end of Endgame because he, correctly, saw Sam as a natural heir to its legacy. Steve had comported himself with integrity, optimism, and selfless heroism, and in Sam he found a kindred spirit. To Steve, whose view of America as a country was informed by his own perspective on its values, there was nothing complicated about handing that legacy to a man he felt shared his values. And Bucky, who had come to see Steve as an infallible moral authority (something that was more or less magically confirmed given his use of Mjolnir) was also blind to the difficulties in asking a Black man to take up that role.

It's multifaceted. On one hand, Sam has the reasonable fear that he'll be hated for claiming that title for himself - that America, or at least the shockingly large portion of America that still holds a white supremacist idea of American identity, would never embrace him as they had with Steve. No matter how heroic he is, some people will just simply never accept that a guy who isn't white could take up that title.

But the other major aspect of that complexity is not just those who would question his worthiness to take that title, but also the question of America's worthiness to have him represent it. Isaiah Bradley more or less was the first Black Captain America, but he was hidden away and punished for doing precisely what Steve had done in WWII. In a country with a 400-year history of utterly atrocious treatment of Black people, from slavery to modern-day killings by police, in what way does America deserve the service of a man like Sam Wilson?

I think it's notable that Sam's embodiment of that role is almost entirely his own. Yes, he's learned to toss the Vibranium shield around (somewhat poetic that the metal the shield is made from was stolen from an African country) but he didn't take any super-soldier serum, and he's still his own superhero with his own suite of abilities. He's taken the core of what it means to be Captain America - to stand up for our loftiest ideals - and made it his own.

The series does something similar to Black Panther, actually. In Black Panther, Killmonger's fundamental argument, that Wakanda has been doing the wrong thing by isolating itself and hoarding its prosperity, technology, and stability, is actually valid and correct. In the end, he does convince T'challa of this, but what makes him the villain is that his proposed solution is wrong - to pay back colonialism with colonialism. I don't think that Karli Morgenthau works quite as well as an antagonist, but I do think that we have here an example of a person whose motives are good. Really, where I think the story suffers is that her turn from heroic freedom fighter to murderer feels a little abrupt (it happens in that messy 3rd episode.)

But, it does provide Sam with a chance to prove himself - yes, he does an awesome job of stopping the plot to kill all the GRC members, and he wins the day, but it's when he steps up to the members of the Council and explains to them why their plans for mass deportations are wrong.

Steve understood what it meant to be weak and powerless before he got turned into a muscular athletic god, and it was that perspective that kept him humble enough, and focused enough on defending people like he had been, to prevent the power he had from corrupting him. Sam's experiences as a Black American (and also a generally larger-than-most amount of empathy) have given him the ability to see what Karli was fighting for and recognize the righteousness of her cause.

There are about three million other things that happened in that episode that bear talking about, but I think the core development of the series is Sam becoming the true Captain America. And wouldn't you know it, there's a fourth Captain America movie now in the works, which will presumably center on Sam Wilson's tenure in that role.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier Moves Toward its Endgame

 Sam has a great insight in this week's episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. As he discusses Bucky's difficulties in adjusting to life and putting the Winter Soldier behind him, and Bucky's apology over his outrage that Sam would turn down the shield and thus the role of Captain America (inadvertently leading to the truly unworthy John Walker taking it on,) Sam points out that as much as they both loved, respected, and valued Steve, even the original Captain America was not the ultimate arbiter of goodness. It didn't matter what Steve thought.

Bucky is looking for external definitions to qualify his rehabilitation. He wants a figure of authority to sign off on his return to being a good person, and not the cyborg super-soldier assassin that he was for so long. Sam sees through the problems with his process of making amends: Bucky wants to feel better by making amends to others, when the truly good act would be to make them feel better.

Sam is a good person, and has basically never wavered from being one. When we're first introduced to him, he's dedicated himself post-military-service to aiding other veterans with the trauma of their time in combat. In fact, he inspires Steve to do similar work after the trauma of the Snap.

We see that the community he is from is one that is tight-knit, as demonstrated when he calls in the whole neighborhood to help fix up the family fishing boat. And one can imagine that his faith in community extended to a faith in his country. Meeting Steve Rogers reinforced that faith.

But the story of Isaiah Bradley, even though he only learned of it recently, was always lurking at the back of his conception of this country. Historically, America has been a land of freedom, opportunity, and optimism for people who look like Steve Rogers and John Walker. But that promise has always been dangled before its racial minorities, especially Black Americans, only to be so often torn away and replaced with the opposite.

Consider, for example, the story Bradley tells of why he was arrested and locked up, experimented on for 30 years. He describes how his brothers-in-arms, the other subjects of the experiments to replicate Erskine's serum, were captured at a POW camp, and the US Military considered simply bombing the camp to prevent anyone from recovering their research. Bradley broke away and stormed the facility alone, bringing the POWs back.

Does that sound familiar? It's almost exactly what Steve Rogers did. Back when he was nothing but a USO mascot, he stole away to rescue a group of POWs (including Bucky) that Hydra was experimenting on. The military swiftly recognized Steve's value and promoted him to a special forces role. Bradley was tossed in jail for 30 years.

This is a show that is definitely doing too many things, but it was nice at least this time to get a strong focus on Sam.

Let's just touch on the other developments:

John Walker gets "other than honorably" discharged (not being up on my military terms, I don't know if this is the same as a dishonorable discharge or something that's a different category) and is stripped of his title as Captain America. He lies repeatedly about killing the person responsible for Lamar's death, even to his family. The episode is called "Truth" and John keep demonstrating his unworthiness by being unable to acknowledge that he killed the wrong person - one even wonders if he can admit it to himself.

After getting a relatively light punishment for, you know, 2nd degree murder, he's approached by shocking reveal Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who gives off some very Power Broker-y vibes (and from narrative efficiency sounds like she could be it,) offering Walker future work.

We also see that Sharon Carter has hired freaking Batroc the Leaper to do... something, and then we see him meeting with Karli in New York to supply the Flag-Smashers with what looks like some hardcore military hardware. Is Sharon the Power Broker? Also, what's her long game here? This isn't actually the first time Batroc's been hired by a good guy (assuming Sharon's still good) as in Winter Soldier he was hired by Nick Fury to take the ship to make a distraction for Black Widow to get information of Project Insight.

Karli's weaponized flash mob abilities gather a group to take over the security of the GRC meeting, where they're voting on a mass deportation bill. Even if Karli's violent methods are troubling, the show certainly seems to come down on the side of "policy-wise, Karli should win, but her methods are just going to make this situation worse."

And that question of American Nationalism is sort of at the heart of all of this:

The ideal America, as I see it, is as the Anti-nation. It's a land where it doesn't matter where you were born or what you look like; you get to be American if you believe in freedom, equality, and democracy. There's unity like you'd get in a traditional nation-state, but it rejects ethnicity as a basis for national identity.

But we're not in the ideal America (the optimist in me says not yet) and there's little more obvious a counter-argument that we are than the experience of Black Americans, who, despite having been here for as many generations (often more) as any White folks, are never given the same sort of ownership, belonging, and agency over the country's destiny that White people have claimed.

Karli seeks to represent displaced people from all over the world who are under threat of being forced out of their homes in Europe, but it boils down to the same question: who gets to belong here (wherever "here" is) and who doesn't. Karli is arguing for a world in which everyone belongs everywhere.

America could be the place where everyone belongs. We have a contradictory legacy of diversity and racism. We're a nation of immigrants, but we're also a nation that created race-based restrictions on citizenship and basic human rights. We're a nation with freedom of religion, but we've also had a powerful political movement to venerate a single faith (and in fact, a single reading of that single faith) as superior.

And that's why the idea of Sam taking up the shield that represents America is so fraught: for all the people that will celebrate this step toward a better America, there will be those who lash out against it. And as Bradley argues, maybe America isn't worthy of having a Black man as its representative.

I really wonder how this story's going to end. We only have one episode left. Zemo's story seems over -he's been taken by the Dora Milaje and is being sent to the Raft (though I wonder why not to Wakanda) and there are still questions of what the deal with the Power Broker is. But as I see it, the key things we have to deal with are these:

Karli's making a move on the GRC. She probably wants to kill them all, which is tough because while murdering a bunch of unarmed people is an unambiguously evil act, her ultimate intention of preventing the hateful "Patch Act" from going forward is a noble one. I think Sam's the best-equipped person to talk her down, but I also hope that Sam doesn't just stand by and let the displaced people get screwed.

John has gone off the deep end, and is now making his own (presumably non-Vibranium) shield. I don't know where he's going, but it can't be good.

Bucky... despite also being one of the title characters, I don't think we've got time to deal with his whole thing. Sam has put him on a new path to rehabilitation, but I don't know if we have time to see all that happen. At the very least, he can back up Sam. Bucky's supposed to be making amends by helping others to feel better, not just himself, and so I'm curious to see how that manifests in the next episode. "Start with one," says Sam, and I think we've got to see Bucky help someone with their problems. John Walker looks beyond redemption by this point, but maybe Bucky can help him as someone who has also done some really heinous things in his past.

The whole Sharon thing I have no idea.

I think Sam's got to become the new Captain America - arguably he already has during his training montage. But maybe he'll show it to the world in the final episode (with some new Wakandan wings!)

Anyway, reflecting on the series up until now:

I don't think six episodes has been enough to touch on every theme they wanted to. But I do appreciate that the MCU is trying, within its superhero story structure, to deal with some very deep and complex issues like racism, nationalism, trauma, and identity. I think this show will probably compare less favorably to Wandavision, which had the benefit of keeping a fairly tight focus on its main character (though it also had the odd set-up for Monica Rambeau, who I liked but also felt like she was on a different show) and thus could feel like a superhero-examination of grief, fairly distilled (and also take a really bonkers approach to format, at least for the first several episodes.)

Still, I think the MCU does a couple things really well: first, that it approaches these larger-than-life superheroes as humans (or human-like people) first, and lets that inform their superheroics. The other is that it acknowledges the complex moral and ethical dilemmas of the real world and tries to say something about them. It might not hit as original or coherent an argument as the most sophisticated works of art do, but there's a genuine effort that can provoke thought and reflection in its audience all while providing popcorn-munching entertainment.

One last note, somewhat unrelated:

As a cinephile Angelino (a city that probably has a disproportionate number of cinephiles) I'm pretty sad to hear about the closing of Arclight Theaters. While it might be odd to hear so many people lamenting the loss of a chain of movie theaters, for those reading who have never been to Arclight, it's basically a movie theater that never seemed to cheap out on the experience (the tickets weren't the cheapest either, to be honest.) They had good food, often had exhibits with things like props and costumes you could see while waiting for the movie, and were just a nice place to go see a movie.

There's one in Culver City I often walk to, and I've seen probably most of the MCU movies that have come out since 2013 there. Granted, it's the movie theater closest to Sony Studios, so I'm sure that some other chain will buy the location, but Arclight was always just kind of a nicer experience than any other chain, and so I'm sad to see it go.

Falcon and Winter Soldier Gets Back on Track

 When you think of Steve Rogers, you think of a buff, tall, blonde, blue-eyed, All-American Man. His strength is herculean, and he's played by Chris Evans, who is a pretty classically handsome guy. We know him a war hero who kicked Nazi (and the fictional Hydra) ass across France and Germany. He's a badass titan, a juggernaut of freedom and justice.

But that's not who he was for most of his life. Well... ok, "most" is a bit tough to talk about when we're looking at a guy who was frozen in ice for 70 years and then re-lived those years in private with a lifetime extended by the super-soldier serum, allowing him to look closer to 80 when he's over 100.

But it's very important that Steve was anything but a strong, strapping young man when he was chosen to get his serum injection. He was a short, scrawny guy with myriad health problems. That he lived such a disadvantaged life and still stood up to bullies made him remarkable, but perhaps even more remarkable was that when he was given the serum, he never forgot how vulnerable and weak a person could be, and how those people needed someone to protect them.

When John Walker is made the new Captain America, he's already a veteran with medals of honor from an elite unit. The military has seen him as someone kind of resembling what Steve Rogers was post-serum, and chooses him to fill that role.

We don't know what he did in Afghanistan. Today, and probably since the Vietnam War, the public has a less idealistic sense of what war looks like and how much we can trust our own soldiers to behave when invested in the authority to commit violence in our name.

But I think John Walker's story works even if he was a perfect soldier, an officer and a gentleman, who always tried to do the right thing and protect the innocent.

The point is that he was made Captain America after he was already a soldier.

The latest episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, "With the Whole World Watching" sees our antagonists (and there are many) sliding into true villainy. Karli Morgenthau's goals are admirable. Sam even says this explicitly. So many evils have been done in the name of nations and borders, inflicting pain and suffering on people for the accident of where they were born. She wants to remake the world as a place where all of humanity is united as a single nation, and I actually agree with her to a large extent. My grandparents were nearly murdered because Hungary (and Germany pulling its strings) decided that Jews weren't "real Hungarians" who deserved to live in their home country. They both lost many family members to this arbitrary conception of nationhood.

To me, America is at its most inspiring when it is the anti-nation: a land where we are united by principles and ideals, and not by ethnicity or religion. The Howling Commandos in the first Captain America movie represented that ideal - a racially diverse elite force in a military that, historically at least, was not de-segregated until after the end of WWII. (Which also tells you that America's antinationalist nature is largely mythological.)

And our adversary was the Nazi regime, which was the most nationalistic of nationalist regimes.

But I'm getting into the weeds here.

Karli's distaste for nationalism is justified and sympathetic. The problem is that she's starting to use tactics that are not as admirable. Karli would argue that violence in a war is justified, and you could even say that we might be holding her to too high of a standard. But whens he threatens Sam's sister and nephews, that is certainly a steep step down from any moral high ground she once possessed.

There's a theme that the super soldier serum exaggerates an individual's core essence. For Steve, thankfully, that made him all the more resolute in stopping bullies and helping people in need. Of course, we saw that what it did to Red Skull was make his hatefulness and malice manifest so that his monstrousness was now reflected in his appearance.

For Karli, I think that she wants to protect people, yes, but at the core of her being is an anger toward the system that led to all this pain and suffering. In Captain America, Erskine asks Steve if he wants to go to Germany to kill Nazis. Steve says no, but he wants to stop bullies. I think that Karli might answer similarly, but while Steve meant it, Karli might actually be pretty eager to kill them.

And... I mean, fair, right? But when that hatred gets magnified by the serum, it starts to have unexpected and unpleasant effects.

That being said: Karli might be better organized, but there's still a sympathetic core to what she's doing.

John Walker has lost it.

He seemed hesitant to take up the role, or at least acknowledged how huge it was for him to become Captain America. But he wants it - and that's in part because he wants to reduce the complicated, horrible experiences he had in Afghanistan into the black-and-white morality that Steve Rogers faced in WWII. He wants the fight to be good vs evil, and to be able to throw himself fully into the fight without any sense of doubt or guilt.

And that's fucking dangerous.

John's friend Lemar grounds him. They've been through the same stuff, and it's Lemar who can remind John that yeah, he's a good person. Lemar's a good friend... sort of. See, I think Lemar is a good soldier and he wants to back up John, but in a way, he's too quick to help John ignore his doubts. Hesitation on the battlefield can be deadly, and that's why soldiers are trained so hard - to lock in procedures and shape their thought process so that they can make quick, efficient calculations. And I think both John and Lemar have really learned to think of doubt and hesitation as purely bad things. Hell, when John asks if Lemar would take the serum, Lemar responds "hell yes, no hesitation" (I might paraphrase here.)

But without doubt or hesitation, we sometimes also lack reflection and self-awareness. And that's allowed John to think of the Flag-Smashers as nothing but a pure evil - something that stands in opposition to his country and his code and thus is just as evil as the Nazis were, which is something we know, as an audience, is patently untrue even if their tactics have turned them villainous.

John's worldview is simplistic, and by the end of this episode, he's taken the serum to have the same (or near the same) strength as his shield-bearing predecessor. But it also seems to have turned his black-and-white, always-ready-to-fight attitude into something dominating his mind.

Lemar's death - an ordinary human in a superhuman fight who gets killed in the sudden and unexpected ways mere mortals so often do - sends John over the edge. What little grounding, however flawed, that he had, is gone.

By the end of the episode, he decapitates one of the Flag Smashers with the very shield that Steve Rogers used to fight Thanos, staining it in blood. In PG-13 movies we never saw that thing covered in the blood of the Nazis that Steve definitely killed with that big hunk of metal, but that kind of symbolized that we found it acceptable when he did that. I mean, they were Nazis.

But executing an already-defeated man who we just earlier saw was teaching children in a refugee camp doesn't look as good, does it?

While this episode was a massive step up from the previous one (which I'm going to hope was just an anomaly) I do think it's trying to do a couple too many things, and in part I think that comes at the expense of its two title characters, who haven't really had time to work through their own arcs and issues (though seeing Bucky finally free of his programming in Wakanda was nice - if there were more time I'd like to see how they did it.) There are only, I think, two episodes left, and it feels like we're just getting started.

Zemo's role in the show is an interesting one, and one I find worked a lot better in this episode (it was just a lot better - I think episode three probably should have been like three different episodes.) He hates the idea of super soldiers, and we get a little demonstration of that when he finds the serum vials dropped by Karli in their fight. He picks one up, and one almost wonders if he's tempted to take it for himself, but instead he smashes it and destroys all but one of the vials, which he seems to have just overlooked (it's that one that John takes for himself.)

Zemo is a man of principle, but also one of few scruples. He gets information out of children with Turkish delights (a reference to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?) and then slips away when the Dora Milaje comes after him. There's never been any doubt he would betray Bucky and Sam, but he's not pure evil either.

Zemo explains that he believes the very concept of super-soldiers, and superheroes in general (though that term, contrary to the trailers, is not used) are inherently problematic, because they create a hierarchy of humanity that allows for a form of supremacy. He says he wants to remove them because of this, and shows himself to be principled when he crushes the serum vials under his feet.

But on the other hand, as Sam calls him out, it's kind of bullshit. Zemo very clearly sees himself as superior to other people - smarter, more worldly, and worthy of making these broad decisions for humanity. The guy is, after all, a Baron, and technically royalty (which is odd because I think the title "Baron" is one of the lowest ranks of nobility, though that might just be in England.) Sam is a much more grounded, normal guy, and it's for that reason that he has the best insights into the Flag Smashers and Karli.

In fact, it's intensely frustrating when John blows Sam's attempt to connect with Karli and talk with her - he comes in mostly in good faith, and demonstrates that he does understand her, as much as she wishes she could blow him off.

Sam's empathy is his superpower, and that's why he and Steve connected so easily and so quickly.

I think if there's one primary complaint I have about the show it's that there's so much going on with Zemo, Karli, and John that it feels like the title characters have to struggle for the spotlight. The first episode, which focused almost exclusively on the two of them (and they never shared the screen that episode) was really interesting, and I feel like all this plot is getting in the way. Six episodes might not be enough to tell this story.

But we'll see.

Loki's New Trailer and the Aesthetics of Time Travel

 There's a new trailer for Loki, Disney +'s third MCU show, which is set to premiere on June 11th. The show looks bonkers - a different sort of bonkers than Wandavision, though definitely looking more in tune with that style of high concept comic book storytelling than the action movie vibes of Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Spoilers for Infinity War and Endgame to follow - at this point I imagine that those who care have already seen them, but if you're, say, finally getting into the MCU, I'll do a spoiler cut.

Mr. Fly Fly and the Ice Man, Episode 3

 Hoo boy.

I was tempted not to write a post this week about Disney Plus' The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (which I maintain is an awkward title, but what are you going to do?) The reason is that, well, it was a hot mess.

Of the first three Disney + MCU forays, I'll confess that this the show I was least excited about, but in its first two episodes, the show managed to hit some good notes: focusing on its leads as people, touching on themes of the meaning of America (one of the biggest themes of the Captain America movies that this show follows from) and the dangers of lacking self-criticism (John Walker's Captain America represents an unnuanced, jingoistic vision of what the Cap represents that flies completely in the face of what Steve Rogers actually was - remember that it wasn't badass soldier Steve Rogers who got picked, but shrimpy kid with heroic conviction who was chosen for the role.)

I think that, in a lot of way, this show seems to suffer from being, well, intended to be the first out of the gate.

Wandavision had its issues - it tried to stuff in a few too many arcs (Monica's great and all but I think the show would have worked without her and we could have had Photon/Spectrum simply introduced in Captain Marvel 2) and the final battle felt a little simplistic compared to what the show had been doing previously - but ultimately I think its biggest success was that it was allowed to focus primarily and... nearly exclusively on Wanda - her grief was the big bad all along, and Agatha was just an opportunist. Wandavision got to be weird and work on its own pace.

But this episode blew through what could have been two or even three separate episodes. Nothing had time to breathe. The pacing was all over the place, and even individual scenes were weirdly shot and paced. Last week we learned that Bucky was willing to go talk to Zemo to learn more about Hydra stuff, but Zemo is out of prison in literally like five minutes.

Then we go to Madripoor, what feels like it could be set up as a really important new location, but we're already out of there by the time the credits roll. Sharon Carter, teased as a major player in the series, has entered and left the narrative (it seems) with just a kind of depressingly cynical turn as a stolen art dealer.

Toss in another scene of Walker and Lemar once again cribbing Sam and Bucky's notes (and a weird outburst by Walker that, yes, sets up his villainous turn that we all expect, but also felt a bit out of nowhere) and Karli going from heroic revolutionary to coldblooded killer for no really clear reason, and...

Well, the episode was a bit of a mess.

We're now halfway through The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and I'm sort of wondering if this show has been given the runtime to actually pay off what it has set up. It seems like there's too much plot to get through to focus on the show's biggest strength, which is the dynamic between Sam and Bucky.

We'll see how it turns out, and to be fair I think episodes 1 and 2 were a lot better. But there do seem to be some signs of the show suffering from trying to stuff too many things into it, possibly in order to fulfill franchise needs.

Anyway, let's hope this episode was a fluke.