The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (1.2): The Super Soldier Left Behind

When the trailers dropped for The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, and the hype around the new show had started to build, people begin to speculate that the show would feel like a buddy-cop comedy between Falcon and Winter Soldier. While the first episode underscored a richer foundation than most buddy-cop comedies, the second episode of the miniseries delivered on the promise of that genre speculation. Other than the world-building in the post-blip Avengers, the friendship and chemistry between Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes shines through at each turn.

The world-building is an essential aspect entering Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (no, I don’t know what that means either). So much of the previous three phases of all of these Marvel cinematic properties focused on insular world-building between the personal stories of Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, and more with little regard to each of these superheroes’ places in the world (except maybe during Avengers: Age of Ultron and its aftermath). The question persists about how these superheroes fit in this decimated and then reanimated world of the post-blip. WandaVision explored a complicated story of one of our heroes who isn’t always using her power for good, so to speak. It still largely focused on Wanda though. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier decided to take this phase-four of Marvel (again, I don’t know exactly what that means, but the below graphic is what this phase-four of films and TV will look like) and blow open the doors to the questions about the place superheroes hold in this particular society. If the first two episodes are any indication, it is that the government views them as replaceable, expendable, but still necessary icons, and that fame and saving the literal universe can only get you so far before everybody forgets you.

Though this second iteration Captain America and the Flag Smashers are fleshed out more in this second episode, I couldn’t help but gravitate toward the relationship- and character-building between Sam and Bucky. Their reunion is quite (thankfully) unceremonious with Bucky just showing up at a job that Sam had taken to chase the Flag Smashers. Bucky refuses to let Sam go alone (and also refuses to quit asking about why he gave up the shield), and we are off and running in the series. Anthony Mackie elaborated in his recent Hot Ones interview about why he thinks that secondary characters are more fun and interesting to play. He essentially stated that these characters get more freedom and are not nearly as inhibited by the plot of the main story. In some ways, he is absolutely right. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier is doing it damnedest to take advantage of that. And might I add, quite successfully so far.

The most affecting part of this particular episode came as Bucky and Sam visit a super solider named Isaiah at his home in Baltimore. The moments leading up to their interactions (the child calling Sam the “Black Falcon” and Sam playfully teasing him about it, and even walking the street in Baltimore up to Isaiah’s door) feel so much more palpable than most of the MCU. It doesn’t feel distant. It’s also made all the more real when Sam cannot hold back his anger and contempt for Bucky never telling him there had been a black Captain America (whom had effectively been left to waste by the same entities that created and used him). While this discussion is interrupted by multiple police cruisers arriving out of nowhere (huh, wonder why?), it was not just tension that was palpable between Sam and Bucky during this scene. Though I certainly don’t want to get ahead of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s writers, it feels like at that moment we were clued into exactly why Sam gave up Steve’s shield. Though he hasn’t explicitly said it to Bucky yet, Sam’s raw emotion (tapped into quite well by Mackie in that moment) further cracked the hard, optimistic exterior I spent last week’s recap lamenting about.

While we are certainly in for more buddy-cop style hi-jinks such as the therapy session where Sam and Bucky participate in an aggressive rendition of the soul-gazing exercise, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier has refused to be defined exclusively by the humor its characters often supplied in previous films. (Though Bucky has perhaps the richest character work of anyone in this show, I plan on digging deeper on that next week.) Phase Four is all the better for it.