This show seems slow moving for something that only lasts six episodes. It seems like there has been plenty of set-up and halfway through, we’re just getting to the action. I’ll reserve judgment until the end but it seems like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier could have been improved by getting to the story quicker.
So, who is Baron Zemo? In both comics and TV, he’s a German noble. Heinrich, the 12th Baron Zemo, first appeared in Avengers #4 in 1964 in a World War II flashback. He’s one of Marvel’s old Nazi SOBs along with the Red Skull and Baron von Strucker. Zemo had developed an extremely powerful adhesive for the Nazis, Adhesive X, during World War II. Captain America wanted to prevent the use of Adhesive X and threw his shield into a vat containing the adhesive, which then fell over Zemo’s face, permanently attaching his purple hood to his face. After Cap was revived from suspended animation and joined the Avengers, he formed the first Masters of Evil, an ad hoc group of supervillains who fought the Avengers.
Heinrich died and was succeeded by his son Helmut, the 13th Baron Zemo. Helmut’s face was scarred by Adhesive X, so like his father, he constantly had to wear a purple mask. He sought constant revenge against Captain America, once kidnapping his friends with the assistance of the Red Skull. Helmut Zemo also founded the fourth version of the Masters of Evil, with over a dozen villains, including the Absorbing Man, Titania, Moonstone, Mister Hyde (Daisy’s father in Agents of SHIELD), Blackout, and the Wrecking Crew. This group invaded Avengers Mansion in a 1986 story, driving half the team out and causing considerable damage. There were casualties on both sides. On the Avengers side, Hercules got roofied and—incredibly—the villains managed to beat him into a coma; while the Black Knight and Jarvis were badly injured. (How despicable do you have to be to put the Avengers’ butler in the hospital?) On the Masters of Evil side, Blackout was killed, Moonstone broke her neck and Zemo fell off the roof of Avengers Mansion.
The one thing I remember about this battle is while Captain America was tied up, Zemo broke into Cap’s locker and tore up the only picture Steve Rogers had of his mother, right in front of him. What an SOB.
Anyway, Zemo survived and later posed as the superhero Citizen V. During the period when the Avengers and Fantastic Four had disappeared in the ‘90s, Citizen V took advantage of the vacuum of heroism and formed the superhero team the Thunderbolts, who in actuality were the Masters of Evil posing as heroes. The twist was that the Thunderbolts soon actually liked being heroes and several permanently reformed.
But I digress. Back on the TV, the gang meets up with a pissed-off Sharon Carter. (Her comics background as niece/grand-niece of Peggy Carter is similar to the movies, except in the comics, Sharon was assumed dead for decades in publication time after being killed in a weird off-panel way by the Grand Director, an insane Nazi who had once taken the role of Captain America.)
The one thing in this episode I found intriguing was the introduction of the fictional nation of Madripoor. In the comics, this was mostly an X-Men thing, a piratical country where Wolverine would wear an eyepatch and … do whatever. So this may be the first actual integration of X-Men intellectual property into the Avengers universe. (I know Marvel and Fox split Quicksilver but to my mind, even though he’s a mutant, he’s very strongly associated with the Avengers—he joined the team in the very early days with Wanda and neither was ever on the X-Men.)
What obscure corner of the Marvel Universe will I explain next week?
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