It looks like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is determined to work in as many of the people who’ve been Captain America as possible—not to mention several who’ve been some form of “Bucky” and the Falcon. I neglected to mention last week (either in my review of episode one or in my brief history of the title characters in the comics) that Falcon’s intelligence officer in this TV series, Joaquin Torres, is the name of the character who took over as Falcon when Sam Wilson became Captain America in the comics.
And we get two more Caps and one more sidekick this week.
We open on John Walker doing an interview at what is supposed to be his high school football field, but that’s totally a college football stadium. Whatever, Walker gets a big marching band and dancing and stuff to an updated version of “The Star-Spangled Man,” the propaganda song that was the main number in Steve Rogers’ USO tour when he first donned the costume in Captain America: The First Avenger.
Walker is a special-ops officer who has won three medals of honor and who has trained with the shield that Sam Wilson donated to the Smithsonian last episode. Not sure when he had time for that, but we’ll let that pass. Both Wilson and Bucky Barnes watch this interview with disgust.
His sidekick, a fellow member of his special-ops team, is Lemar Hoskins, who has the codename Battlestar. Wilson has traced the Flag Smashers to Munich, and what starts as a solo mission turns into a team-up: Bucky Barnes pretty much forces himself onto Wilson’s mission, and during a fight with the Flag Smashers atop two moving trucks, the new Cap and Battlestar show up to help out.
Not that any of them are much help. The Flag Smashers all appear to be enhanced by some kind of version of the Super Soldier Serum, and they kick all four heroes’ asses pretty good, also destroying Redwing.
This leads us to my favorite scene in the episode, when Barnes takes Wilson to Baltimore.
It starts with some delightful meta-commentary on the tendency throughout the 1960s and 1970s of so many superheroes of color to be given names that start with the word “Black”—Black Panther, Black Goliath, Black Lightning, etc.—by having a little kid refer to Wilson as “Black Falcon.” Then they visit Isaiah Bradley—the black Captain America.
Bradley worked as a superhero for the government past the days of World War II, and the Winter Soldier clashed with him in 1951. Bradley did some damage to his artificial arm, too. But Bradley doesn’t want anything to do with anybody and kicks them both out of the house, after showing that he still has his super strength at his advanced age. Wilson is aghast that he himself never heard of Bradley, and even more aghast to discover that Barnes never told Steve Rogers about Bradley.
Carl Lumbly has never not been superb in anything he’s been in, and he knocks it out of the park as the elderly, angry Bradley. He talks of being in jail and being experimented on. The U.S. government doesn’t come across all that great here, having already christened a new Captain America and with the implications of what happened to Bradley. On top of that, the Flag Smashers are seen here to be bringing medicine to people in refugee camps—these are the bad guys that the government is sending both Captain America and the Falcon to stop.
The questioning of authority hovers over everything here, including the end of the scene with Bradley. Wilson and Barnes are arguing in the street—specifically in the streets of a not-particularly-affluent section of Baltimore—which leads to two cops showing up and assuming that a black man arguing with a white man means trouble. They calm down when they recognize Wilson as famous, as famous black people obviously aren’t dangerous. But then they have to arrest Barnes, because it turns out that when he tagged along with Wilson to Munich, he also missed his therapy session, which violates the terms of his pardon.
The therapy session this leads to is my second favorite scene, as Dr. Raynor tries to get both heroes to open up. Barnes does, at least—his issue with Wilson is that he gave up the shield. Rogers bequeathed it to him, and he rejected it, which leads Barnes to think that Rogers may have been wrong about Wilson, which means he may have been wrong about Barnes, too. Since Rogers’ faith in Barnes is the only reason he’s any kind of good person now, this possibility worries Barnes greatly.
Wilson, however, still thinks he did the right thing, regardless of whether or not Barnes or Rogers could possibly understand it. And if nothing else, seeing how Bradley wound up, in contrast to how Rogers wound up, is a pretty telling point in Wilson’s favor…
The performances here are stellar. One of my disappointments in the first episode was that we didn’t get Barnes and Wilson together, but episode two makes up for that in spades. Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan spend pretty much the entire episode together, and it’s magnificent. These two have magnificent chemistry, which we saw hints of in Captain America: Civil War, and which is on full display here.
Wyatt Russell also does great work, playing the humble aw-shucks-I’m-just-doin’-my-job soldier who’s trying to do the right thing. He’s doing this because he was ordered to, and he considers it a great honor. Russell strikes a very good balance here, as he’s not really a bad guy, but it’s also hard to warm to him, at least in part because his persona as Captain America is so obviously manufactured. He’s trying to fill Rogers’ shoes, but he hasn’t really done anything to earn the accolades he’s been getting. The people in the football stadium are cheering the uniform and the shield, not the person wearing it. Heck, Rogers himself didn’t get taken seriously as a soldier until he rescued a bunch of prisoners from Hydra’s clutches.
Walker also very obviously has some serious combat skills, but those skills may not mean much. For all that Walker and Hoskins try to take credit for saving Wilson and Barnes’ lives when they unsuccessfully try to stop the Flag Smashers, the fact is, they also got their asses kicked and did, basically, no damage to the Flag Smashers at all.
Plus, again, the Flag Smashers don’t seem to be all that bad. They’re labelled as terrorists, and they certainly were disruptive last week, but their goals aren’t entirely horrible, either. At the very least, there are shades of gray here.
I expressed hope that things would move forward this week, and I got what I wanted. Our title heroes are now working together, and we’re seeing progress. On top of that, the Big-Ass Action Sequence was much better, and actually plot relevant. (I think everyone was a little too good at keeping their balance on top of a moving truck, but it was still a fun, exciting action scene.) There’s not a bad performance in the bunch, either, and even if the rest of the show was awful (and it isn’t), I’d be here for the Mackie-Stan banter, which just sparkles.
Odds and ends
- In the first paragraph I referred to “Bucky” in quotes. When Walker took over as Captain America in the comics, in a run that was written by the late Mark Gruenwald, he also had an African-American sidekick named Lemar Hoskins, who took on the name Bucky. The late Dwayne McDuffie—who was one of the most prominent comics writers of color, and who later co-founded Milestone Media—gently informed the white Gruenwald that “buck” was a racial slur, and maybe don’t call him that? His name was changed to Battlestar. FWS thankfully skips the first step, with Hoskins using the Battlestar name from jump.
- Isaiah Bradley is based on a comics character introduced in the brilliant 2003 miniseries Truth: Red, White, and Black by Robert Morales & Kyle Baker. That comic established that Rogers wasn’t the only one who got the Super Soldier Serum. Several African-American soldiers were experimented on with the formula also, though only one of them survived to the end of the war, and most didn’t survive the experiments at all. The few who made it through the treatments went on secret missions for the Allies. At one point, Bradley stole a Captain America uniform and went on a solo mission behind the lines, and wound up being captured by Hitler. The comic is fantastic, a stark look at how the U.S. government that gave us stuff like the Tuskegee Experiments would really test the Super Soldier Serum before they gave it to the blond-haired, blue-eyed white guy. In particular, Morales and Baker did a good job of reminding readers that the U.S. was all about eugenics and preserving the white race in the first half of the 20th century. I really hope the MCU version of Bradley follows the comics’ example and doesn’t pull any punches.
- I like that John Walker is less of a dick than he is in the comics. Originally created as the Super Patriot at the height of the Reagan era, he was very much a product of the same period in pop culture that gave us Rambo and his ilk, and I like this version better. Mind you, he’s still a bit of a dick, but the comics version of Walker carried himself like he thought he deserved the shield, while the MCU Walker is more self-effacing about it.
- In the comics, it was established that two other people took on the mantle of Captain America during World War II after Cap and Bucky’s apparent death. One was Jeff Mace, a.k.a. the Patriot, a version of whom we saw in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series played by Jason O’Mara. The other was William Nasland, a.k.a. the Spirit of ’76, who has yet to have an MCU counterpart. I also neglected to mention one other substitute Cap in the modern era: the ill-fated Roscoe Simons, who took on the role after Cap quit in Captain America Vol. 1 #176 by Steve Englehart & Sal Buscema (1974). Simons was killed rather brutally by the Red Skull, which inspired Rogers to take up the shield once again.
- As much as I adore the conversation between Wilson and Barnes about “the Big Three,” it’s not quite accurate. Wilson insists that every bad guy they face is either an alien, an android, or a wizard. But while that’s true of some (Loki, Thanos, Ultron, Malekith, Ronan, Kaecilius, Hela, Ego, Yon-Rogg), a goodly number of the MCU bad guys are regular humans who’ve been enhanced either chemically or with technology (Stane, Whiplash, the Abomination, the Red Skull, Killian, Yellowjacket, Vulture, Killmonger, the Ghost, Mysterio, and, of course, the Winter Soldier). Heck, some aren’t even enhanced: the hordes of Hydra, for example, not to mention Zemo. And the Flag Smashers seem to fall into the enhanced-human category as well…
- Having said that, I love that Barnes read The Hobbit when it first came out in 1937. That is a perfect touch.
- Speaking of Zemo, he finally shows up—in the final scene brooding in his jail cell after Wilson and Barnes decide they’re going to go talk to him. Which makes sense, as the Super Soldier Serum got its start with Hydra (remember in The First Avenger, we learned that the Red Skull was the first recipient of the formula before Dr. Erskine defected to the U.S.).
Keith R.A. DeCandido also does the Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch every Monday and Thursday. His takes on the MCU films can be found in his “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch” that started on this site in 2017.
Yeah this was a good episode.
I’m really hoping Marvel continues to challenge expectations, specifically with Zemo. Having him end up as the Big Bad by the end of the series is the obvious play. I’m hoping they don’t do that, and he ends up being a Gollum-esque character. T’Challa spared Zemo’s life, much like Bilbo spared Gollum. Bilbo’s mercy ended up saving Middle-Earth.
Let’s have Zemo provide valuable information and end up helping to save the day, albeit still remaining villainous. Fox accomplished this (repeatedly) with Magneto.
I know Zemo as written in the comics is generally not like this (he’s just…evil) but the Skrulls in the comics are also generally unsympathetic.
On another hopeful (but even less likely) note, it’d be nice if the Patriot from AoS was mentioned at some point as a failed super-soldier experiment or something like that.
Holy crap, I didn’t think they’d do Isaiah Bradley, and I am so hyped! Also, Walker seems to be much nicer than his comic book counterpart, although his warning towards the end of the episode might mean it’s all an act.
“Truth” is truly an amazing comic.
@2,
Same. I’d also been wondering if we’d ever see Isiah Bradley adapted into the MCU and I’m delighted it finally happened here.
And I’ve been worried about Walker since it was confirmed he’d be appearing. After Endgame, I knew the odds of U.S.Agent appearing in the wake of Steve’s retirement were high.
But I’ve been dreading it because Comics Walker is such an a**hole…but that’s also paradoxically an intrinsic part of his character. So trying to adapt him was always gonna be tricky.
I love that Bucky read The Hobbit, but I cannot believe they passed on the most obvious rebuttal available to Bucky re wizards vs sorcerers re hats: a movie Walt Disney made around WWII, wherein a sorcerer’s irresponsible assistant apprentice causes much mischief with said sorcerer’s hat. I know the most obvious reference isn’t usually considered the best, but WHERE IS THIS BEING STREAMED AGAIN!?
Yeah, this NuCap guy can Just Keep Walking outta here (you know… because he’s named like the whiskey… Johnnie Walker…).
During Sam and Bucky’s awkward car ride with the new guys they mention a “Global Repatriation Council” (which doesn’t sound like some kind of secretly sinister organization at all, nope). One of the things this GRC is supposed to be helping the returnees with is “reactivating citizenship,” which I don’t get. Do people lose their citizenship after they die and come back? Why is some sketchy global organization handling this instead of governments?
As much as I adore the conversation between Wilson and Barnes about “the Big Three,” it’s not quite accurate. Wilson insists that every bad guy they face is either an alien, an android, or a wizard.
I don’t know if he was saying that everyone they fight is one of the Big Three. The fact that he calls them the Big Three seems to automatically imply that there are other, not-so-big ones? Like, just because you have a “Big Five” of African animals doesn’t mean that every animal in Africa is a lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, or cape buffalo.
@3 – Mr. Magic: Like krad said, Walker being such an asshole is part of the whole Reagan era thing. It’s not THAT necessary here, and also, as opossed to his original storyline in the Cap comics, he’s not the main character here, Sam and Bucky are. I don’t need him to be the exact asshole, because he’s being used for different, if similar purposes than in thee comics.
As for Bradley, his grandson also shows up, and that is part of a larger trend of the MCU introducing the Young Avengers. We got Wiccan and Speed (although he’s a latter member) in WV, Kate Bishop in the upcoming Hawkeye show, Stature (also a latter member) appeared in Endgame and is cast in Quantumania, etc. We only need Hulkling (who could sorta show up in Secret Invasion), and with Kang coming in Quantumania, you got a lead on Iron Lad. :)
@5 – kurozukin: It doesn’t sound like “blipped” citizens of stable-er countries like the USA lost their citizenship, but in other places, like Eastern Europe, it might be that borders changed because of the chaos, and people came back to life in a country that no longer recognized them as citizens. Of course, that does not preclude sinister stuff going on.
The casting so far has been absolutely spot on Wyatt Rusell, Erin Kellyman, and Carl Lumbly are superb bits of casting against the already excellent Stan and Mackie, I was a bit worried last week that Stan might overshadow Mackie a little bit when they got together but not a bit of it here. Mackie displays Sams pent up frustration at the unspoken racism all around him and Buckys haunted eyes from his past demons are mesmerising…Best of all on the casting front we still have the great Daniel Bruhl to come.
I was in the whole disappointed by Agents of Shield so I was slightly sceptical about how the MCU would translate to TV series’ without the more adult themes of Jesica Jones and Daredevil that Netflix allowed but Disney + are so far smashing it out of the park with this and Wandavision.
@6,
True. I was just worried about Walker would play in the current political era. Christopher Priest has been trying to revamp him the current U.S.Agent mini-series and he’s been having similar problems.
And I still wonder if we’ll see Walker stick around since it also looks like the MCU’s building to the Thunderbolts or Dark Avengers — and Walker does have history with the latter in the comics.
And yeah, you’re right about Patriot. I was geeing out about Isiah so much that it completely went over my head that they’d set up Elijah.
I think the comics walker can work today. He just wouldn’t be anything but a villain. And a very… human one at that
@6: It doesn’t sound like “blipped” citizens of stable-er countries like the USA lost their citizenship, but in other places, like Eastern Europe, it might be that borders changed because of the chaos, and people came back to life in a country that no longer recognized them as citizens.
Ah ok, that makes some sense. I was just wondering because “reactivating citizenship” didn’t immediately come to mind among the things that people who were brought back to life after five years would obviously need.
They could have gone with a full-on Trumper style for Walker, but it looks like they’re trying to do something else. And Walker and Hoskins themselves might not be bad guys, but the whole Global Repatriation Council and the part of the US government that gave Walker the shield are definitely fishy.
I have to pick this nit… :) I have no problem with believing that stadium to be a high school stadium, as I’ve been in quite a few over the years that were that size here in the South – especially in more rural/away from city locations…
Great episode with so many discussable nuggets!
Also! Erin Kellyman’s slow smile when she was on the back of the truck when it’s discerned she’s not the damsel in distress … was so amazingly creepy and wicked. Wonderful!
@11 – yep. The high school football stadium near me was revamped and updated for a cost of about $50 million. It seats almost 10,000 people.
And that’s not even the biggest stadium in this part of the state.
Okay, I sit corrected on the high school football stadium thing…. *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
If I heard it correctly, and remember the comics correctly, Karli and her Flag Smashers were being pursued by the Power Broker. In the comics, the Power Broker led an evil outfit who gave people a super serum, but then controlled them by threatening to withhold booster shots. So the Flag Smashers might not be as bad as they first appeared. And in comics, the Power Broker had a hold on the new Cap and Battlestar. So even though the new Cap looks like a good guy, there might be bad people pulling his strings.
The only thing I disliked in this ep is Bucky pulling off his sleeve, for no purpose other than to remind us he has a mechanical arm, and leap from the plane, cayching handy branches on the way down to slow himself. I mean, the rest of him is still human. So preposterous it pulled me right out of the story, ending my suspension of disbelief.
I was excited they included Isaiah Bradley, whose story is a reminder the powers that be don’t always do right by their superheroes. And his nephew Elijah, who in comics becomes Patriot on the Young Avengers team.
“a stark look at how the U.S. government […]would really test the Super Soldier Serum”
John Byrne once made an interesting objection to that theory, noting that an anti-Black individual probably would not want to risk turning a Black man into a physically perfect human being……
@15: The only thing I disliked in this ep is Bucky pulling off his sleeve, for no purpose other than to remind us he has a mechanical arm, and leap from the plane, cayching handy branches on the way down to slow himself. I mean, the rest of him is still human. So preposterous it pulled me right out of the story, ending my suspension of disbelief.
It was the bit where he outran the truck that threw me. Bucky seems to have received some upgrades, somewhere along the way.
Bucky flexing about reading the Hobbit had me cackling with glee. Not to mention that means he read the original edition, not the one that was retconned after LotR was published!
Thank you for for the information about Isaiah Bradley, I had never heard of him.
I am getting major Hannibal Lecter vibes from Zemo, what with the classical music, the cell, etc. Not to mention that it occurs to me that even his function in the plot is somewhat similar, which is that they are going to him for help to catch other bad guys.
I am really intrigued by the Flag Smashers, and I’m going to spoil Solo for anybody who hasn’t seen it yet (it’s a few years old now) but I’m also highly amused by the meta aspect of casting Erin Kellyman in this role. I loved the scene where the “hostage” puts on the mask, but it’s a funny mirror to her big scene in Solo, where the masked marauder/pirate that has been antagonizing them for the movie removes their mask to reveal…Erin Kellyman’s face. Not to mention that they’re not marauders/pirates at all but…rebels stealing from rich crime bosses, the Empire, etc and helping out the common people. So especially in light of their actions and potential motives here I can’t help but see a ton of parallels. While I’m personally a little skeptical of ‘one world’ type of ideologies I don’t think they are totally wrong either to not want things to just go back to the status quo.
I also hope that John Walker continues to be a more nuanced character than just a jerk-face wearing the Cap suit. I’m not saying they all have to like each other, but I always find it more interesting when the characters – even the ones you are butting heads with – are just flawed people doing what they think is right (within reason), and as far as we know, he didn’t ask for this. Obviously there could be some more to it, similar to how Hayward was first introduced and then ended up being a total liar (before it was obvious he was lying/manipulating the situation I might have said he at least had a valid concern/perspective given what life was like for those 5 years for the survivors. Interestingly, Karli also says something to the effect of ‘they care more about those who returned than those who were left behind’.).
On top of the Tuskegee Experiments, what Bradley says about how his cells were used without his consent is reminiscent of the story of Henrietta Lacks.
@17 um, did you miss the tunnel chase in Civil War where Bucky, Black Panther, and Cap all out ran the traffic? Or Infinity War when the three of them outpace every other combatant on the field in Wakanda? The only upgrade I see is 2 years of exercise and proper nutrition while in Wakanda allowing him to reach peak performance much like Steve and his runs in TWS.
“…won three….” many people prefer the earned usage even in a fictional setting.
@20: It’s been a while, so I’d have to go back to Civil War. What I remember of the battle scene in Infinity War has him outrunning an infantry charge, which is a bit different. But, OK, I will accept that enhanced speed was previously established and I had forgotten.
@18 — Someone (maybe on Twitter) was pointing out that if Bucky actually read The Hobbit in 1937 he must’ve gotten his hands on the British first edition — the first American edition didn’t come out until 1938.
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/reviews/1stUShobbit.htm
@17 When Cap rescued Bucky, there was mention of Red Skull experimenting on him and his comrades. And the Skull himself had access to early versions of the serum that Erskine had developed before he defected to the US.
@5: I think we’re meant to imagine the GRC as being roughly equivalent to something like the UNHCR, but with a higher budget since there have never been so many refugees at once.
While I’m personally a little skeptical of ‘one world’ type of ideologies I don’t think they are totally wrong either to not want things to just go back to the status quo.
Yeah, plus that underlying idea of not going back to the status quo is, if anything, more topical and relevant now than it would’ve been a year again before COVID.
@25 And there were all those years where Bucky was under HYDRA control. Put two and two together and…
As excited as I was to see Isaiah, I was equally excited to see Eli when he answer the door. I love the original series of Young Avengers, and as Magnus @6 points out, we’re only missing Hulkling and Iron Lad, who both have opportunities to appear pretty soon. (I’d bet more on Captain Marvel 2 for Hulkling, instead of Secret Invasion, as both the Kree and the Skrulls are part of the Captain Marvel movies.)
I am loving this show. Great stuff. Mackie and Stan are amazing together. Great chemistry.
Bobby
I love the original series of Young Avengers, and as Magnus @6 points out, we’re only missing Hulkling and Iron Lad, who both have opportunities to appear pretty soon. (I’d bet more on Captain Marvel 2 for Hulkling, instead of Secret Invasion, as both the Kree and the Skrulls are part of the Captain Marvel movies.)
Plus, Teddy is Mar-Vell’s son in the comics. So if that stays true for the films, then it makes more sense to do it in Captain Marvel 2 given Carol’s own connection to Mar-Vell and the existing setup.
I know that Krad has conceded the point already, but just to pile on about high school football stadiums here in the south- I’m in a town with a division 2 conference champion college that actually plays in the city high school’s 11,000 seat stadium. The college does not have their own field. And the county high schools stadium across town is even bigger at 12,000 seats. High school football is take absurdly seriously down south.
@31 Oh, right….hadn’t really thought that far, but being Mar-Vell’s son is still quite possible, given her Skull sympathies….though weaving Wanda into it somehow is going to be…interesting.
@16– typical John Byrne: fairly racist sentiments disguised as supposedly reasonable objections to a historically solid anti racism story line. It’s up there with the group of economists in the 70s who argued that the enslaved people in the South couldn’t have had it so bad since the slavers would have wanted to keep their workers healthy and happy.
@34 It was brought up by a fair number of Black fans, too, though….but it occurs to me that anti-Blackness has several ways of expressing itself, and I certainly can see a racist seeing no problem of the possibility of a Black super-soldier…after all, the whole notion of “brute strength of Negroes” relies on the notion of “Yes, Negroes can be stronger, but white men are still superior because of our intellect and brains”….
I can solve the stadium issue. That scene was filmed at Duluth High School in Georgia, NE of Atlanta. I know this for a fact because one of my kids was an extra in it. He is visible during the medium crowd shot in the upper right corner. He had to keep what show it was secret for a while. We finally knew during the Super Bowl teaser last year. I can now say one of my kids has been in a Super Bowl commercial. Multiple times. They had enough extras to fill one section that they moved around the stadium and then composited to make it look full.
Am I the only one who thinks that the “Global Repatriation Council” sounds an awful lot like the “International Brotherhood for the Assistance of Stateless Persons”?
Nothing to add except being in the UK and having read the comments, I am stunned at the sizes of your stadiums for schools. Obviously football/soccer is bigger here but it still would be a patch of grass in a park with only parents spectating and the players dodging dog mess! In the 2019 season the average attendance for my local 2nd division professional team was 18k!
Karran Danks @38: For what it’s worth, I gather high schools in the UK are a lot smaller than in the US. I checked, and Duluth High School in Georgia has about 2700 students, which is on the small side, really. Large high schools run easily into the 3000s, and 4000-5000 isn’t the upper limit. So . . . that’s worth taking into account when considering standard high school stadium size!
Mary Frances @39 – No, it is very much a U.S. thing. I went to a High School with a student body of around 1300 or so, and our teams played schools with student numbers in the 2500-3000 range, and our football field seated a couple hundred at most, Hell, my university had a student body of 20-25,000 and their stadium sits less than 7,000. We held our HS provincial track and field championships in that stadium. We came nowhere close to filling it even halfway, and 80% of the what crowd there was, was just the other athletes hanging around between their own events. Student sports just aren’t that big a thing in most places.
I never thought about it much until I was visiting relatives across the border and they invited us to go to a High School basketball game between two little towns whose combined total population (not students, literally the total population of both towns) wouldn’t match how many students my own High School had. The stands were packed, and with at least twice the seating capacity my own school had. It was absolutely shocking. The focus and attention and resources the U.S. puts into school sports is way outside of what other countries do.
@0: Having said that, I love that Barnes read The Hobbit when it first came out in 1937. That is a perfect touch.
That was the point I choked on. Sure, Bucky-2020 is being pushed to be a Sensitive Man (and fighting back against the push) — but MCU-Bucky in his youth was a sturdy type who probably played at least one high-school sport (rather than being the always-intended-as-a-sidekick type of the comics); I have a very hard time seeing him reading a book marketed to kids, as The Hobbit was. (It won the Carnegie Medal, just like The Graveyard Book in this millennium.) I hear people mumbling “hidden depths”; I don’t believe it. But that goes with all the Big Three talk — a cute line rather than something plausible.
@15: the arm would have to be massively anchored to do what it did in Cap 2; I didn’t find the jump implausible, especially given how low we were shown the plane and all the trees he had to fall through — although he would have done better to take a running leap off the tailgate (as would Falcon) than to go out the side. (I’m going by what I’ve read about jumping from a 727; a C-130 might be able to make a drop pass at a lower speed, although this one didn’t look like it was slow-flying.)
@35: that was my reaction — not to mention that the camp was rigged enough that (per Wikipedia) in the original story the rest of the recruits were slaughtered.
@36: fascinating! I estimated that stadium seating 3-5x that many, but I realized that we only see the seating near the center of the field; is there any end-zone seating at all?
@40: in much of the US, high-school sports are both entertainment and us-against-the-world; the teams can be proxies at a level approaching Rollerball, and kids are raised to believe that Sports Matter. (I live in the northeast US, which is a long way culturally from the South — but the arguments over scheduling end-of-season “football” matches, and the angst when they all had to be canceled last season, are/were severe.) It seems surprising given how many USians move a long way from home — but many of the ones who stay are fanatics even when they don’t have children in the school, let alone on the team; it’s a way of being part of a group.
chip137: Bucky could very well have been trolling Sam with the Hobbit reference. He had plenty of opportunities to see the movies since The Winter Soldier.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@41, Bucky may have looked like a stereotypical jock, but we also know that he went to a science expo for fun and was really excited about the futuristic inventions displayed there even when they didn’t quite work and still gets really excited by things like Wakanda’s super-advanced tech. Are you saying it’s impossible (or even implausible) for someone to like both sports and books? I know that’s what most Western Media would like to have us believe, but that just proves it’s been a while since those creators interacted with real people.
Also, we know that MCU Bucky had three younger siblings. There’s every chance in the world that he’d bought it for them and was reading it to them at bedtime every night.
Alsoalso, the reason Lord of the Rings got published (not why Tolkien wrote it but why it got a publishing deal) was because The Hobbit proved extremely popular with adults as well as kids. No publisher is going to take a chance on a monstrosity like LotR – especially in those days when multi-tome epics were not the norm – if it was “just a kids’ book”.
@43, For what Bucky says to be true, he has to have got ahold of the first UK printing, which was only 1500 copies, before it was even released in America, and within three months of UK release.
Not impossible, but it requires a somewhat convoluted series of events to get a copy in his hands, and that would be a little easier to buy if he were a different sort of nerd. (It’s hard to believe he’d have heard of it yet in 1937.)
Alternatively, he might be misremembering or misstating the year.
Or he could be lying to mess with Sam, which feels like a valid read of the scene in context.
Though I do now wonder, provided he did read it pre-HYDRA, if he knows about the second edition changes to fit better with LotR, or if his take on Gollum is unusually outdated.
About Isaiah Bradley, it seems I misunderstood at the time his comic came out, maybe from reading confused reviewers, but I gather the creators were firmly setting it after Steve Rogers became Captain America in an experiment that couldn’t be repeated, since Dr Erskine kept some of the secrets and was dead. You could suspect this to be an editorial choice to not, indirectly, blame Steve Rogers in this story.
Per https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Super-Soldier_Serum – a character who did get the drug before Steve Rogers, invented in a story run in 2000, is Clinton McIntyre, “an Army recruit who killed his commanding officer. He was let out of lock-up by two rogue Generals to test the formula.” It wasn’t right, it killed him, I think he was white if you’re keeping score, and the body was put in storage, and was revived in the modern day by AIM with a false memory grudge against Captain America. After such incidents as you’d expect to arise from that situation, he faked his death and was never seen again.
British former pacifist Brian Falsworth and American Nazi (Bundist) Wilhelm Lohmer also got it, but maybe after Steve.
Opinion: It would be difficult to find a more heartbreaking character than James Buchanan Barnes
Bucky was Steve’s protector and his confidant, his best friend. By the time we see him again in the Marvel ‘present’, he only sees himself as a killer. He doesn’t think he’s redeemable. He can’t see why Steve would waste his energy on him.
He’s plagued by memories of crimes and sins from a past over which he had no control, and yet self-forgiveness is out of his reach. Bucky feels forever connected to Hydra, even though it was his prison, and he was their puppet.
One quote from this weekend just cements this, and it brought me to tears. “If Steve was wrong about you, maybe he was wrong about me.” Bucky doesn’t know himself. The strong, confident young man who proudly served his country is gone. Even the White Wolf of Wakanda was just a moment in a long list of moments, a brief and tantalizing taste of freedom and peace that he can’t really have. The forgiveness offered by Steve wasn’t enough; it didn’t have a permanent root in his soul. And now he doesn’t have a Steve.
It’s a good thing we know something he doesn’t know: all good guys need a Sam.
Lot of good stuff in this episode, I though the racial element in Baltimore was more plausible than Sam getting turned down for a loan (at least after he was identified as an Avenger).
I really like how Walker is not an instant villain. In WandaVision, it took no time at all for the head of SWORD to be revealed as a rather incompetent villain. This guy has 3(!) Medals of Honor and no obvious political handlers or personal agenda. This may all change in later episodes, but so far he actually seems like a reasonable choice to be the next Cap. I was also surprised that he was being used in combat missions and wasn’t just a figurehead.
However I still find Sam’s orders/missions/status a bit vague, and in this episode it was compounded by Bucky tagging along and then new Cap and sidekick showing up. Who is in charge of these things?
And while I think the actors are doing a fantastic job, the animosity between Bucky and Sam feels a little forced. Still, they are great together!
@17, Don’t feel bad, the MCU has always been very vague as to what skills Steve Rogers had, and even more so what skills Bucky has. Super Soldier definition is pretty much whatever the plot calls for. I mostly recall Bucky picking Rocket up on the battlefield in Infinity War and shooting a rifle. He is mostly outmatched by Iron Man in Civil War, and usually loses to Cap in Winter Soldier. But it generally seems like he is mostly on par with Cap…so therefore…uh…strong-ish?
@15 – AlanBrown: Ripping off his sleeve was stupid, but in the MCU, Bucky has enhanced strength, resistance, and agility. He showed it in the previous movies, doing the same kind of jumps and stuff that Cap, in stuff that had nothing to do with his arm.
@16 – Camilla: Byrne is a racist himself, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in his words. :)
@19 – Athreeren: Good catch.
@33 – gwangung: Hulkling needs no Wanda involvement to become who is. Only to get his boyfriend.
@36 – Greg: Cool!
@39 – Mary Frances: It’s not a matter of school sizes, even with thousands of students, having a high school stadium (much less one like that) is INSANE for most of the world.
@47 It does seem at this point that Bucky and Steve’s objections to Walker!Cap are less based on anything about Walker himself (except for the fact that he accepted the shield, I suppose) and more because he’s not their real dad Steve Rogers.
Re Sam and Bucky’s official status, I’m also a little confused. They suggest that being outside the chain of command gives them a greater flexibility than Walker and Hoskins. I guess that might be true if they’re following leads in Louisiana or DC, but as an international investigation- like, how? Given Sam’s money troubles, it’s hardly as though they’re going to chartering planes to jump out of on their own dime- they’re still going through someone’s official channels.
@49: Well, maybe in a world with Quinjets, C130s are going cheaply…. But, yeah, I’m guessing that Sam and Bucky’s status, or lack thereof, will become a more central issue at some point. So far it’s just a bit confusing. Was Sam sent to Munich (and if so, why, if Walker was also sent there), or did he just call in a favour to get a ride? Walker seemed to be trying to pull strings to help them out (i.e. by getting Bucky out of jail) but that just raises different questions. How does Walker have that authority anyway?
@42: cute point — especially if Bucky had heard of all the things-to-know-about that Sam told Steve during Cap 2. It would also account for him getting the year wrong; he learned a simple datum sometime later, rather than the detail that people have been raising here.
@43: Of course it’s possible for people to be both jock and wonk/nerd (to put it crudely) — but it was a lot less possible 83 years ago (or even 60 years ago, as I can attest). Being into technology was starting to be respectable, helped by an assortment of practicalities ranging from the hot tech at the World’s Fair and hot-rodding generally(*) back to Germany rubbing the US’s nose in the consequences of tech inferiority before the US entered WW1; reading for fun was borderline, and reading a book that was (a) a “fairy story” and (b) marketed specifically to children at that time (regardless of how it got word-of-mouthed to a wider audience) strikes me as unlikely. I doubt he’d have read it to younger siblings — in his milieu I would bet on that being his mother’s job; it’s not impossible he would have done that in addition to teaching them how to throw and hit a ball, but IMO very unlikely.
(*) factoid: the Little Deuce Coupe the Beach Boys hymned was a 1932 Ford; Wikipedia says it was popular with hot rodders because the engine was larger than the previous model’s. I had this Grease-born image of hot-rodding being a post-WW2 phenomenon, and I don’t know how much hot-rodding there would have been in Bucky’s neighborhood — but there was definitely a respect for practical tech that I wouldn’t assume would show an interest in wilder speculation. Accounts of the time by Asimov, Knight, and Pohl paint genre readers as largely beyond the pale; lots of proto-scientists read SF (I wouldn’t claim overt fantasy), but they weren’t the physical or personality type that I get from the brief glimpse of pre-WW2 MCU-Bucky.
I’ve long since given up on understanding the exact status of superheroes and how things are arranged when they work with the government. All I really know is that in this universe the military command structure is there solely to create incompetent authority figures the heroes can rebel against, any officer or even just higher up enlisted can rent out some equipment for the weekend and conduct military operations in the US or on foreign soil with no consequences or authorization, and courts-martial don’t exist 90% of the time.
@52 All I really know is that in this universe the military command structure is there solely to create incompetent authority figures
Actually, I think that this is true throughout the multiverse…it’s certainly true in this universe, rebelling heroes or not.
@52- Be fair- sometimes the authority figures aren’t just incompetent. Plenty of them are actively corrupt!
@50 – Keith: Walker does not have that kind authority, but his handlers do.
@51, it does seem unlikely that Bucky would have read the first edition of The Hobbit in ’37 both for inability to actually get a copy and that a young man like Bucky would want to read it as marketed.
But maybe he would have. The MCU Bucky of The First Avenger seems to be tough, clever, kind and charming. The real tragedy is that he may have a better Captain America than Steve before Hydra broke him.
@46, I think Bucky has the saddest story in the MCU. I think if Killmonger and Wanda had spent 5 minutes talking to the guy they would have gone off thanking their lucky stars for how the world has treated them.
Re: Football stadiums
I did my undergraduate at Rice University in Houston, TX, and I was always amused by the fact that our football stadium could have held everyone (undergraduate and graduate, living and dead) who had ever gotten a degree from Rice—with room left to spare. (I think in the past 25 years the alumni population has finally exceeded the stadium capacity, but back then…)
This was the result of being (at the time) the smallest school in the country with a Division I football program and being in a football conference with the other 7 major Texas schools, so we had to have a 70,000-seat stadium for a undergraduate population of 2700.
What I want to know is how did Bucky, a pardoned former terrorist, obtain the necessary clearance to get onto a military base, let alone walk around like it’s no big deal?
I’m perhaps a little more amused than I should be at Sam’s half-hearted attempt to assuage Bucky’s theoretical white guilt over Bradley’s use of “your people,” given that Bucky has much more specific and immediate guilt at hand.
I think it’s perfectly likely Bucky could have read the Hobbit around the time it came out, but that the writers (or Bucky) just missed the exact year…I don’t think it has to require a huge amount of handwaving.
@60- Yes, I think it’s likely that it was just a quick mistake on the writer’s part, looking up the initial publication of The Hobbit without thinking through the logistics of getting a copy of an English-published book in 1930s America. But it’s also fairly easily explainable as “Bucky read somewhere recently that the Hobbit was first published in 1937, thought ‘that sounds about the time I read it,’ and tucked that information away without further interrogation.
And heck, if we’re all determined that Bucky would’ve been too bashful to be seen buying the book himself, maybe he borrowed a copy from one of his sickly artist friends.
For those of you obsessing about how/whether Bucky might have read The Hobbit in the 1930s . . . I agree, Bucky (or, more factually, the writers, but it isn’t hard to believe that the character might have just repeated the year he’d been told the book was published or something like that) probably got the year wrong. I doubt the specific year was that important to him; even if he enjoyed the book, I don’t imagine that reading it was exactly a life-changing experience for him. As for how he got his hands on a copy, there is this thing called the public library? Brooklyn’s public library system dates back well into the 19th century; it was huge even before the big Brooklyn Central Library opened (in 1941, unfortunately), and had bunches of Carnegie libraries scattered all through the borough. I can see big brother Bucky taking his kid sister(s) to the library to get them out of their mother’s hair and/or for them to do schoolwork on a Saturday afternoon, picking up a book in the children’s section to kill time, and just–starting to read it.
In other words, lots of ways it could have happened, and it made for a good line in the series!
Obviously, it’s a clue that Bucky is actually Mephisto
Sam’s role with the military seems to be exactly what he says in the bank, an independent contractor.
Admittedly, we haven’t seen what the Accords have turned into over the last five years, but some sort of revision has appeared to have happened. In Endgame the Avengers are living openly in the compound, Steve is openly Steve Rogers at the group grief meetings. Imo it looks like Avengers can Avenge where needed with armed forces approval within the same bounds as service members. Sam looks to be Avenging on a pay per gig basis for the USA.
Hopefully they’ll expand on this. But I wouldn’t be shocked if the mundane explantions are left for Hawkeye, this is a perfect exposition dump disguised as mentoring Kate opportunity.
Sam no doubt works for SOCOM, the Special Operations Command, which does all sorts of things out of sight, and outside the normal chain of command. With his high visibility, the new Cap would be on a very short leash, especially since his predecessor, Steve Rogers, turned on the Powers That Be.
I think the bigger objection to Bucky reading The Hobbit in 1937 is that it was explicitly a children’s book. I can buy that Bucky was a Sci-Fi/Fantasy nerd, but isn’t it more likely that he’d be into Burroughs and Wells than Tolkien?
It’s a cute line though, and obviously Tolkien is more relevant and recognizable to a modern viewer.
Even if it is unlikely that a guy like Bucky would have read The Hobbit in 37, 38 or whenever, I was very happy with the inclusion. The Winter Soldier is a man born over a hundred years ago, given “super serum”, used as agent of evil by the Soviets and a made up NWO splinter group of Nazis, kept on ice whenever not in use, brainwashed, and has a magical metal arm from a fictional country in Africa–I mean realism left the station a while back. I can deal with a publishing date error.
I can’t believe people are getting hung on that little detail. What a bunch of nerds. :p