TV #39 of 2021:
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, season 1
One sad truth about franchises with heavy degrees of serialization is that it becomes harder to judge discrete installments on their own terms — and that they can be ruthlessly undercut by the weaker elements they inherit. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, for instance, was probably always going to feel somewhat mundane by comparison to the wonderfully genre-bending WandaVision that it follows on Disney+, but its biggest problem is that it’s leaning on structural pillars that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has thus far neglected.
The villains’ ideology is absolutely nonsensical, with a lot of high-minded rhetoric about politics impacted by the Snap and the Blip of the Avengers movies, when half of the population crumbled to dust and then came back to life five years later. The time between those events presents a rich narrative space that previous writers have generally ignored, which makes it impossible for this miniseries to sell anyone’s convictions surrounding it. Similarly, the inherent idea of two former Steve Rogers sidekicks teaming up relies on our investments in their relationships to the outgoing Captain America and to one another, none of which have seemed particularly important to the scripts for several films now.
This title delivers its own wonky choices with the material it’s given too, like not even having the paired protagonists share a scene for the entire first episode (of only six in total). Or gracing Bucky with the hint of an arc for processing his trauma and making amends to the people he’d hurt, but ultimately not really taking that anywhere interesting. Or utterly wasting the latest sitcom star to be cast in this continuity, who scores an immediate impression and then sits the rest of the season out. Or turning the flag-smashers to murder and bombings, so we don’t have to worry about actually evaluating the moral worth of their arguments. Or laying groundwork for future stories at the expense of meaningful closure in the present. The list goes on.
The best part of this show is its periodic focus on Sam Wilson as a hero in his own right, and how he negotiates a fraught understanding of Cap’s legacy with the parallel knowledge of how the country they fight for has historically treated black men like him. Bringing in Isaiah Bradley, victim of a super-soldier version of the unethical Tuskegee syphilis study, is another smart decision that adds further layers to the conflicts at play. The official new Captain America, on the other hand, never feels like much more than a thin concept wrapped around a rehash of Will Simpson from the initial run of Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Netflix.
If you’re just here for the beat-down action spectacle and the buddy-comedy banter, well, I guess that’s on fine display, although it would be stronger with greater substance behind it all. This is a competent Disney venture, nowhere near as bad as, say, Scott Buck‘s work for the MCU on other platforms. But especially after Wanda raised the standards for this sort of superhero program, it’s disappointing that Falcon doesn’t soar.
★★★☆☆
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