Streaming Marvel: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Struggles to Say Anything

The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls ever onward, whether the average viewer can possibly watch all of it or not. And now, the small screen has become the place to watch the bulk of MCU storytelling. Can’t keep it all straight? Ken Lowe is revisiting every MCU TV show—the good, the bad and the non-canon—in our ongoing feature, Streaming Marvel. You can follow along with the whole series here. This month: Marvel’s second-stringers pick up the pieces left behind by Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

At some point during the careers of titans like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, Marvel Comics refined a model of interconnected narrative that is probably mankind’s closest approximation to a fictional perpetual motion machine. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken the idea to film, where it has made more money than comics ever could. It’s also forced a mode of storytelling continuity onto film (and now television) that those media haven’t ever really operated in before. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, emerging as it does from the ashes of Avengers: Endgame, with Marvel pivoting to shows on Disney+, is a show operating almost entirely in service to that kind of continuity.

That’s surely not what writer/producer Malcolm Spellman (also behind the return of some of the characters here in this year’s Captain America: Brave New World) set out to do. The writer behind Empire crafted a story that at times tries to engage honestly with the fraught legacy of a Black man taking up the mantle of a nation that was founded on the enslavement of Black people, and on the kind of social upheaval that would follow something like the unbelievable events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. These are meaty, weighty topics, interesting stuff that is potentially exciting for the first outing of Anthony Mackie as a new Captain America.

For various reasons, though, these topics are watered down, or made confusing, or otherwise take a back seat to other things in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. How much of that is Spellman and how much the folks in the conference rooms back at Disney HQ, we may never know. With this entry, though, one thing is certain: We hit one of the rough patches of Marvel’s expanding streaming catalog.

The Show

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is set less than a year after the events of Avengers: Endgame, as half the Earth’s (and, we presume, the universe’s) population struggles to reintegrate into society following their miraculous return from Thanos’ snap. The Falcon, Sam Wilson (Mackie), is struggling with the idea of being Captain America, having been handed the shield by a retiring Steve Rogers at the end of the movie. So he… just gives the shield to the government and lets them give it to somebody else, John Walker (Wyatt Russell). Wilson is still using his wing suit and drones to undertake top secret missions for the U.S. military, and is on the hunt for a group of terrorists called the Flag Smashers. They are led by a young woman, Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman), who preferred the state of the world during “The Blip” and who wants to resist efforts by the governments of the world to displace people who have settled into new lives under the (reasonable) assumption that Thanos’ disaster would never be undone.

(These side-notes could become longer than some of these entire columns, but: Flag-Smasher was a singular villain and foil to Captain America in the comics, where his name was Karl Morgenthau—a man whose gimmick was that he hated all patriotism. Cap is not known for having a deep bench of compelling rogues, and this concept was clearly too gonzo to take literally in a live action TV show.)

While all of that is going on, the show is also following Steve Rogers’ oldest pal, reformed Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan, now by far the longest-serving veteran of the MCU still in active service). Bucky is passive aggressively grumbling his way through mandatory therapy, all while trying to redress the wrongs he committed while he was a brainwashed Soviet assassin. When it becomes clear that the Flag-Smashers are benefiting from the use of yet another re-discovery of the same super-soldier serum that gave the world the original Captain America, Sam and Bucky team up to get to the bottom of it.

There are some interesting character turns for both protagonists, but like a lot about this show, they feel under developed or reined in. Sam has befriended an elderly Black man who was cruelly experimented on by the government to become what was essentially a pre-Cap super soldier candidate, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, already a bad hombre of superhero fare due to some voiceover work). It’s a chilling evocation of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, or the exploitation of biological material collected from Henrietta Lacks—times in U.S. history when Black people were unwittingly or unwillingly used for medical or scientific research. But having introduced the concept, the show doesn’t really resolve or deal with it; Sam feels bad about it but continues to believe in his mission as the Falcon, and later as a newly anointed Captain America. 

Bucky likewise is forced to free Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) from prison in the interest of hunting down leads on the rediscovered serum. For those needing a refresher, Zemo orchestrated the murder of Wakanda’s King T’Chaka, father of the Black Panther, and framed Bucky for it, inciting the infighting that was the central conflict of Captain America: Civil War. Zemo is straight-up evil. It seems as if this is going to present deep moral quandaries or major complications, but apart from a momentary dust-up with some (justifiably pissed) Wakandans, there isn’t any of that: Zemo is now suddenly just kind of chill. His devious twist at the end is to just kill some of the Flag-Smashers as they’re on their way to jail after having been defeated anyway.

Ultimately, though, the show feels confused because its villains are confused. The Flag-Smashers are targeting a global authority that is wielding oppressive police powers to forcibly reestablish old national borders and resettle people who have returned from the Blip back into their old jobs and homes. This process is displacing others, including Morgenthau and all her super-soldier-serumed lieutenants, all of whom, we learn, got jacked while they were living under the thumb of a mysterious Power Broker in the made up vice city of Madripoor. Their final coup involves blowing up this global authority’s New York HQ as they are on the verge of voting in an even more oppressive plan.