For the past thirteen years, the cultural landscape has been dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe — a patchwork quilt of connective narrative tissue that has forever reshaped the structure of traditional filmmaking. While not entirely gone, few and far between are the days of risky and bold mid-level studio releases; now every few years the major entertainment titans are trying desperately to launch a new franchise with the same pre-installed iconography that made the MCU such a success. These shifting tides have completely redefined the theatrical landscape, and the waves are still being seen over a decade after the 2008 release of Iron Man. But while the other studios are trying to play catch-up, Marvel is laying the foundation for phase two of a cultural takeover that feels borderline sinister in its execution: television. While this is far from the first time that the Marvel logo has played on TV screens (Netflix’s mixed bag of “mature” superhero content and the sharp contrast of ABC’s more lighthearted outings spring to mind), WandaVision and now, most recently, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are the first projects in what is sure to become an important battleground in the ever-expanding war for consumer income.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was originally slated to be the first Marvel show to premiere on Disney+, is a prime example of the kind of launchpad storytelling that gives the MCU those addicting moments of freshness and forward-moving momentum. Spiraling out of the ending of Avengers: Endgame, the show follows Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as he struggles with the legacy of the shield he was gifted and the painful history it represents, as well as Bucky Barnes’ (Sebastian Stan) attempts to wrestle with his own conscience and atone for the sins he committed while serving as the Winter Soldier. Also thrown into the mix are John Walker (Wyatt Russell) — a traumatized soldier handed the mantle of Captain America and given free reign to act with full American impunity — and the Flag-Smashers, a radical militant group fighting back against globalized efforts to relocate refugees who survived the Snap. Both of these forces serve as the tangible antagonists for the series.
At face value, the show is the first canon MCU-outing to make proper usage of the medium of television. WandaVision got off to a wonderful start by using the evolution of the medium as a vehicle to explore trauma and mental illness, but by the midway point it became clear that WandaVision’s surrealist inspirations were hiding a much more traditional and hackneyed MCU format in the backend of the series. While The Falcon and the Winter Soldier doesn’t exactly push the envelope in terms of broad reimaginings of the superhero genre, it eschews the smoke and mirrors of its predecessor and focuses directly on character, the one element that defines television apart from its big screen counterpart.
It goes without saying that most of the heavy character lifting on the film side of things falls squarely onto one of the Big Three: Thor, Captain America, or Iron Man. Even the other original Avengers don’t get nearly as much development as Marvel’s Holy Trinity, so it goes without saying that any supporting characters suffer greatly from a lack of depth. This is arguably the greatest quality of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: its tenacity in building its main characters from the ground up. We’ve always known that Sam was a courageous ex-Air Force pilot with a drive to do the right thing, but after eight episodes we’re now left with a fully realized character instead of an archetype; a Black man trying to balance his responsibilities to his family alongside his responsibilities as a hero, all the while trying to figure out what it means to represent a nation that is fundamentally structured against people who look like him. Even Bucky, a walking plot device since his introduction in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, gets a full arc that holds him accountable for the lives that he ruined while also extending him the grace to heal and forgive himself for his actions.
From the first episode, it’s clear that showrunner Malcolm Spellman is interested in using the circumstances of the Marvel Universe to have difficult conversations. In the second episode, viewers are introduced to Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a Black veteran of the Korean War who was forcibly given the Super Soldier serum and then imprisoned for over three decades, a parallel to disturbing real-life brutalities such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and the illegal experiments performed on Henrietta Lacks. The show is deeply aware of the bitter irony of a Black man shielding himself using the tainted colors of his oppressors, and it forces our characters to interrogate the privilege and systemic structures that emblazoned Steve Rogers as a hero while committing Isaiah’s name to the forgotten annals of history. We find Sam trapped in a prison of indecision because of both of these fundamental truths; as an Avenger and a hero he understands that Steve had a moral compass that drove him to do the right thing without compromise, but as a Black man he also understands that the same grace will never be extended to him by the people he’s sworn to protect.
The presence of John Walker also intensifies that irony, because while Sam is forced to struggle with the weight of his identity and his responsibilities, both he and the audience get to watch John fail upwards into the mantle of Captain America before crumbling under the weight of his own demons, as well as the molded identity programmed into him by the United States government. Walker’s characterization is a complex one, simultaneously easy to loathe yet all too common in its tragedy. As a former U.S. veteran with three Medals of Honor under his belt, it’s as plain as day that whatever individuality John once had has been stripped away and replaced with a desire for approval and a volatile mix of indifference and rage, the perfect ticking time bomb for the government to use as an extension of their own aggressive imperialist foreign policy. Seeing his mental breakdown in episode four spiral into an extrajudicial murder felt disturbingly tangible, and the image of Captain America’s shield covered in blood with onlookers recording on their cell phones feels too meta to be anything other than a deliberate and horrifying parallel to our nation’s neverending danse macabre with the police. As an entity, John represents the Captain America that the nation desperately hoped Steve Rogers would be: docile, juvenile, impulsive, and easy to manipulate; a cog in a much more sinister machine.
It’s a shame, then, that in a show with so much implicit and pointed social commentary, the villains aren’t extended that same treatment. The Flag-Smashers, led by Erin Kellyman’s fiery and impassioned Karli Morgenthau, are a farce; a mummer’s gag of what Hollywood imagines as radical anarchist leftists. Dedicated to crushing a corrupt systemic structure such as the Global Repatriation Council (GRC), the show isn’t really interested in reckoning with the Flag-Smashers’ anti-border politics — instead, it chooses to prop them up as a bogeyman at the other end of the political spectrum. We’re told that they’ve had hard lives and that their circumstances contribute to their dissatisfaction with the world, but the audience is never given a chance to understand that aspect of their pathos through narrative engagement with them. Instead, the ideals that drive them are always related to us through Sam, as a way for the MCU to control the framing of anti-government anarchists as “too extreme.” This way, our heroes continue to look like heroes in our eyes.
The show suffers greatly from the de-fanging it receives in order to be congruent with the sequentialism of the greater MCU. John Walker works as a commentary because we see men like him on the news every day — brash, trigger-happy, lacking empathy — but the universe isn’t really interested in examining him as the result of a deliberately broken system. Instead, we’re supposed to view John as a lone wolf; a challenged man who’s pushed to the end of his rope and makes a grave mistake that he’ll spend years trying to atone for. Indeed, the show ends with the slightest hint of a redemption for John, because in the comics U.S. Agent is traditionally portrayed as a no-nonsense antihero and the MCU can’t waste any of its transactional fan currency. Despite the conversation that Walker represents, his status as a piece of fandom iconography is much more important because it’s another chip for us to add to our pile, another trading card for us to collect next time he shows up on-screen.
That same kind of continuous narrative thinking also impedes the show from making a genuine statement on Sam’s crisis of responsibility. Anyone who understands context knows that he’s going to pick up the shield; what we don’t know is what that means for him as a Black man or the world at large. And the show does understand that there’s a depressing irony there, because Isaiah tells Sam that “no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be Captain America.” But instead of Sam taking the mantle as a revolutionary, as a Captain America who will challenge the traditional structures that have upheld a “certain kind of American values,” he’s simply…a reformist. Instead of demanding the abolition of the GRC because of the inhumanity that bred the Flag-Smashers, he instead gives them a stern talking to about the importance of empathy and how they “aren’t that different” from Karli in the grand scheme of things. In its desperation to prop up Sam as a figurehead who can carry the next film franchise, the show unintentionally undercuts its conversation about Blackness in relation to the structures of whiteness in America. Sam earns his place as Captain America by (seemingly) not rocking the boat too hard, a hollow neo-liberal takedown of both sides that does no favors to the show narratively nor any real-world discussions it might have wanted to explore. At the end of the day, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not a bad show. At times it’s even an exceptional one. And alongside Black Panther, it’s genuinely one of the only times in recent memory that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has attempted to cut through a veneer of fan service and transactional pop culture entertainment in order to say something. But when what you’re allowed to say is conditional, when it has to be filtered through a lens of palatability and profitability, is it anything more than a half-measure wrapped in lip service? If there’s one thing that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier does wholeheartedly and genuinely, it exposes a glaring wound that superhero narratives will be forced to reckon with moving forward: is it even worthwhile to say anything at all, when it’s detrimental to business to say too much?
