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.
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