Summary: Sam gives up the shield to the government who give it to John Walker to be the new Captain America. Sam and Bucky work together and look into the Flag Smashers a new terrorist group. They discover that they are super soldiers. Bucky frees Zemo to get more information, and with him they go to Madripoor and Latvia. They encounter the leader, Karli and Sam tries to help her. John arrives with no intention to communicate and after a few encounters, Karli gets away. John murders a Flag Smasher in public after his friend is killed and is discharged by the government. Zemo is take by the Dora Milaje. Sam and Bucky resolve their problems and Sam accepts the role of Captain America. Karli attacks the GRC meeting in New York and Sam and Bucky stop her. Karli is killed by Sharon. John is contacted by Val and becomes US Agent.
The Good: As expected, Sam and Bucky's interactions are a lot of fun in this show. The energy of these characters is what carries the show and kept my interest throughout all six episodes. But these two aren't only effective as a pairing. Their individual arcs in this show ended up being pretty solid, and had a decent amount of story to them. Sam's story is the obvious highlight. It took a while before the show brought Sam's struggle to the forefront, but when it happened it was pretty compelling. The forced racial themes in the earlier episodes became the heart of the show in the last two episodes and I thought that it worked pretty well. Isaiah was a well fleshed out character to parallel Sam, and I enjoyed what he brought to the story. Zemo's return in this show was surprisingly well done. Zemo was a pretty flat character in "Captain America: Civil War", but his presence here was pretty enjoyable. Zemo's narrow-minded perspective on super soldier serum played into the themes of the show nicely, so the character's inclusion did not feel forced. Furthermore, Zemo's role in the story as the bad guy working with the good guys is surprisingly a trope that the MCU has not used yet. Because of that, it feels unique to see Zemo in this role and it does a nice job of fleshing him out to make us understand him better. Plus his interactions with Sam and Bucky are a lot of fun. The best part of this show for me was John Walker. John is a character that nobody is going to like because we don't want to see a new government-selected Captain America. It would have been really easy for the show to make him another two-dimensional, boring villain, and that's what I thought we were going to get after his introduction in the second episode. But impressively, the show found something far better with him. We spend a lot of time looking into John's psyche and we understand that he isn't a bad person at all, but he is still the wrong man for the job. John wants to be the best possible Captain America, but he doesn't have any of Steve's virtues, and the episode "The Whole World is Watching" shows us exactly what happens when you give too much power to somebody who is not like Steve Rogers. John's meltdown, and his ensuing fight with Sam and Bucky were intense scenes to watch that were beautifully shot to connect us with John's mindset. I like how much this show focused on showing us the socioeconomic effects of The Blip. The Blip is such an original idea, and I think that exploring the effects that it had on the world can lead to some fresh and interesting television. The exploration in this show was a bit shallow, but whenever the show started addressing what happened to the world after The Blip it became more interesting to watch. The Bad: Karli and the Flag Smashers were terrible villains. The motivations of this group were poorly defined the entire show. We never understood why they had turned to violence to prove their point, and we also don't really know what they are fighting for. They believe that the world was better before The Blip. But why? We are never shown what the world was like before or why that version of the world was better. Because of that, we can't connect with the Flag Smashers' goals at all. Furthermore, Karli herself is a bad villain. The show tries way too hard to make us sympathize with her, to the point that it forgets the story it's trying to tell in an attempt to make us like her. So many of the early scenes with Karli try too hard to make us care for her because, oh no, her friends are dying! And Donya died! Oh no! Instead of telling any story with these characters, the show tries and fails to make us sympathize with her, and it continues this trend throughout the entire series. By the time Karli dies, I had no reaction to it and I was rolling my eyes at how dramatic the show was being with her death. Sam quite literally ignores Sharon while she bleeds out to mourn Karli, a person he should not care about as much as he does. It's all very stupid. Then add on the fact that the actress playing Karli isn't compelling at all, and the character is boring, shoved down our throat and devoid of charisma. This is not a good villain. The show overall feels like a movie dragged out to 5 hours. The story here could easily be told in two hours if the pacing was quicker, some ideas were cut and the story was simplified. There is nothing here to suggest that this needed to be a 6 episode long TV show. I hate the new direction of turning concepts for movies into TV shows for the sake of business. TV shows are a separate artform and should be treated as such. If you want to make a TV show, there needs to be a story that demands more time to be told properly. "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" is not that story. Some of the insignificant filler storylines like Madripoor, the power broker, all those action scenes, the slow paced scenes with Sam and Bucky's personal lives, the scenes with Karli, etc. could easily be cut and the show would not lose much at all. This is a show with far too much padding, and I feel like the story being told here would actually be better as a movie. I did not like how little Bucky was utilized in this show. The show is called "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" yet Bucky has very little to do. He has a very minor therapy storyline but other than that he doesn't do much. He's just a spectator most of the time, and that's a bad misuse of one of the most complex and interesting characters in the entire MCU. The action in this show wasn't great either. Of course there was a complete lack of tension because the MCU loves having the characters quip during the action scenes, making it difficult to invest in the danger. But even when this wasn't happening, the action scenes fell flat. There was so much empty action and very little of it had anything of consequence. It felt like more filler to pad out the show, and it was difficult to get invested in it. The directing was also quite poor, with a lot of shaky cam being used, making it tougher to figure out what we're watching. The action wasn't directed well and there was too much of it. The themes of this show weren't explored to their full potential. True to the MCU, it felt like the plot was always the major focus, and the themes were simply tacked on so that people can say that the show is thought-provoking and deep. But the reality is that these ideas are never the main focus of the show, and are explored in a very simplistic, one-dimensional light. Take the racial themes for example. The idea of a black Captain America being difficult to acclimate to is a good conflict. But the show spends very little of its runtime contemplating this idea. There is one scene where Sam hears Isaiah's story and has doubts, but then he makes his decision right after. It happens quick, there isn't much heart to it, and it is a very shallow story compared to what it could have been had there been more care taken when telling this story. The MCU likes to include themes that are relevant to current day events, but the themes always feel like they were lazily slapped onto the story instead of being properly integrated into it. Because of this, the thematic exploration feels more like an attempt to cheaply appeal to the public, when it should be used to tell a more compelling story. Best Episodes: E04 The Whole World is Watching: This episode told a really nice story with John Walker, and it was also where the ideas of the show were at their most compelling and the character interactions were at their most fun. Worst Episodes: E03 Power Broker: A really poor episode focusing on storylines that probably should have been cut from the show. The logistics were horrible and the visual style of the episode was brutal on the eyes. E06 One World, One People: This finale was almost entirely unsatisfying. It was just an empty action spectacle with no character work until the very end. This episode suffered from the same issues plaguing every MCU movie climax. I was bored for much of this episode. Character of the Season: John. Conclusion: "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" did not surprise me the way that "WandaVision" did. This show was everything that I feared it was going to be. It was an MCU film stretched out into a TV show with a lot of the typical MCU tropes and problems that make the movies feel so repetitive to me. There isn't anything special here, and outside of one strong episode, this was a very poor TV show. The main characters were fine, but the villains were bad, the story was underwhelming and the show simply failed to captivate me. I probably should be much harsher on this show in my reviews, but I did not have high expectations going into this show. This is everything that you would expect it to be. I'm sure that diehard MCU fans will love this, but it's not the kind of television for me.
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
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