There weren’t any comic book deep cuts this week in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier this week, so for a change, I’ll actually talk about the TV show.
You can almost see the exact point when John Walker snaps. Battlestar has been murdered by one of the Flag Smashers and the new Captain America is enraged. Walker chases after one of them and brutally executes him with his shield, while people record it with their smartphones. (This did remind me of the old Captain America story where Cap was forced to use his shield to behead the vampire Baron Blood. Cap felt terrible about it but what he did was understandable since it was a vampire and there was no other way.) I’m assuming the man who supposedly symbolizes America will bring dishonor to his country when the world sees the red, white and blue shield with blood on it.
I’m impressed with the depth this show has given John Walker thus far. In contrast to the comics, he doesn’t seem as much of a jerk. He showed some thoughtfulness in his conversation with Battlestar about his medals of honor, noting he received them for the most awful days of his life in Afghanistan. Walker is still haunted by what he saw and it will undoubtedly get worse after the murder of his partner.
In contrast, we have the Winter Soldier. Bucky did truly awful things over a long period of time as a brainwashed spy, but as a result of the Wakandans intervening to read a series of words to deprogram him, Bucky is free. This was a very nice sequence.
One thing I hope this show doesn’t do is turn Baron Zemo into some “cool” character worthy of a bunch of memes on Twitter. The guy’s a Nazi bastard, and sometimes villains just need to be villains—they can be complicated but make them complicated villains, and not complicated anti-heroes. I was worried that scene of him dancing in a club would make him seem cool to people but I was glad this week the show hinted at something darker. It was very creepy watching him sing a song and throw some Turkish delight at those kids (literally candy from a stranger). Also, I want to know how they got away with flying Zemo away after breaking him out of prison. Did the FAA equivalent really just let a plane known to be owned by Zemo out of the airspace in which Zemo was known to be in prison?
I don’t much care for the Flag Smashers. I think their ideas have merit, and this show is a good continuing examination of what happens to a planet when people disappear and reappear after they’d been mourned and the world moved on. (They didn’t have this problem in the comics. In the original Infinity Gauntlet, Nebula wrested control of the Infinity Stones from Thanos and made time turn back 24 hours, before the disappearance. So basically, half the universe never disappeared.) But I think the Flag Smashers’ methods leave a lot to be desired. I also don’t know if I like the idea of a bunch of people running around with Super Soldier serum in their veins, as it should be rarer.
Freckle Face was an asshole for calling Sam’s sister and threatening her kids. I didn’t like the guy Walker killed, either, mostly due to that dumb anecdote about his grandfather saying, “If something scares you, that’s a sign that you’re doing something right.” This is completely asinine. As our son the skeptic immediately turned to us to say, “So you’re saying if I’m scared to jump off a building, I should do it?” You can see the hole in the character’s logic.
I very much liked this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The fight scenes were exciting and it feels like we’re going somewhere here.
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