I don’t like this show’s title. It’s long and awkward and an all too obvious and otherwise useless reference to The Falcon and the Snowman.
The show gives us even more proof (not that we needed any) that the MCU has gone on too long. The Snap and the un-Snap were cool events when they happened, but they came with implications that the later MCU content has simply failed to deal with. Half the population disappeared in an instant! Five years later, all those same people reappeared in an instant! This should create a world full of unrecognizable chaos, and yet nothing the MCU has produced after Endgame has really even tried to deal with any of it. Here we get hints that national boundaries were significantly redrawn during those five years, and that there’s now some effort to change them back, but the world does not look nearly different enough, and the scale of the problem that gives the show its plot is several orders of magnitude too small. The population of Earth doubled in an instant! There should be nonstop resource wars, opportunism and desperation starting conflicts that consume entire nations, billions of dispossessed people violently searching for any place they can lay their heads…instead we get what looks like a few dozen people, in only one very specific region of the world (where, apparently, everyone speaks English with an English accent, for some damn reason), mildly upset about getting evicted from a foreign country where they’ve lived for only five years.
And I find these ‘villains’ (if you can even call them that) wanting even on top of that. People with objectively correct policy prescriptions can still be villains, of course, but it needs to be handled right, which this show doesn’t. The right way to handle it is for the Flag Smashers to start out completely sympathetic, and for the good guys to realize that the Flag Smashers are more in the right than the regime the good guys are supposed to serve, and modify said regime accordingly, following which most of the Flag Smashers take yes for an answer and lay down their weapons. Tyrannical rumps remain on both sides, thus revealing that those particular people never really cared about their sides’ stated causes. The final conflict is the good elements from the regime and the Flag Smashers (Sam, Bucky, Karli, etc.) against the bad elements of both sides (Zemo the fascist imported into the regime, hoping to exploit its power for his own purposes; Walker the regime-homegrown fascist, hoping to mitigate his own butt-hurt by violently crushing all opposition and diversity; the most violent Flag Smashers, who never really cared for global unity but only wanted to watch the world burn; the only thing they can all agree on is that peace is not an option).
Or if that’s too nuanced, just use some of the show’s abundant running time to show (instead of bizarrely clunky exposition and violent but absurdly low-stakes heel turns that come out of nowhere) that the Flag Smashers start out meaning well, but some of them are too willing to go too far in their righteous cause, and win control of the group, purge out the less-violent ones, and end up as a totalitarian society bent on mass murder. Have their motto “One world, one people” (a completely reasonable call for unity through mutual understanding) end up morphing into “One world, one people, one leader” (a close-enough translation of the Nazi motto “Ein reich, ein volk, ein fuhrer,” which calls for unity through extermination of everyone that dares to differ). (I thought the show was actually going to do this, but alas, it didn’t have even that much wit.)
Or if that’s too nuanced, just give us Flag-Smasher-esque villains whose cause is transparently ignoble from the start! Instead of basing them on the Palestinians (justifiably upset about and perhaps-too-violently lashing out against a manifestly unfair situation), base them on the pieds-noirs of Algeria (definitely-too-violently lashing out in favor of a manifestly unfair situation)!*1 Have them openly believe and declare that the Snap was a good thing, and Thanos was right, and that the thing to do now is re-murder half of the newly-doubled population so the world doesn’t have to change back!
What the show actually gives us is an unspoken declaration that young people protesting are automatically suspicious enough to warrant attention from the US military-intelligence complex, even in a world that must have literally millions of much bigger problems; and that once said protesters have been baited into violence (but still way less violence than the ‘good guys’ routinely employ, and also way less than other bad actors routinely commit without attracting any attention*2), they are suddenly the most pressing threat anyone can think of, to the point that the US military feels forced to join forces with actual mass murderers who have actually destabilized the world in ways far worse than the Flag Smashers ever could. And then once the Flag Smashers are definitively defeated, the show pays lip service (in a speech so clunky I can hardly believe it exists, though in fairness it is very faithful to the spirit of the kind of moralizing the Comics Code Authority used to mandate) to the rightness of their cause, but even that lip service is immediately undermined by Sam promptly rushing off to do even more violence against the people whose cause he just loudly defended.
Speaking of the pieds-noirs, this is yet another MCU joint that simply takes place in the wrong decade. Captain America allying with former fascist foot soldiers and the feudal lords of Old Europe against well-meaning international radicals while the US military just openly murders people is a story worth telling (the bloodstained shield is a detail I especially appreciate), but it all belongs in the 1960s at the latest. Captain America being a worldwide icon that most everyone admires just…doesn’t fit any later in history than that.*3 But US policy favoring homegrown and imported fascism over humanitarian radicalism (and then paying lip service to the radicals after defeating their efforts to improve the world) sure does ring true for that moment in history and many others, including the present day.
I guess it’s kind of nice to see Madripore onscreen, though it’s yet another thing that doesn’t really fit in modern times. The Madripore of the comics was based on Hong Kong of the mid-20th century, where the influence of the superpowers (and hence ‘civilization’) was weak, and people could get away with more. But that’s really not what Hong Kong is like anymore, and if it’s really such a rough-and-tumble hive of scum and villainy, where did all those glittering skyscrapers come from?
It’s additionally problematic to create a fictional place that combines ignorant stereotypes about any number of real places; I’ll discuss this at much greater length when my long-stalled MCU rewatch finally gets to Black Panther (any second now!), but for now suffice it to say that treating one’s own culture as real, and creating fictionalized constructs or composites to stand in for other real-life cultures is…not a great look.
It is kind of funny that all the scum and villainy do business in Bitcoin, because of course that’s exactly what they would do.
John Walker’s arc is unsatisfying; by Erskine’s calculation (explained very eloquently in the first Cap movie), he is not qualified to be Captain America, with or without the serum. He wasn’t a weak man who therefore developed good ideas about how strength should be used; he was highly accomplished in everything he ever did, from high-school football to his absurdly illustrious military career.*4 This is not at all the kind of person that is equipped to handle the responsibility of being Cap.
So far, so good, actually; militaries and other hierarchical organizations are very nearly constitutionally incapable of promoting based on anything but past achievement, so it’s quite plausible that they’d select a new Cap based on impressive achievements that nevertheless disqualify him from being Cap. And of course it’s additionally plausible that such a person, forced to learn, for the first time and under tremendous stress, what failure feels like, would react the way Walker does to his loss to the Dora Milaje and Battlestar’s death: incredulity, panic, shame, emotional meltdown, and murder.
The obvious next step is to make Walker a villain, thus expounding on how the pressures of being perfect can make anyone crazy, and the shock of failure under such pressures can turn anyone evil, and Erskine’s way is the only way to select super soldiers. And maybe even that maybe someone who was that good at killing people, and reacts this way to the first fair fights he’s ever faced, might have been somewhat evil all along. This of course leads perfectly into Walker joining the Thunderbolts, a transparently amoral criminal conspiracy far more dangerous than anything the Flag Smashers got up to.
Instead of that, we get this mealy-mouthed attempt to have it both ways: yes, Walker’s failure to regulate his emotions led him to very publicly murder someone, but he’s still a good person! Somehow! Even though the consequences he faces for his crimes are laughably light: he totally should have faced a court-martial, which totally should have convicted and life-sentenced him in .12 seconds*5, and if the US government couldn’t bring itself to do that, they should have fed him to whatever local jurisdiction hosted the crime, or just turned him over to an angry mob the way Iron Man did to that one Taliban guy. But no, white-skinned major characters are immune from such fates; they get to be forgiven just because, and shown to have learned their lesson by quoting Lincoln*6 and yelling about how Black lives matter, and somehow that’s enough to atone for a very public murder, stealing a dose of Super Soldier Serum, and god knows what other crimes.
I give the show some credit for showing that such mercy is not always a good idea, but it would’ve been quicker (and less misogynistic) to do it with Walker, rather than dragging Sharon Carter into it as a second unrepentant criminal who doesn’t deserve mercy. And it sure is interesting that Carter is such an accurate blend of Tulsi Gabbard and any given January 6 rioter, and of course I give the show credit for making that connection so long before real life did.
And this is me just being bitter about my own less-than-illustrious military career, but what the hell is going on with New Cap and Battlestar’s (lack of) personal grooming? Back in my day those haircuts were unsatisfactory, and the sideburns were unacceptable, and it was the US military’s all-but-official position that that stubble is a worse crime than murdering someone in front of dozens of eyewitnesses and almost as many cameras. Yes, they’re from the Army, which has looser appearance standards than my Marine Corps, and yes it’s heavily implied that they’re from the special-ops community, which has appearance standards even looser than that, but…I don’t have to like it. I mean, I’m happy for all those people that don’t have to put up with all that bullshit, to the point that even National Guard guys apparently get to have full beards now,*7 but dammit I had to put up with all that bullshit and I reserve my right to yell at clouds until I die mad about it.
And speaking of Black lives mattering, I appreciate the racial angles this story brings up.*8 Isaiah Bradley’s tragic story makes three useful points that might be news to mainstream audiences and/or bear repeating: 1) eagle-eyed viewers will note that the ‘crime’ for which he was imprisoned for 30 years (disobeying orders in order to rescue prisoners) was exactly the same act of heroism that got Steve Rogers into the hero business; this underlines the reality that Malcolm X pointed out all those years ago (since confirmed many times over): whether it’s political activism, or gun ownership, or drug use, or mass shootings, White America isn’t scared or bothered by anything until Black men start doing it. 2) Eagle-eyed viewers will also note that Bradley’s fate of indefinite imprisonment for being a politically inconvenient Super Soldier is very similar to the Red Guardian’s, thus suggesting (very, very accurately) that US racism was and is every bit as oppressive and brutal as Soviet tyranny. 3) The US government and various private actors totally did do hideously unethical medical experiments on American prisoners (and free people) from various oppressed ethnic groups before, during, and after, and the 1950s.
It’s interesting and kind of funny to me that Captain America, that avatar of freedom and democracy, explicitly adopts, with that appallingly clunky Comics-Code-Authority-approved speech, the longstanding policy of the very unfree and undemocratic Roman Empire vis-à-vis rebellions and wartime enemies: they’re unacceptable while fighting is in progress, but once victory is secured by violence, there’s no problem with doing pretty much everything the just-crushed enemies asked for. And of course it’s not just Rome that did that: the rather unfree and undemocratic United States of America has also been known to, say, violently crush a large-scale rebellion (the Confederacy), only to later allow and then explicitly support (via Jim Crow laws) their cause (violent racism); or openly support fascism in Europe and Japan both before and after bombing it to smithereens; or violently suppress the Black civil-rights movement while adopting some of its policy recommendations and praising some of its leaders; or even successfully prosecute anti-democracy insurrectionists on a huge scale before voting their god-king back into office so he can pardon them.
Despite all the time and pixels I’ve sunk into watching and writing about this show, I must say that it’s not worth seeing, and there’s really no need for it to exist. It establishes Sam Wilson as Captain America, and Isaiah Bradley and John Walker as characters, which are necessary steps for further MCU movies, but further MCU movies aren’t necessary either, and in any case all the establishing they needed didn’t require a whole six-episode series: it could be done with a few minutes of credit cookies in earlier movies and/or a few minutes of exposition in later movies. If we must have a look at Bucky’s therapy process (which of course we don’t, because Thunderbolts is going to undo it all by returning him to the mass-murder business), let that be its own thing, preferably a two-hour movie or a ten-minute Marvel One-Shot rather than a six-hour series.
In short,*9 I don’t like this show. Much like its title, it’s long and awkward and useless.
*1There’s even already an important plot point in which a canonically French-Algerian character joins their side for his own personal convenience without giving a fuck about their cause!
*2 Seriously, the ‘villains’ kill three whole people in the entire show. There are intersections that pose a greater threat to humanity than they do!
*3 Unless of course the world drastically diverged from the timeline we know, but you’d have to show us that. Did the existence of superheroes and/or the Snap and un-Snap make our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan less brutal or more popular? Did they prevent or mitigate the rise of Trump, or atone for GWB’s reign of error? Did covid happen in this universe? Did the disruptions caused by the existence of superhumans and a galaxy-spanning alien civilization somehow set Earth’s geopolitics back to the 1960s? If so, the movies really need to tell us that instead of just blithely plugging 1960s plots into 2020s content.
*4 This is yet another case of actual superheroes being less remarkable than the normie characters in the MCU; no one has actually won three Medals of Honor, and only a few have won two (most recently during World War 1), and even fewer people in the last 50 years (14 by my count) have won one without dying in the process. A three-time Medal of Honor winner is therefore a more remarkable being than a Super Soldier, even in our world where neither exist, and even more so in the MCU, where to all appearances there are more Super Soldiers (at least thirteen that we know of: Cap, Hulk, Red Guardian, Walker, the eight Flag Smashers, and soon enough President Ross) than three-time Medal of Honor winners (just Walker).
*5 and this even would have been the perfect time to introduce (by sending Walker there) the Vault), a complement to the Raft.
*6 in absurdly self-serving fashion; oh, the until-very-recently-merciless professional killer, whose life was just saved by a world-historical act of mercy, suddenly appreciates mercy? You don’t fucking say!
*7 or so it seems from the ones I often see playing cop (that is, uselessly standing around doing nothing for nobody) in the NYC subway system as part of some dumbass’s attempt at appearing to fight crime or whatever.
*8 I’m even willing to allow that USAgent’s suit being introduced as “The same thing, only black” right after the Black Captain America’s debut is a pretty good joke.
*9 why start now?
