The Falcon and The Winter Soldier – The Whole World is Watching

The biggest benefit to television is that it allows writers to spend time developing characters over the course of hours across a season, rather than being confined to the mere two-hour window provided by most films. As I’ve written about before in these pieces, that was the greatest boon I could see from Marvel branching out into shows that would highlight some of their B-team players that had been elevated to the big leagues in light of the losses suffered by the MCU in Avengers: Endgame. And it worked pretty well for WandaVision, which gave us a deeper look into what makes Scarlet Witch tick – information that will be key when she returns to the big screen in her next, Doctor Strange-adjacent adventure. I was hoping for The Falcon and The Winter Soldier to provide the same: a look at what makes Sam and Bucky tick, explore them dealing with the loss of Steve, and perhaps getting them both closer to their ultimate MCU destinies. But with two episodes left, TFATWS has proven that it’s really only concerned with telling a shallow story of why the Flag Smashers are the bad guys, introducing and then warping John Walker’s Captain America (which isn’t a shock considering his comic origins, which I’ll get into later), and refusing to dig deep into either Sam or Bucky as characters – which is the real tragedy of this series.

One of the more annoying, yet incredibly prevalent, things TV showrunners love to say when talking about their series is that it’s a “____ hour movie,” thinking that if they compare a TV show to a film it will get more people hyped to watch. What it really does is signal to TV critics that the showrunner doesn’t understand the medium of television and probably created a poorly paced series without a whole lot of character development. While I haven’t seen anything touting TFATWS as a six-hour movie, after four episodes, it’s pretty clear that was the blueprint for the series. Which, naturally, means the series is far more interested in presenting a single six-hour arc and not with using the medium to drill down on character beats, take quiet moments to explore the story, or even give us self-contained episodes. Everything on the screen is in service to getting the Flag Smashers caught (and not really understanding them or their cause – which is easily the biggest misstep of the whole show) and turning John Walker into a Super Soldier. That’s the story. And with so many supporting characters from past films popping up thus far, there’s no breathing room to allow us to spend quality time with the show’s titular characters.

So let’s tackle the Flag Smasher problem. I suspect plenty of writers will do a deep dive into all the problems with their characterization, and how this is a trend in superhero films, but I want to at least scratch the surface. It’s a long standing tradition in these stories – and, frankly, any story where the writers want to position their heroes as the righteous ones – to present a seemingly innocuous villain with some pretty sound ideas. After all, Karli’s position that the world governments have failed those they displaced when the Blip was reversed isn’t wrong. People lost their homes, their livelihoods, and were sent to camps with nothing so that the missing could simply resume their lives once more. It’s a horrific proposition – and one that certainly makes you sit up and take notice. But, without any real explanation or reason, Karli decides to bomb a building and kill people. When confronted about it this week, she simply says those people weren’t innocent and moves on. Now, we’re meant to infer that the serum is making her more violent, or that it’s changing her – or even just assume she wants to kill those who wronged her. But the series doesn’t bother interrogating this massive character change. It simply gives it lip service and moves on, because this is a six-hour movie and the story requires Karli to be painted as the bad guy who won’t listen to our heroes so that they can take her out without alienating the audience.

But this isn’t a movie, it’s a TV series, and there should be time to dig into her motivations. We should sympathize with her. We should see that her choice to ramp up her fight with violence and murder wears on her. This shouldn’t be a decision she takes lightly. That’s the beauty of TV! We have the time to get to know her and understand her, so that when she makes this turn to a darker path we can mourn the loss of a character we liked. Instead, we are given nothing in the way of character development and Karli makes this heel turn simply because the storyline dictates it. The most disappointing moment of the entire episode for me was the phone call between Karli and Sam’s sister, Sarah. There’s a brief moment at the close of the call when Erin Kellyman’s face shows just how painful threatening an innocent woman was to Karli, and that she’s disgusted with herself for doing it. In that second of screen time, we can see just what Kellyman could have done with the character had she been given a chance to actually show us what it took to make Karli decide true violence was the only option – rather than simply say those words and move on. It’s such a missed opportunity for the series, and I would gladly give up the reappearances of Sharon, Ayo, and Zemo to have spent more time with Karli to understand just what her and her team wanted to achieve.

And then there’s the episode’s other poorly executed plot point: John Walker falling apart. In the comics, Walker takes the serum (through his connection to the Power Broker, rather than by finding it on the floor) and becomes a Super Solider, so this plot point wasn’t exactly a shock – personally, I’ve been waiting to see how he’d get his hands on the serum since the first episode. However, boy, was it handled pretty poorly here because, guess what, the series hasn’t bothered to develop his character at all. Noticing a trend? Yeah, in a television series meant to give us a chance to see Sam and Bucky as their own characters, distinct from Steve, it’s managed to not only fail at providing meaningful character development to its titular characters, but it’s also managed to fail at fleshing out its villains and its supporting cast. That’s pretty damn hard to do, and when it comes to John Walker, well, it’s just stupid.

Yes, we all want Sam to become the new Cap. And we know the show wants that as well (Chekhov’s Shield and all that). Well, the show also had Chekhov’s Super Soldier Serum when it came to John Walker. I think we all knew that he wanted to have “real” power, and that he would realize (aka be humiliated) at some point by “normal” people (here, the Dora Milaje, providing us with the series’ best fight sequence) and the call of the serum would become too much. He can’t live up to the moniker of Captain America because he doesn’t have Steve’s strength and abilities, so he’ll get them however he can. And, in a tale as old as storytelling, he will get the super powers and abuse them in some way – as Zemo said, there hasn’t been another Steve Rogers, who can resist the allure of power. It was particularly disappointing that the catalyst for John’s descent into darkness turned out to be the death of Lemar.* We know precious little not only about John, but also about his relationship with Lemar. We know they are best friends and that they served together, but if the series wanted his death to hit as anything but a cynical move to turn John into the violent, angry man it needs him to be so that Sam can take over the mantle of Cap, well, it failed both characters in failing to give us the time to get to know them both.

*Again, I suspect someone far better suited for it than I will write a great piece explaining all the problems with using the death of one of the few Black characters in Marvel to signal the dark turn of a white “hero” but boy, was this not the best choice here. For a series that has made a point that it wanted to address American racial tensions – particularly with having a Black Captain America in a country where white supremacy continues to be a pressing issue – to center the death of a Black man as the reason for a key piece of character development in a white character…oof. When this occurs with a female character, the term used is “fridging.” Marvel fridged Lemar so that John Walker could turn into the bad Captain America the story called for. And that’s not only bad writing, it’s a really horrible look for the MCU as a whole, where Black actors have so often been relegated to the status of the sidekick rather than the true hero. I’m really disappointed with this particular choice.

So, with two episodes left in the series, where do we stand? Well, New Captain America just murdered a Flag Smasher live and in living color on about 50 cell phones, and he’s souped up with Super Soldier Serum. Zemo is in the wind (which anyone could have predicted would be the case as soon as he appeared in the series). We still know next to nothing about Karli and why she suddenly decided that the Flag Smashers should up their MO to terrorist bombings. We don’t know who the Power Broker is (there are two ways the series can address this final mystery: a big reveal that sets up a showdown with a major actor in a future film or it’s someone we already know – and who has already appeared on the series . . . hint, hint). And all that interesting character development we were hoping to get from Bucky and Sam? Well, I think we can just kiss that goodbye. That ship has most definitely sailed and we’ll head into their next MCU adventure knowing just as much about them as we did before this pointless exercise of a series commenced. There were so many interesting paths this series could have taken, and instead of creating a coherent arc with complex characters, the series decided to try to be a little bit of everything and in the process, became about nothing.