The Falcon and Winter Soldier Finale: This Series Should Have Been a Movie

One of the most underrated talents of directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who helmed the last two Captain America movies and the final (for now) Avengers team-ups, is time management. In the vast, otherwise unwieldy Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame, it was essential to not only deliver high-intensity action to inspire heroic fervor, but also quiet character moments that gave fans an emotional rush. But the kind of crafting that made those elements combine so well in the movies is something The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, despite its expanded TV format, utterly lacked. Even if you appreciated the ultimate story being told (Sam’s embrace of the Captain America banner), it is impossible to justify the baffling miscalculations regarding its plotting and runtime.

What the finale, “One World, One People,” really showed was that buried somewhere in the mess of this season was probably a decent movie. Or, if you want to really give it a chance to do something interesting with the characters it introduced—including its leads—then a much longer TV show. Six episodes requires tight, focused storytelling and a clear sense of what the show is and where it’s going. FAWS never had that. From start to finish, it was a muddled, often contradictory mess that, when given the opportunity to do something bold or make a statement about Big Issues, went in so heavy-handed it knocked you back or—more often—whiffed it entirely.

“But the rumored cut bioterrorism storyline!” I can already hear some of you yelling into my mentions. Not an excuse. It makes sense for why the Flag Smashers plot was so ineffectual, but it doesn’t answer why Bucky and Sam were mostly bystanders in their own story. It also doesn’t make up for the fact that the characters with the most potential (especially Zemo, Lemar, and John Walker) were ultimately sidelined without having accomplished anything.

If the point of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was to get us to where we could really be excited for Falcon as the next Captain America, to get to know his character better and see his struggle against the institutional racism that buried heroes like Isaiah, there’s a movie that could be recut from this season. But even then, Sam’s trajectory is frustrating. He starts, essentially, as a merc—one who taunts an ally over therapy despite being a former therapist himself. There’s a tease where we might have seen Sam’s struggles as a veteran living without the support of the government he fought for, and what that would mean for him especially as a Black man. But instead it’s dispensed of almost immediately to go on a world tour with Zemo. When the show comes back to those bayou moments in the penultimate episode with Sam as a changed man, it’s jarring. Even the training sequences felt out of order. As much as I love Zemo, so much of those middle episodes felt like filler in a show that could not afford to have it.